The Hunger Games (2012)

Directed by:  Gary Ross
Starring:  Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson

The Hunger Games is a movie that’s based on a book that’s based on an idea that nerds have been arguing over the origin of for decades.  Katniss Everdeen volunteers as Tribute from one of the poorer districts of a dystopian country named Panem in place of her super adorable younger sister.  As Tribute, she is whisked away from her Amish slummy hunter-gatherer lifestyle into the upper echelons of a fabulously wealthy society where people consume shitloads of calories and have weird hair.  Here she prepares for the titular Hunger Games competition in which teenagers annually slaughter each other while the crowd screams for their blood.  The winner are declared when only one is left standing.

The movie is split into two parts.  Part one is what I like to call “The Exposition.”  It is here we get a good look at a totally crapsack world where poor people live in squalor and filth while the rich people live in utopias (a utopia?) far removed from those who suffer.  It gives a sense of why the Games exist and just how fucked the lower classes of Panem are, even though it looks like these lower classes do all the labor.  And then there’s part two: what I like to call “The Ol’ Ultra Violence.” In which The Hunger Games begins in earnest and a bunch of teenagers start to murder each other with sparkling medieval weaponry and unusual enthusiasm.

Overall, The Hunger Games is a film that works in both concept and execution.  Jennifer Lawrence lives as Katniss both in poise and personality.  As for the rest of the cast, I have no misgivings about any of them; they all do a fine job, though Ms. Lawrence clearly carries the majority of the runtime.  It has more grit than the typical young-adult film especially once the Games begin.  Allowing teenagers to be killed violently on screen was an important and interesting move.  I’m mostly sure other directors or editors would have liberally used jump cuts to communicate this necessary roughness down to a mere implication.  But amping the stakes this way made the hour long build-up to part two really matter.

One more thought: someone else mentioned that this film should have served as some kind of commentary about our society.  I don’t think it should be held to that standard.  If you ask me, this film doesn’t have that kind of responsibility.  Yes, there are some creepy visuals about some nuclear war or whatever but this is more of an underdog story than it is anything political.  The people have all accepted this bizarre reality in which they were bred.  It’s too early to rise against it right now.  Let’s have an adventure and push that particular melodrama onto the sequels.  That’s what sequels are for: for when the initial shock wears off and for when these impressionable young teenagers become boring old adults.

A

Mistborn: The Well of Ascension (2007)

Written by: Brandon Sanderson
Published by: Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1688-2
Genre:  Fantasy

Warning: This is a review of the second book in a trilogy.  Therefore, it must be said that it may contain spoilers for the first book in that trilogy.  I apologize if this is inconvenient.

George R. R. Martin ruined fantasy for me, I think.  These days, when I’m reading a book that’s so eager to win me over to whatever world of intrigue it has promised on the cover sleeve, I yearn for a gritty realism where character actions matter and political infighting presents real and prevailing danger at all times–that whatever threat that threatens the realm puts something I care about at stake.  A Song of Ice and Fire, for whatever faults it has regarding its overemphasis on descriptions of food and set pieces, at the very least feels appropriately vast.  As that series continues to grow, its vastness increases (Dorne a notable exception of course that might actually turn out promising), and it all feels very important and absorbing.  And the things that happen to the various well-developed characters feel natural and less forced, regardless of how absurd the premise feels after thinking about it for two minutes.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that it is becoming more difficult for me to buy this Hero With a Thousand Faces template.  I’m not necessarily one to embrace sophistication–I’ve tried reading In Search of Lost Time a couple times and couldn’t do it–but I’m saying that the tried and true themes of the Hero’s Journey just don’t resonate with me as much as they used to.  I question whether or not I’m qualified to write a response to this sort of thing.  I’m not much of a professional. But it’s how I feel at any rate.  So off we go.

The Well of Ascension is the second book in the Mistborn trilogy written by Brandon Sanderson.  It picks up roughly one year after the end of The Final Empire.  Elend Venture is now the monarch presiding over the Central Dominance, which consists primarily of its capital city of Luthadel.  The survivors of the Kelsier’s crew, all responsible in one way or another for overthrowing the godking known simply as the Lord Ruler, have all taken jobs that involve the court.  Elend’s focus is one that is less austere, willing the power he’s usurped to be transferred to the people and particularly the peasant population known as the skaa.  Naturally, the upperclassmen don’t like this at all and are constantly scheming to oust him from the court.  Complicating things further still is the looming threat of Elend’s father who has amassed his own army to march on the city, and still two more armies that threaten his hard-won victory as well.

The theme of this novel is one where an empire torn to pieces after its Lord Ruler’s displacement is reunited under the guise of a new peace.  It serves as a decent analysis of what happens to power when powerful people are deposed or cast aside.  It is a novel that is very eager to please: it truly wants you to feel that Luthadel is an important city and that the world would fall apart without Elend or Vin (of whom we’ll get to shortly) involved in every little political nuance, and is trying so hard to entertain.  Politics is interesting I guess, you know, when they’re done right.  My big problem rests with Luthadel being the big focus of this second, darker entry in the Hero’s Journey.  We don’t venture outside of its walls very often and ultimately don’t really have an understanding of how important this city is in spite of its convenient central location in the heart of the former Final Empire.  Why does Elend’s kingship matter?  Why is maintaining Luthadel’s position as the dominant force that drives this new empire important?  The world of Mistborn is hinted at being extremely large, suggested by the very well done lore that is the product of 1000 years of oppression by an immortal godking.  Why are we still stuck here playing this stupid game and not out adventuring so we may better understand why exactly the world needs Luthadel at all?  I’m sure it’s possible to infer a thing or two about why, but I couldn’t be bothered to.   The book asks us instead to care about the primary characters that were set up in Kelsier’s crew during the first novel and limits their abilities to do much of anything with the world at large thanks to political theater and enemies at the gates.  Yawn.

