Fairy tales in books and film

I watched Pan’s Labyrinth last night, a Spanish language film set in Spain during WWII. The heroine, Ofelia, is a young girl of about seven or eight whose widowed mother has remarried and is now expecting a baby. Ofelia escapes from the uncomfortable situation by telling stories to her baby brother inside her mother’s belly and by reading books of fairy tales. Although the adults around her try to suppress her imagination, Ofelia has gumption and often wanders off into the nearby woods. There, she discovers a magical labyrinth guarded by a fawn who tells her that she is in fact princess of a land underground and must complete three tasks in order to be reinstated to her rightful throne. We witness Ofelia’s tasks throughout the film and her difficulties in carrying them out in an adult world filled with turmoil and power struggles and devoid of imagination.

I loved this film because it reminded me of other, similar books and films from my childhood: The Never-ending Story, Labyrinth, Willow, The Princess Bride, The Castle in the Attic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Pan’s Labyrinth inspired me to pick up my new copy of The Book of Lost Things, as the epigraphs I mentioned a few day ago seem to indicate that this book will be similar. I don’t think that it will disappoint, for it begins “once upon a time.” I’m not sure what it is about fairy tales that has so entranced me since childhood. Perhaps because they tend to involve people or animals who are able to surmount their troubles in incredible ways while learning unexpected things about themselves during their journey. That’s just one quick stab at it. I’ll keep this thought in mind as I read The Book of Lost Things. More on this later...

Writing satisfaction, at last!

Don’t readers take for granted the process involved in creating those books we love? I know that I do. Once I discover a great author and devour his/her latest book, I long for another, checking bookstores and websites constantly for signs of a prospective publication. When none seems in sight, I grow terribly impatient. Some writers do possess the good fortune to be quite prolific, producing a novel a year or something equally incredible and impressive. It is only when I sit down with my research notes and try to write something myself that I remember how difficult it is. Oh, how it can drain one’s brain. But, how sweet is the satisfaction of a perfectly constructed paragraph. The sentence that effectively, accurately and (hopefully) eloquently articulates those jumbled thoughts in one’s head. Of course, the type of writing I’m talking about is much less creative and on a minuscule scale compared to what a novelist would do, but it does require a certain amount of original thought and inspiration. And inspiration comes at a high price! I had a breakthrough today and it’s a beautiful thing. I produced a mere three sentences, but those 91 words actually state an idea that has suffered many, many imprecise attempts at expression over the past week or so. Yeah me!
Note to self: Next time you pick up a book for pleasure reading, do not read quite as casually. There’s no telling what sort of inner turmoil the author endured to get those words on the page!
P.S.: Try to remember tomorrow how great it felt to produce something. That is motivation in itself.

Send Me

We're off to the beach for the weekend, so not much time for blogging today. Thought I'd share this author interview from QPB's insider column. I really appreciated the humorous take on family dysfunction in Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. Patrick Ryan's debut novel Send Me also looks into family dynamics, though from a rather different angle. Based on the rave reader reviews on QPB and Amazon, I may have to order this one. [below interview excerpted from qpb.com]

Associate Editor Justin Ravitz recently sat down with author Patrick Ryan to discuss his new book, Send Me
JUSTIN RAVITZ: In a nutshell, what's your book about?
PATRICK RYAN: It's a big nutshell: it's about people trying to do the right thing, and screwing up, and my trying to understand why they screwed up. I think that nobody really knows how to be a good mother, father or sibling. It was about having compassion for all of these people. And giving a panoramic view of this family.
JR: I loved the atypical structure. You told the story of this family through six members of this family, by jumping back and forth randomly over 40-odd years. We enter each scene nearly mid-action, and this odd sense of dislocation sheds a remarkable kind of beauty and nuance to each scene. What inspired this approach?
PR: Thanks! I never wanted to write a traditional novel. I never saw it as having one arc. I think that when people experience life, we don't experience it chronologically. In our heads we make these leaps to memories from when we were five to now. I wanted to try to mirror that. Each of the six main characters has his or her own arc, and sometimes they overlap.
[...]
JR: What, if anything, unifies this fractured, dysfunctional Kerrigan/Ragazzino family? What brings them together?
PR: I think that each one of them arrives at a place where he or she is very much aware of his or her shortcomings and culpability. But I didn't want any of them to be heroes or villains or "good" or "bad" people, necessarily. I don't believe in those pure extremes; everyone's sort of in the middle. I wanted them to be messed up and aware of that. That's what life is, that's who we are.
JR: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself?
PR: It's either an inspiring or pathetic story (laughs). I was born in DC, I grew up in Florida, went to Florida State, got my MFA at Bowling Green State in Ohio, and then embarked on a long series of jobs, one after another, and wrote the whole time. I was a housepainter, bartender, teacher, waiter, retail, I worked at a law firm . . . Between 1988 and starting Send Me in 2003, I wrote, finished, revised and sent around seven novels that I was never able to publish. I also started and got about halfway through eight more. All those years, it was always about having some crummy job that I had no interest in so that I could write. I wrote five days a week. And every book I finished I thought "this is the one, this is the one." But I got really down and depressed before I started Send Me. This sounds so corny - I thought "I can't obsess every single day about having my book published. I have to let go of the prize." And something clicked in my head and I just relaxed a bit. And I started writing better.
JR: Are there parts of yourself, your own history and family amidst these characters?
PR: Almost all of the events themselves are made up. The one thing that's really true is that my mother does think that she's a reincarnated model from a Vermeer painting (laughs).
JR: I have my own theories, but what's the meaning of your title?
PR: To me it's three things: 1) Deliver me from all this. 2) Sort of an abbreviated "you send me," I always thought that meant "I get a big kick out of you," but I found out that in the fifties it actually meant "You make me horny." (laughs) 3) You're driving me away from you, send me out of here, get me out of here. [...]

