Life, on a scale of stresses, one to six, where one is not very much stress, and six is absolutely too much.... currently the stress reading is at about fifteen, the safety gauge is screwed down tight, and steam is leaking at the seams. Healthwise, not so good either, and my doctor says "Avoid stress", then laughs, because she's stressed too.
My mother's condition is going rapidly downhill, and I regularly get calls from the alarm monitoring centre, and drop everything, rush over to find she's fallen, can't get up.
She seems to be getting good at whacking her head on some random hard object as she goes too. She won't eat enough, so she gets weaker, then her balance gets worse.... it's all a downward spiral. Her memory is falling apart faster and faster. My brother has at last stepped up to take a bit of the load, and my sister's just been and stayed a week with her, which gave me several nights of uninterrupted sleep. Until the five a.m. ambulance call.
So it's nice to just do nothing. I picked up Audrey Niffenegger's second novel "Her Fearful Symmetry" (first one was "The Time Traveller's Wife") in a secondhand bookstore this morning, and enjoyed the luxury of sitting down to read, with nobody demanding my time. Well, there's always something else I really ought to be doing, but today I sat down to read, and read I did, until I ran out of book, 485 pages later, I enjoyed it. I even recommend it. The Amazonites tend to give it a bit of a poor grade. Well, to hell with them, I say. It entertained me for about three whole hours, so it can't be all bad.
If you read "The Time Traveller's Wife", you'd know it wasn't likely to be a simple, straightforward, single-string story. And story it is, that's all, it doesn't need to be overanalysed and searched for hidden allegory. Just a story. With a ghost.
I'll rate it as five stars.
P.s. (a later addition). I wanted to link to the book, so, of course, I ended up reading reviews. now, reviews always interest me, because I contrast them with my own experience. I didn't link to the publisher's or the author's blurb, because, hey, what's a publisher going to say about a product it's trying to sell? Or what's an author going to say?
So that leads us to Amazon and other sites where reviewers can say good or bad.
Now, my problem, if I try to tell you how I felt about the book, is that I can't do that without perhaps revealing things you need to find out for yourself.
Elsewhere, I recently read someone's thoughts on movie trailers. How in the past, a trailer's purpose was to intrigue you with glimpses and hints, so you just had to see the movie and find out what it was about, but now, the trailer seems to be a pastiche of all the major scenes, the best and the brightest, so when you go see the movie... there's nothing left. You've already seen the bits that are exciting, and so it feels as if you're just sitting through the b-grade stuff that wasn't good enough for the trailer.
That's how it can be with book reviews too.
Here's the spoiler: twins, ghosts, and a cemetery. So there.
It seem that readers and reviewers are complaining that parts of the plot were far-fetched and hard to believe. What a surprise. The author's previous book was called "The Time Traveller's Wife". Even if you have not read it, nor seen the movie, you can not buy the current tome without being exposed to the blurb about its predecessor.
So if you expect "Her Fearful Symmetry" to be thoroughly true to everyday reality, then I'd say you're pretty stupid. People complain about characters' behaviour, about the various denouements, say "Well that's unlikely, people just wouldn't really do that." Well, in my experience, people in real life do all sorts of bizarre things that seem illogical and make no sense. That's actually not magic reality, it's real life. Sometimes people will do unpredicted things, and there will be no explanation. That's just how it is. Why then must we expect an author to explain everything, to leave us sure of the reasons for each character's actions?
Why should we expect a tidy ending? Do we really need an Agatha Christie-like scene at the end where all the characters are gathered together in the drawing-room of a country house, and a some detective genius walks us through all the clues we should have picked up earlier in the book, and explains why each character behaved in the way they did? Do we need a happy ending?
I'll say, for my part, that I write, in my mind, as I read books, alternative scenarios. This book was no exception. I'd have liked characters to behave differently, make different decisions. I'd like to be able to step in there, part way along, and nudge things in a different direction. But this was Audrey Niffenegger's book, not mine, she gets to call the shots, and I read them and have to accept her direction. If I want a book where all the characters behave in a way I like, where the plot develops as I wish, I'll have to write it myself.
Until then, I'm reading other people's stories, and should respect their choices. I can like or dislike it, but I have no right to say "She should have....".
Just like I read blogs. Even my favourite bloggers post things I won't like, and I'll post things my readers won't like.
If you don't like it, spit it out, go get something else.
I also watched The Social Network. Now that was a waste of my time. I'm still no wiser as to Facebook's
I assume the people involved in making it thought the movie to be a worthy task.
IMDB gives it 8.2 out of ten stars. The reviews there make me wonder if I watched the same thing. To me it was just a collage of cliched scenes that we've all seen before in oh so many other movies, put together to tell another story we've heard before, student geek gets dotcom idea, abuses friendships on the way, picks up sharks and sucker fish, ends up rich but sad.
Thought provoking? No. Emotionally charged? No. A visual treat? No. Great drama? No.
I also spent a while watching a river today, watching brown floodwater slide over a weir, and roil in chaos. That time was better used.