So if the politics is a total flatline (it is) then what of the characters that drive the narrative of this story?  Well…

…they’re okay, I guess.  All the characters you’ve grown to love from the first book are back.  Even Kelsier gets a starring role as ‘that guy we like to talk about because he was always smiling even when he was raging inside.’  There’s Vin, there’s Elend, there’s OreSeur, there’s… um… Ham… there’s… guy?  And guy?  And guy?  And some other guy?  There are new characters as well!  Like Zane, the angsty teenage Mistborn man that serves as an effective foil to Vin, the angsty teenage Mistborn woman.  And whats-his-face.  He’s there, too.  And everyone smiles more often than they realistically should.  You know what, whatever.  Let’s talk about Elend and Vin.

For the most part, the Mistborn series is more reliant on its action setpieces than for any deeper purpose it might try to postulate.  The character of Vin is clearly the action girl here, and also the heroine.  She is set up in the first novel as a street urchin that comes to the revelation that her magical abilities surpass many of the other Mistborn known at the time.  Streetwise, paranoid, and angsty, she stays up nearly all hours to protect the far weaker, not-Mistborn-at-all Elend because she loves him I guess.  She engages in these huge fights with tons of assassins that serve to display just how powerful she is, ostensibly to hold the audience in thrall as well because here is this creature that could do so much with her power and blah blah blah.   She feels obligated to protect everyone and that’s fine.  But there is also something Mary Sueish about her, where it seems that we are always relying on Vin and Vin only to keep Luthadel safe.  Most action scenes where anything is at stake whatsoever is ended after a time simply because Vin swoops in at the last moment to save the day.  She rarely makes any mistakes, and when she does she isn’t held accountable for them at all.  No, Vin is young and perfect.  Yawn.

Elend Venture is slightly different.  Political theatre aside, this guy actually gets something of an arc.  Whereas everyone else kind of keeps doing their thing, Elend has the biggest opportunity to grow and my argument is that Elend’s arc saves The Well of Ascension from crap-fantasy purgatory.  Here is a guy that is timid and weak, a philosopher who is fundamentally useless, and a king in name only.  But he gets more interesting as time goes by because he starts to learn what it is that makes kings great and he shirks his soft, philosophical side to become more of a hardened, altruistic king that doesn’t hide under his bed at the slightest bit of danger.  It’s fun to see him evolve into a person that doesn’t need a Mary Sue around constantly to protect him, and surely by the end of this book in particular he does become more of a man that can defend his own interests, a real king actually.  That is nice to see when everyone else is just kind of meh.  I’m more excited to see what becomes of him in the next book than I am of anything else, because suddenly this guy is important and certainly conflicted genuinely about who or what he is.

You may think by now that I don’t like the Mistborn series all that much.  The truth is that I don’t necessarily hate it.  I think it could be better.  There are really cool action set pieces and the magic is performed in an interesting way, although again the Allomancy system seems heavily inspired by video game RPG mechanics (be sure to watch your magic meter!).  It’s a crutch, though.  Action can never be resolved without involving some Allomantic trickery in this series and the softness of the writing and the disregard of feelings for these characters makes it a little more difficult to stay invested in anything that happens.  No, where Mistborn truly shines is within its mythologies, of why there are Steel Inquisitors, where the mysterious mists came from, what led the Lord Ruler to become a thing, and most interestingly this whole race of creatures that can assume the forms of other living things completely that are presumably born from the mists.  The characters we’re spending time with to uncover the nature of this strange fantasy world just aren’t up to par with the rest of the world itself and generally aren’t able to carry the series in my opinion, but at the very least it’s compelling enough to stick with it, since Sanderson dispenses the lore at regular intervals, indicating that the world is vast and storied and interesting.  It’s just too bad that we only get to see just a sliver of what makes the world of Mistborn so neat, and we get to stay locked up in a single city for the whole duration.

B-

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)

Written By: Audrey Niffenegger
Published By: Harcourt Books

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story about a woman who is perfectly normal in every way and her husband who is not so normal.  He happens to be a time traveler, but not in the traditional mad scientist sense.  Instead, he time travels to places he’s been before when beset with any amount of stress.  This means that any trip he makes to the past or future is strictly involuntary and unpredictable.  The novel focuses on how the husband’s time traveling is both the cause of their relationship the source of all its problems.  And it’s brilliant.

So when two people get married, the general consensus is that the relationship will have a bunch of ups and downs.  There is a lot of sex, a lot of fighting, and a lot of compromise, sometimes kids.  Countless generations of families have beat around this bush for so long that there isn’t a whole lot of intrigue, a whole lot of “newness” in it.  Sure, you got your basic questions: “How did you two little lovebirds meet?” being one such question.  And, with perhaps starstruck eyes, one of the askees will tell you, “well this one time we met at a Holiday Inn Express, s/he was going that way and I was going that way…” and then they would keep running their mouth about how awesome or how horrible things turned out.  Yawn.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is pretty similar, but features way more interesting people at its core.  The characters of Henry and Clare DeTamble are both charming, cultured, and overall very pleasant in the way one would hope a young married couple would be.  They aren’t superheroes or supergeniuses in spite of one’s ability to move through the ether of time.  Actually, Henry is very humble about (if not totally resentful of) his condition in spite of knowing that it is the source of all the happiness he would ever know.  Clare is a pistol, well-off but not obnoxious, maybe a little naive at times, surprisingly gutteral at others, but makes for a sound pairing with her chrono-impaired soulmate.  Their personalities are distinct and compelling as they make their confessions over the course of the whole lifespans together, and their stories come through at the hands of some really terrific, careful, and inspired writing.