The House on the Strand

I first encountered Daphne du Maurier as a teenager when my grandmother loaned me her worn copy of Rebecca. I remember being completely enthralled, holding my breath with every turn of the page. Had I not had such high expectations for my reading of The House on the Strand due to my fond memory of Rebecca, I may not have been left quite as unsatisfied. This wasn’t a bad novel, just a bit disappointing. In fact, the premise is interesting. I tend to enjoy plots alternating between the twentieth/twenty-first centuries and the Middle Ages or Renaissance—Michael Crichton’s Timeline, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, The Intelligencer, The Eight, even the not-so-well-written Da Vinci Code, though the last three are not truly time travel books, but rather mysteries solved with clues from the past.

Plot summary from daphnedumaurier.org:

“Dick Young has been lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Magnus Lane, a professor of bio-physics. He has agreed, while he is there, to act as guinea-pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered; and the small bottles which hold it are waiting for him in the laboratory at Kilmarth.
With no idea of what the result will be, he takes the prescribed dose - and without warning finds himself back in the fourteenth century, in this same Cornish countryside. During the following days he takes successive 'trips'. Each lasts only a short time, but always he is back in the same surroundings. Invisible, inaudible, he finds that he is a kind of alter ago of Roger Kylmerth, steward to Sir Henry Champernoune, lord of the manor of Tywardreath. He witnesses intrigue, adultery, murder, feeling himself personally involved.
Are the experiences hallucinatory, a subconscious escape from dissatisfaction with his own marital life? Or has he really traveled back in time? This is the question Dick asks himself.
More and more he grudges the hours spent away from these people of long ago, resentful of the time that must be given to his loving though suspicious wife and to his stepsons, intruders into his secret life. With immense skill, the tension is kept on both levels, and, as Dick grows ever more obsessed by his trips into the past, so the reader begins to share his addiction, and to find that past and present become inextricably, perilously mixed - until the final, stunning climax.”

It was the limited character development that truly frustrated me in this novel. Dick Young seems to me a rather shallow individual. We know very little about him, only that he recently ended a career in editing due to displeasure with his job. Dick is a malcontent whose curiosity for the fourteenth century is piqued simply because it is different from his present—perhaps equally complicated, but more logical to him. He seeks refuge from a nagging wife and two stepsons at his friend’s country estate and his brief forays into the past deepen this estrangement. Since Dick is merely a passive observer of the past and has no interaction with the families whose history he is tracing, these passages of the novel have an artificial quality. We witness along with Dick only isolated events in fourteenth-century Kilmarth and have little opportunity to develop sympathies for these characters. Furthermore, Dick’s interactions with the people in his present hardly earn our compassion, either. He conceals his drug-induced time travel from his wife and this growing obsession becomes his only motivation, causing his family relationships to rapidly deteriorate. Du Maurier is quite successful at depicting the single-mindedness of an addict completely dependent on his drug of choice. I only wish that she could have drawn me into her story in the way that her character was drawn to his vice.

If you are looking for a good time travel book, try Connie Willis or Audrey Niffenegger’s excellent book The Time Traveler’s Wife. And for a satisfying Du Maurier read, pick up one of her more celebrated books. There is a reason this one is obscure.

The troublesome task of writing

Sitting here and trying to make myself write makes me want to scream. AAAAAAAAAAA!!!!! I would rather do anything other than write my dissertation. I would rather read or take a walk outside; I would rather iron and fold clothes; I even would rather scrub disgusting pots and pans or worse, the drain in our shower. I am so (figuratively) sick of the thought of it that I feel (physically) sick when I try to do it. Why is this? Is it the effort? Yes. Is it fearing that I have nothing to say? Yes. Is it fearing that I won’t finish by my “deadline”? Yes. Avoidance is just easier. But avoidance brings guilt. And with guilt comes aggravation, irritation and general disappointment in self. Everyone says “just push through,” “just divide it into smaller chunks,” but I “just” want to smack them all. Do I really want to get my PhD? I thought that I did. It would open more doors in my future (even if I decide not to take them) and I suppose that options are good to have. It would mean giving up if I didn’t continue to write and that is not the greatest character trait. Do I dislike the thought of leaving this part of my life incomplete more than I dislike the thought of writing? Yes. Then what’s the problem? Why all the inner turmoil? Why do I struggle so? It’s such an enormous, daunting task. That’s why. But, lots of people have done it. People do it every day. If they can do it, so can I. Right?