The time traveling aspect is also treated with great care, having evolved a personality unto itself.  There is some self-awareness carefully weaved into the narrative that aims to keep your eyesockets from rolling out of your skull, lest you are used to stupid heroes not capable of selfishly applying their powers for the betterment of their station.  This novel has plenty of that, even boldly addressing certain issues that would be unique only to time travelers in some rather surprising ways.  But it also adds some restrictions to Henry’s ability to move around time, even adding some danger in the mix to offer yet another facet to his already carefully manicured personality.

But what really makes this novel work is how it meticulously sets up and pays off even the smallest little character quirks or traits, harnessing the power of time to open and close the loose ends of what is ostensibly a closed loop of a story.  You are given just enough information to presume you know how it will all turn out, but even as more things are revealed, you are never quite sure if that’s really going to happen.  Or, more frequently, some time traveling thing will happen and you’ll keep that filed away to see if it ever gets resolved, no doubt to write an angry email to the author once it never comes.  And so, you keep turning and turning the pages, wondering if what you are expecting will come to pass, whether this future that this book reluctantly shares is actually going to be real.

One of the big questions of The Time Traveler’s Wife revolves around this idea of fate.  Think about it, if some guy or girl entered your life from another dimension and told you that you were married to them in the distant future, how would you feel about that?  Both characters more or less grapple with that, and the joy from reading this novel is grappling with that concept ourselves.  Are our futures already written for us?  Do we have a chance to change them?  Or is changing them part of the plan?  Should we ever know our future? And if we do know the future, should we at any point share that information with anyone?

In a good work of literature, there are underlying themes that challenge us to explore the world in a different way, to become people that we are not and possibly could never be.  To ask the important questions and to get us to think about the differences of our lives and how our unwritten futures toddle ahead, forming endless possibilities just as endless possibilities are snuffed out every waking second of every day as we decide a yes or a no or a maybe.  The Time Traveler’s Wife asks these questions by giving us the ability to see the world unfold through the eyes of two charming and lovely individuals who may carry the answer within themselves, who might offer some reassurance that defying fate might be possible, even for them.  It is nearly perfect.

A

Choice Passages:

     “Clare takes the Thermos cup away from me. She pours herself half an inch of coffee and takes a cautious sip. ‘Ugh,’ she says. ‘This is disgusting. Is it supposed to taste like this?’
     ‘Well it usually tastes less ferocious. You like yours with lots of cream and sugar.’
     Clare pours the rest of the coffee into the Meadow and takes a doughnut. Then she says, ‘You’re making me into a freak.'”

     “I’m stomping the living shit out of a large drunk suburban guy who had the effrontery to call me a faggot and then tried to beat me up to prove his point. We are in the alley next to the Vic Theater. I can hear the Smoking Popes’ bass leaking out of the theater’s side exits as I systematically smash this idiot’s nose and go to work on his ribs. I’m having a rotten evening, and this fool is taking the brunt of my frustration.”

     “I’m standing in the bathroom, shivering in my slip and brushing my teeth. In the mirror I can see Henry lying on the bed. He’s snoring. I spit out the toothpaste and rinse my mouth. Suddenly it comes over me: happiness. And the realization: we’re married. Well, I’m married, anyway.”

`Salem’s Lot (1975)

Written By:  Stephen King
Published By:  Doubleday

`Salem’s Lot is a novel that asks a simple question: What happens when vampires descend upon a modern American village filled with a bunch of simple-minded idiots?  As such, it is a sort of Americanized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula as well as some considerably more pulpy rags.  It follows the novelist Ben Mears during his pit-stop in the town bearing the novel’s namesake.  He seeks to rent out the nefarious Marsten mansion on the outskirts of town so that his latest novel may be inspired by its evil atmosphere and is surprised to learn that he was already outbid not too long ago by a suspiciously reclusive chap only named Mr. Barlow.  This is a surprising turn of events because the house has stood derelict and abandoned for many decades.  Resigned, he holes up in a local boarding house, meets a girl, and is thrust into some kind of Eldritch horror as the town begins to decay from the inside in conjunction with increased activity at the maleficent mansion that broods over the town.  Did I mention the mansion was evil?

It’s been said that Stephen King regards this, his second novel, as one of his favorites.  I’m inclined to agree.  Unlike his comparatively trashy debut effort Carrie, this novel has been crafted with much more care and restraint.  Characters are given plenty of opportunities and time to carefully develop into a rich and varied cast of unbelievers who are slowly persuaded to take action against phantasmal forces far beyond the borders of modern reasoning, but in a more modern setting.  Even the town gets in on this development, beginning as a little bustling burg that hesitantly degenerates into a dilapidated and sad shadow of its former glory: no doubt a commentary on the ongoing and steady dissolution of the pastoral part of the American Dream.  A bittersweet ending, at best.

However, I still struggle a little with King’s writing.  Throughout the novel, it’s very clear that the talking heads one encounters are just various bodies with Stephen King’s face attached to them.  There are often little throw-away lines that characters say or think, perhaps intended as a natural response to the situation and whatever emotions they may imply to give them some depth; but they don’t feel natural or organic at all.  More like cheesy.  For instance, very early on in the novel when Ben and Susan meet for the first time in the park, he throws out this strange suave remark: “Of such inconsequential beginnings dynasties are begun,” which is a very obvious wink at the reader that shit is going to be thrown down eventually, but at that very moment it feels rushed or shoved in.

Numerous other references to song lyrics and poems and sayings are sprinkled everywhere into the manuscript with only minimally useful context; I presume it’s meant to make things feel deep, to give these characters a sense of gravity and purpose, or even just indignantly shove the reader into the scene.  But most of the time they fall flat and refuse to make any sense.  They also serve to age the novel in as unflattering a way as you could get.  I haven’t heard of any of these pop tunes that were big on the radio in 1975, and auxiliary character’s Vietnam flashbacks are frequent and bothersome, offering very little to what is for all intents and purposes a story about magic and monsters.  The audience of today has moved a little past that, I think.

But these are small qualms I have with ‘Salem’s Lot.  Generally speaking, this is a powerful novel about a bunch of random people who come together to displace an enormous evil that has beset their beloved township and threatens their very souls.  It is a labor of love that takes its time setting up what is an intense and gripping thrill ride, one with a colorful cast of what eventually become compelling [enough] characters who you learn to admire and frustrate over as they work toward liberating the town from a rapidly growing evil not seen since, well since ever.  Two of the best things this novel has going for it: the segues between action sequences where lesser throwaway characters (and to an extent the town as a whole) meet their doom, and one of the most baddass boss boasts I’ve had the pleasure of seeing that is totally befitting to a boss of Barlow’s station.

B+

Choice Passages

“…perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality.”

“That next one now, that was that slutty little Ruthie Crockett, the one who didn’t wear no bra to school and was always elbowing her chums and sniggering when Dud passed on the street. Bang. Good-by, Ruthie.”

“Clyde Corliss broke wind.”

“‘I don’t care who’s tried to stop him before. I don’t care if Attila the Hun played him and lost. I’m going to have my shot. I want you with me. I need you.'”

“‘Here we go, friends, into isolation,’ Matt said. ‘Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars.'”

Carrie (1974)

Written By: Stephen King
Published By: Doubleday/Signet

Carrie is a story of a 16 year-old smalltown girl whose telekinetic powers are awakened when she has her first period.  In the shower.  Of the ladies’ locker room.  After the other ladies assailed her with tampons while she bleeds all over the place.  Her condition is no doubt exacerbated by her religious wingnut-off-the-rails mom who believes that she is the embodiment of the unholiest of sins.  Essentially, Carrie spends every waking moment of her life perpetually tortured by stupid small-town hicks during the day and being stuffed in a closet by her mom to pray to God for the sin of merely existing by night.  Eventually, some horrible things happen and Carrie snaps, costing a good number of high school students and townsfolk their lives.  It is written in an epistolary fashion, which means that the narrative segments where the plot progresses are mixed in with some faux newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and investigative reports that ostensibly aim to explain what happens in the narrative and why.  Incidentally, Child Protective Services is never mentioned (although I can give that a pass since the agency was fairly new) in spite of all the blatant and obvious signs that Carrie is subjected to an enormous amount of abuse during and even before her high school career.  Things that make you go ‘hmmmm.’

Quick aside: do girls actually bully one another using tampons?  That’s pretty fucked up.

This novel set the standard for a lot of horror fiction and solidified Stephen King’s place in the literary lexicon, for better or worse.  It plays mainly in extremes when it comes to developing characters and approaches the topics of bullying, religion, and paranormal activity with dubious rancor.  The religious references in particular are especially painful in scenes featuring Carrie’s mom, where heavy Christian and Biblical symbolism abounds; the mom gets very heavy handed quoting scripture at Carrie for her perceived slights.  I suppose if you’re overtly religious this kind of thing could be super effective, but Margaret White is so far off the deep end that I find it hard to fathom her degree of fanaticism could even be possible.  Other characters are unquestionably flawed, yet are cut so thin that they might as well be transparent–the worst of these would have to be Billy Nolan, who’s just kind of shoe’d in because there needs to be an asshole to instigate things I guess and whats-her-face couldn’t think but for a man.  In the end, hardly anyone is likable, even Carrie herself.  Which sucks, because Carrie is the one who really needs to succeed the most.

King fans probably won’t have issues with the book’s construction.  But as a seemingly normal guy trying to approach this material in an objective way, his writing style certainly takes some getting used to.  It’s quite fascinating, actually, to see how Stephen King’s upbringing and experiences have informed his writing ability.  Characters are defined by a sort of pastoral bigotry that leads to passages so profound in their idiocy that one might wonder how they were given the greenlight at all.  Odd details are also given away in character soliloquies that make bizarre references to pop-songs of the time or some guy’s business up the street, or a clumsy simile involving a car.  Manliness permeates every page–a tractor-trailer kind of manliness despite the fact that this is a novel about a 16 year-old smalltown girl forced to confront this testosterone-fueled bravado.  It suggests the intended audience for this book consists of those farming types that live in the Bible Belt of contemporary America; but don’t make the mistake that these people are treated with any sort of reverence or respect.  From top to bottom, they definitely aren’t.  Maybe that’s why this schlock has the appeal that it does since it appeals more to the smalltown folk than the ‘educated elite’, or maybe it was just a sign of the times at the time.

Carrie is a book that is easy to pick up burn through in a weekend.   I don’t think you’ll emerge a brighter person for reading it, but if you want some cheap thrills and good old fashioned revenge sttory, this book will see you through the day rather briskly and not all that seriously.

B-

Choice Passages:

“It was becoming a chant, an incantation. Someone in the background (perhaps Hargensen again, Sue couldn’t tell in the jungle of echoes) was yelling, “Plug it up!” with hoarse, uninhibited abandon.
‘PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iod!”
‘You’re bleeding!’ Sue yelled suddenly, furiously. ‘You’re bleeding, you big dumb pudding!'”

“Estelle Horan has lived in the neat San Diego suburb of Parrish for twelve years, and outwardly she is typical Ms. California:
She wears bright print shifts and smoked amber sunglasses; her hair is black-streaked blonde; she drives a neat maroon Volkswagen Formula Vee with a smile decal on the gas cap and a green-flag ecology sticker on the back window. Her husband is an executive at the Parrish branch of the Bank of America; her son and daughter are certified members of the Southern California Sun ‘n Fun Crowd, burnished-brown beach creatures. There is a hibachi in the small, beautifully kept back yard, and the door chimes play a tinkly phrase from the refrain of ‘Hey, Jude.'”

“When they had finished making love, as she slowly put her clothes in order in the back seat of Tommy Ross’s 1963 Ford, Sue Snell found her thoughts turning back to Carrie White.”

“The first time had hurt like hell. Her girl friends, Helen Shyres and Jeanne Gault, had both done It, and they both assured her that it only hurt for a minute-like getting a shot of penicillin-and then it was roses. But for Sue, the first time had been like being reamed out with a hoe handle. Tommy had confessed to her since, with a grin, that he had gotten the rubber on wrong, too.”

Safe Area Goražde (2000)

Written By: Joe Sacco
Published By: Fantagraphics Books

When reading a traditional novel, it can be challenging sometimes to glean the “correct” message from words alone, especially if the common style of writing has changed significantly over the previous 300 years. A weaker author might use imagery that is rather ambiguous for one reason or another and, depending on the reader, the author’s intention behind a set of carefully selected words might fail to connect even in the most pivotal of moments. For as language changes, the images intended for the reader’s head might blur as generation after generation evolves the human condition.

Using a graphical approach can evoke more specific feelings about the situation since the ambiguity is not as much of an issue. After all, if one picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a book of a thousand pictures worth? Within the pages of Safe Area Goražde there might be an answer.

The imagery provided by Safe Area Goražde is at once surprising and magnificent. Every single frame is layered with incredible detail as author Joe Sacco describes the things going on with each of the characters he encounters within the titular safe area.

Within this imagery, there seem to be a few things going on. First, there is the issue of relieving the reader’s imagination of all that hard work involved in imagining things. This is evident throughout the entire novel; as the narrative drifts from character to character there are usually short intermissions that show the reader the strife that has occurred to bring things full circle in the way they have, or even to pull the “camera” out so we can more easily glimpse the story in a larger context. A good example of this occurs on pages 14 and 15 when the journalists are being interviewed in the classroom. People are milling about as usual, and even though life is certainly hard for them, the scene is a poignant demonstration of the desire to live.

The graphical approach can also be all up in the reader’s face, immediately establishing a tone in a few pages whereas a regular novel may struggle to accomplish for many and more. In the case of Safe Area Goražde, author Joe Sacco goes a little bit further and applies his cartoonist skills in creating unique caricatures for many of the players, especially when humor or merriment is involved. This technique is established pretty early on in the party scene on page 8, where faces are exaggerated and contorted in comical ways. In later pages, such as the section on Brotherhood and Unity (20-23), the images are far more normalized in an obvious attempt to cancel out the overall comic effect and get serious for a little while.

The story that seems to emerge is that even though the plight of the Bosnians is not an especially good one, there is a sense that the survival instinct is emergent in the whole of the remaining population. It becomes clear that these folks are doing everything they can to survive in spite of the odds of endless persecution by the Serbs and still have the propensity to be humorous about it. It leaves one to wonder, “just how could they possibly do it?”

A

Mistborn: The Final Empire (2006)

Written By: Brandon Sanderson
Published By: Tor Books

So there once was a time when I was young and full of energy and ambition.  I liked to write stories fairly frequently, but the stories tended to not go many places and ultimately they ended up as derivative works inspired by other works that people did a whole lot better at this whole writing thing than I could ever hope to anyway (see what I mean?).  My primary influences during this time were video games, and if you were to read these embarrassing manuscripts that I eventually stopped creating for a number of reasons, you would see just how much their presence overwhelmed my every thought.  In addition to that, I could not bear to take any project all the way to the end and oftentimes I would purposely cut my narrative short because I got bored or didn’t know how to connect things together in any meaningful way.

Mistborn: The Final Empire reads to me very much like one of those early manuscripts.  In fact, I could’ve written something just like it if only I had just persevered in my desires to become a highly successful and well-loved fantasy author.  It is a manuscript that is largely mechanical in its execution that has an interesting premise, an efficient setup, and a really good payoff, but isn’t without its flaws.

The book tells the story of an efficient-by-design group of people who have come together to overthrow an oppressive fundamental regime.  The leader of the group is a very charismatic older dude by the name of Kelsier, who of course has a rough past that underlies his entire motivation.  He is also what this mythos styles as an “Allomancer,” or a guy who can perform various super-human feats after swallowing tinctures of pure metal.  He brings in a very young (and very abused) street urchin from the lower castes of the imperial society due to her inborn abilities as an Allomancer in which is revealed that she possesses a lot of natural skill.  As the story progresses, we see plans getting planned, plans getting foiled, foils getting planned, and plans foiling plans.  Throughout all this foolery, we are treated to a needlessly cryptic backstory about what being a Mistborn means and what drives the characters and why the world is as insufferable as it is–tropes typical for this type of work.

As a fantasy adventure novel, Mistborn: The Final Empire certainly succeeds in telling a story that has its ups and downs.  Things get set up, things get paid off, things get tied together, and there is action that drives characters to respond to changes in the situation.  Sprinkled within are various commentaries about social orders, slavery, corruption in government, thievery, and so on.  For the purposes of action and or adventure, it is as adequate as they come.

Problems arise, however, in the ways Allomancy, the lynchpin in which the whole mythology revolves, is handled.  This book takes a weird approach in separating itself from the normal mechanics of swords and sorcery.  Basically, there are 8 or so different types of metal that endow Allomancers with various powers like telekinesis or improved senses.  The main difference between full-blown Allomancers and the lesser-powered “Mistings” is that Allomancers have full access to all of these metals while Mistings may only utilize one to its full potential.  In a sense, this balances the magic in ways that keep things grounded in reality and allows tension to come and go whenever required, and safely redefines the magic formula.

But when Allomancy itself comes into play, it is handled very much like a video game in that practitioners can “take stock” in abilities they have at their disposal, they can “cast” their powers much like wizards can, and have a way to kind of monitor their remaining resources in what can only be described as a Magic Meter sort of way.  When first confronted with a situation that can only be resolved using Allomancy, its use is ramrodded right into the narrative and doesn’t make any sense at all.  This execution, at first, is surprisingly dry and even pragmatic.  Characters “burn” the metal, and then they “stop burning” the metal at whatever times the plot dictates.  I guess there is something to be said about showing and not telling, but at least get some subtlety in there, novel.  Geez.

Anyway, the dry mechanics surrounding Allomancy take some getting used to, but it won’t completely keep you off guard.  The other problems that arise are within the narrative itself.  The rest of the text is also dry and pragmatic, unless there is an action scene.  Internal monologues show up within character points-of-view that are sometimes appropriate, sometimes not, and when it’s not appropriate it really sticks out.  Character motivations are quickly summarized in some italicized text just to make sure the reader is still paying attention, and many characters are also either really annoying or just flatline completely even when their successes are not guaranteed.  Kelsier, for instance, is supposed to be a really self-confident dude with a shaky past full of tragedy, betrayal, and loss.  He’s always smiling and joking around, always looking ahead to a brighter future I guess, but at the same time we are given too much information about what drives him and what motivates him through some poorly placed internal monologues that don’t leave us wondering anything.  We don’t remain intrigued in him at all, which is a tad unfortunate.

The character Vin is also very hard to stomach at first.  Much like Kelsier, we are made fully aware of her faults and her internal conflicts, often because there is no better context where these elements can better fall into place.   We’re just given them as a sort of ‘thanks’ for continuing our slog through this story and it’s something we need to know in order to connect some dots later on in a very forced manner.  And it gets irritating.  It’s not bad storytelling, but if you are looking into the Mistborn series for a sense of thrill and intrigue, you’ll be plodding along for a while before the good shit starts to happen and the headaches stop.

That being said, once you reach the top of the arc for Mistborn: The Final Empire, you will be whisked away on a rollercoaster ride that is a real thrill, and will leave you wanting more when you reach the end.  As stories go, it hits all the beats required, there aren’t much in the way of surprises, but you will be entertained and at the very least interested in seeing where this world ends up.

B

Choice Passages:

“He is a Misting, Vin thought. Kelsier and Dockson called him a ‘Smoker.’ She would probably have to figure out what that meant on her own; experience told her that a powerful man like Kelsier would withhold knowledge from her as long as he could, stringing her along with occasional tidbits. His knowledge was what bound her to him–it would be unwise to give away too much too quickly.”

“Gritting his teeth, Kelsier flared his pewter again; it was running low, he noticed. Pewter was the fastest-burning of the basic eight metals.”

“Renoux studied her, and Vin glanced away. She didn’t like it when people looked at her that way–it made her wonder how they were going to try and use her.”

Joyeux Noël (2005)

Director: Christian Carion
Writer: Christian Carion
Distributor (US): Sony Pictures Classics

Traditionally, war is regarded as a major event in a nation or culture’s history that serves conveniently as a means to an end: a way to consolidate power and show the rest of the world that said nation or culture really means business. It is in this vein that empires across the world rise and fall and one likely to continue until the Earth’s Great Human Experiment finally reaches its conclusion. War, it seems, is a primal urge not unlike farming, hunting, or even sex. To list oneself along the same lines as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or even Napoleon Bonaparte is almost too big a temptation to bear. Yet in the Modern Age, new messages have emerged that downplay the power and the glory wrought in inter-human suffering and brutality; they seem to conclude rather loudly that in spite of every other possible benefit that mutually murdering one another could have, war’s ultimate consequence is the collective waste of human potential.

Joyeux Noël is just one of many efforts to explore the consequences of war, but it has a unique twist. It is a film that tells the story of one of the most remarkable events in the history of any war to date: a Christmas truce on the embattered World War I frontlines, inspired by events that actually happened in the first year of the war when all sides laid down their arms and shells and came together to celebrate the penultimate Christian holiday.

Unlike most other war films, Joyeux Noël opts to focus on both sides of the front as the conflict progresses. It does everything it can to humanize every aspect of its players, the result being a bird’s eye view of everything that suggests an overwhelming grayness to the men serving on the ground. Notable players include an opera tenor on the German side, an artist on the French side, and a priest on the Scottish side. Most of the men believe that the war will be over by Christmas time, the Germans especially so. As a result, both camps maintain a grim optimism. Germany even chooses to have a large number of Christmas trees sent to the front so the troops might be able to celebrate the holiday away from their families.

As Christmas draws nearer and it becomes clearer that anyone not dead is probably in it for the long haul, the soldiers settle into their new lives and engage in a sort of cautious revelry with the eerie desolation of No Man’s Land quietly lying between them. It begins with the opera singer from the German side who had snuck his opera girlfriend into the trenches with the motivation to increase morale to the men there by singing Christmas songs. The Allies overhear them and, having acquired multiple sets of bagpipes with thanks to the Scots, play an accompanying refrain. It is at this moment that, in spite of or because of the harrowing violence and suffering that the front has collectively endured on both sides that the opponents realize they are one in the same. The officers do the unthinkable: they approach one another in the center of No Man’s Land amidst rotting corpses and shellshocked craters and decide to declare an unofficial ceasefire for the evening.

It is in this moment of rare camaraderie between enemies that the vastness and unquestionable truth concerning human potential lies, for it is not only the officers that decide to lay down their arms for the good of the holiday, but all soldiers on the nearby frontlines as well. They swap stories of home, speak candidly of their wives and families, trade spirits and chocolate and even swap addresses for future opportunities to visit one another. For one precious evening, the Western Front is truly quiet, even uncannily peaceful.

Seeing the fraternization unfolding among sworn foes of the hotly contested front lines is nothing short of remarkable. Men who were ostensibly born to kill one another come together in a fleeting moment of sanity and realize that in any other world they could be friends. It suggests perhaps that war may not be such a primal instinct after all, that World War I or any other war for that matter may not be as necessary as once thought by the masses. The very idea that this could even happen should be shocking enough, but the fact that it actually did speaks volumes about the human potential that inspired a drive for peace and the human potential that was wasted when peace never came.

B+

ThomNote: This is an essay I had to write for a Literature of War class I’m currently taking, hence a slightly unconventional format. I haven’t abandoned you faithful readers, I’ve just been busy. Moar reviews are coming. I promise. 🙂

A Woman in Berlin (1945, 2006)

Written By: Anonymous
Translated By: Philip Boehm
Published By: Metropolitan Books

A Woman in Berlin tells the story of, well, an anonymous woman in Berlin during one of the most brutal periods of human history. World War II is drawing to a close as Russians besiege the city from the east. The civilians, many of whom are women, hide away within their homes in a desperate attempt to protect themselves while awaiting salvation from the Fuhrer that will never come. Bombs explode, walls collapse, windows shatter, and many innocent people die. The woman, for whom we will hereafter call Anonymous, scribbles away in her notebook as the city crumbles around her, giving us a first-hand account of Berlin’s transition from protected city to smoldering rubble.

It’s not pretty.

From the very outset, the incoming Russian invasion is tempered with fear. Apartments and businesses alike are crushed by the same indiscriminate missile payloads day after day after day. Thousands of people, mostly women and children, are displaced from their homes in one fashion or another—many have fled to the shelter of the West, while those less fortunate have found unlikely alliances with neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers as they seek out suitably dark hiding places that are often underground. Rumors circulate both by whispers and by words about the fates of those unfortunate to be caught in the midst of the onslaught, ostensibly created to inspire what few brave German men remain to take up arms and defend the Fatherland to the death.

Anonymous is skeptical of the rumors’ intended effects, going so far as to call headlines regarding violence and rape ridiculous. She states that “their only effect is to send thousands more helpless women and children running out of town, jamming the roads heading west, where they’re likely to starve or die under fire from enemy planes. (5)” There is a sense here that the war has already been lost, the Russians are coming, and no one—man or otherwise—will be able to stop them. Further driving this skepticism is a sequence regarding salvation from ‘that man’ (as we now call A.H.). When an elderly gentleman from the neighborhood only called ‘Siegismund’ comes onto the scene, talking about how the Fuhrer will save them all because he has some kind of plan, the other residents only exchange awkward glances as he rambles on. No one bothers to argue with him; in fact, no one says anything at all because “who wants to argue with a madman? Besides, madmen can be dangerous. (12)”

This skepticism devolves into apathy as the bombing and gunfire continues. Anonymous witnesses some German soldiers pitifully marching toward the front, looking listless and tired. She looks on for a bit, but can no longer bear to watch them as they trudge toward a bitter end. Over the next day or so, this apathy evolves into full blown resentment as the civilians discuss how they’d be better off if “[Hitler’s] old lady’d had a miscarriage. (28)” All that is left up to this point is to wait out the storm and resolve to remain intact both in mind and in body, for no man could apparently save them from this doom.

When the Russians finally arrive and set up their base camp throughout the ruins, there is a very brief but very interesting shift in Anonymous’ observations that seems to endure throughout at least the first 100 pages of A Woman in Berlin, although subdued more in some parts than in others. The Ivans milling about the base camp appear at first to be quite the fascinating lot. “Some Russians are wheeling freshly stolen bicycles up and down the driveway. They’re teaching one another to ride, on their seats as stiffly as Susi the bicycle-riding chimpanzee in the zoo. They crash into the trees and laugh with pleasure… It turns out that Russian men, too, are ‘only men.’ (47)”

There is almost a flair of innocence going on with these Russians; the lot of them seem to be merely boys with a newfound freedom to do whatever they please. Usually this means finding all the liquor and looting as much cool stuff as possible. Interestingly, the Russians feel compelled to loot watches more than other things, often covering both arms with these spoils. But freedom in the hands of someone who may not deserve it can turn that someone mad indeed and, as Anonymous has already pointed out, a madman can be very dangerous.

This is when things begin to go sour, when the innocence quickly fades away. Anonymous is raped several times over many nights by many people in many places. Needless to say, her spirit is dampened considerably when the Russian authorities on the scene refuse to help condemn the perpetrators of these vile acts, and doubly so when her compatriots all but refuse to intervene. The papers apparently weren’t all wrong, and the attacks on her person are nothing less than savage. She resorts to her feminine wiles and primal know-how to fend off the pack, to survive, to not let herself be destroyed by the Ivans. She is reasonably successful in this regard as she seeks out an officer named Anatol who serves as a sort of protective alpha male.

Although this doesn’t mean her outlook is getting much better, it does afford her enough protection to focus her account of the Russian presence and her experience with the Russian conquerors. As things settle down (relatively speaking), the Ivans turn the flat into a kind of mess hall conference room. She sees many different Russians come and go, and though many seem to be crude barbarians, she is also astonished to find some adept individuals in their midst. Individuals such as the placid young Vanya who is nothing but a child, who says, “We humans are all bad. Me, too, I’ve done bad things; (76)” Schoolteacher/chess player Andrei, who likes a good debate now and then; and even Major –ovich So-and-So, who is dapper if not a little clumsy and forward. Her apprehension ebbs and flows like the tides as one shade of gray after the next steps forward to make his claim, either by earnestness or by force.

At the time A Woman in Berlin was written, men and women shared entirely different roles in society. Men were generally manly, fighting in wars and driving tanks and doing the butchery and taming the dogs and running the factories and protecting the women. Women were generally expected to stay at home and maybe pursue an education or wash dishes or clean the carpets and support the men. The events seen in this book clearly shattered those roles, leaving countless women and children stranded with nothing but their wits to see them through. During the fall of Berlin, it wasn’t men who offered protection; it was men who offered to plunder. The women were forced to make choices that would benefit their survival or risk losing everything. The men in the war, the men who stayed home, and the men invading the city are not regarded amiably in any sense of the word. A lot of things could be said about any camp actually, but given the events of past and present for A Woman in Berlin, one feeling trumps all: the feeling of disappointment in the men who on both sides are sworn to protect the weak, the old, and the feeble.

A

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

Written By: Erich Maria Remarque
Published By: Random House

Reading literature sucks. Not because literature is bad, or boring, or something only teachers do to torture students or anything. But because when I am NOT reading or writing about a literary piece under academic pretenses, my review is just a chip in the pile of millions of other chips that have come and gone before and after because other people are reading and wring about literature under academic pretenses. I’m late to the party, and any thought that I make today about anything has already been thought by someone thinkier than myself and that’s just disappointing.

This is because when I approach and digest a novel like All Quiet on the Western Front with wholly virgin eyes and talk about my experiences with it, I am compelled to divulge some clever insight about something new. Something no one else can see. Yet, no one else is surprised because they themselves have already thought things thoroughly through, and penned it down for the book report they must turn in to Mrs. Sedminik the 4th Grade teacher by 8 AM Monday morning. And then that review is tossed into the chip pile with millions of others, a signal lost in the ether of endless noise that is, in a word, “progress”.

All Quiet on the Western Front is billed as “The Greatest War Novel of All Time.” It is about a German guy, fresh out of high school, who enlists to fight in the trenches of World War I with his classbuddies. He begins as an eager young adventure seeker, kind of in it for the thrill, whose enthusiasm and spirit becomes quickly deflated as he is exposed to the incredible horror that is The Front. As he sits in various stinky, dirty holes, watching his friends and comrades get blown to pieces by enemy mortar shells, he copes with starvation, despair, and being blown to pieces himself by frequently suppressing or rationalizing his role in the war as that of ‘becoming a man.’

The story is driven primarily by the war that rages on within the guy’s mind. It is a clear struggle to stay sane in whatever way he can as the world is literally destroyed all around him. We get insight into the thoughts and feelings directly from this poor naive sod stuck in one of the most harrowing situations ever to beset humanity. This suffering and pain is interspersed with a lot of commentary and reflection about the war that is so powerfully poetic that this review could never do it justice. Remarque’s lamentations are just as apt today as they were during WWI–War isn’t glorious, or fun, or even very heroic; it should never be thought of as such. Countless lives are thrown away for the betterment of a select few who would never set foot on the battlefield on any day of the week even if you paid them double. Why do we, as a race, let this happen?

This novel is fantastically written, fantastically paced, and extravagantly detailed. Even if all you are doing is reading this for Lit 101 (actually that’s kind of what I’m doing), it shouldn’t be too hard to get sucked right in to the fascinating horror of early modern warfare. And if you’re an ignorant mongoloid warmonger that preaches to the glory of human domination through excessive violence, perhaps it will adjust your worldview a smidgen and give the rest of us hope that we won’t die under your terms or anyone else’s.

Remarque himself describes it best:

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.”

Choice Passages:

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial–I believe we are lost.”

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades–words, words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”

“Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

A