"Fear of Flying" - Erica Jong (28 Aug - 9 Sep)

I've read this book between slippery moments. It so happens that during these two weeks, my mother has decided to turn our home into a kind of daycare for some of my older cousin's children. For the first few days it was two two-years old and one four-year old, and though lately it dwindled down to one of the two-years old, the little boy has grown very fond of me (or my childhood toys), and I admit it, I of him, but our relationship has given rise to many brief moments where I try to pick up the book and just think: no, I simply can't focus on Isadora Wing's musings while this ever-laughing kid keeps pulling my hand to play with some Lego or other.

Again, it took some getting used to, as I'm used to a straight-up plot (The Shadow Over Innsmouth was perhaps a snack, in that sense, while Fear of Flying required some more active engagement due to Isadora's interspersed narrative of present and hindsight), but I've enjoyed a lot getting to know a character so multi-layered and complex as her. Talking about characters, I've seen myself as many of them. When it comes to relationships, I've been Isadora; I've been Bennet for the most part; I've even tried to be Adrian once - but gave it up quickly, as it just didn't feel right. Isadora, though, she is surprising, and at first I sinned of pidgeon-holing her in the same way we do with real people. She's clever enough to warn us about these things, though. In one of her musings about writing as a means for surviving, she says that plots, verses and characters are only writers' way of tiding up the world around them, but never quite faithful to the complexities of the world, but she becomes clearly self-conscious when at one point, she asks the reader whether one thinks she's telling the literary truth as she speaks... She has clearly been through a couple of traumatic experiences - with or without the psychoanalytic thread of analysis that runs through the whole story - but some occurrences are only hinted at from the beginning, so just as a real person, it takes a long time to get to know her - down to her selectively xenophobic antics and other not-so-likeable features.

But oh, what is a book about... Good thing we didn't phrase the question that way for this blog, but rather "raw impressions". There are thoughtful and meta-literary discussions about the spiritual communion with books, escapism and the (seemingly mysanthropic) desire to give up our free will ("All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness"), mingled with heart-in-hand conversations about repressed sexuality and power-struggles in a relationship, not to mention her allegoric fears - of flying, and of lying. But the driving force, I feel, or the theme that I enjoyed the most, was the ever-cycling contradiction of desire: an expanded "Tatt av Kvinnen" (Erlend Loe), where we get to know Marianne's side of the story and her ever-changing desires (and I can vow that that is not only a feminine hazard). It is also one of the things Milan Kundera elaborates on with "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", but while his (male) main character struggles namely between stability and carelessness, Jong's (female) main character additionally struggles between two men that seem to be, personally, opposing poles - which I think is funny because she mocks Hesse at some point as being a kind of adolescent writer, and this sort of polarized characters are almost solely the ones he writes about. More about her criticism on Hesse later, maybe, but let it be said I'm not offended, only growing aware of different ways of reading, I suppose.

I often fretted halfway through a chapter, thanks to Isadora's manic-depressive way of telling her life, but there are so many interesting conversations with others and with herself that I quickly left these things aside. Often I tried making a parallel between her predicaments and similar situations I've been in, and thought that they could all be wittily put to music in Conor Oberst's (Bright Eyes) self-deprecating tone. Or, again, quoting lyricisms, I guess "the wanting comes in waves!".

"Fear of Flying" by Erica Jong, 26. August-1. September (Sunniva)

I don't know why I've been stalling this review for so long. It could be partly because these past few weeks have been very busy, and partly because I'm slightly scared of writing about feminism. If I do that, I'll have to define, in some way or other, where I stand. And while I am a feminist, some way or other, I find so many other subjects to engage in, that I've hardly thought it through. This is, I'm afraid, going to be more of a quote-fest and less of an actual review. The quotes do represent some of the most important things I got from the book though, so I hope it's all right.

When I was searching all the second hand book shops for this (and the rest of the books on the list), everyone kept telling me how popular, radical and exciting this book was when it came out in the 70s. First published in 1973, I imagined the issues would be forty years old as well.

"So I learned about women from men. I saw them through the eyes of male writers. Of course, I didn't think of them as male writers. I thought of them as writers, as authorities, as gods who knew and were to be trusted completely." p.145

This is one of the books in which I have folded down most corners. Needless to say, the character I sympathise the most with is Isadora Wing, the main character. I don't sympathise with all her actions. For some reason, although I have never (as far as I know) been cheated on, I've never been able to stand people who have affairs or are unfaithful to their partner in any way. The only good thing about how she leaves her husband is that he is completely aware of it before it happens. Yet there are so many other thoughts and ideas of hers that I recognise as my own.

"I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism." p.180

"Whenever I was home, I wanted to get away, and whenever I got away I wanted to go home again." p. 214

All the quoted reviews on the back and inside the cover make the book sound like it's all about sex and sexual freedom. I don't think it is. It covers subjects such as being a woman, or an artist, or an American Jew, living in Germany some years after the war, travelling, stereotypes, academia, psychoanalysis... And probably a few more I've forgotten. In addition to discussing sex and sexual freedom.

"All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness." p. 188

"There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes." p. 211

"Even Bennett, with all his supposed psychology and insight, maintained that men tried to pick me up all the time because I conveyed my 'availability' – as he put it. Because I dressed too sexily. Or wore my hair too wantonly. Or something. I deserved to be attacked, in short. It was the same old jargon of the war between the sexes, the same old fifties lingo in disguise: there is no such thing as rape; you ladies ask for it. You laidies." p. 247

That this was a problem in the seventies and still is, is extremely sad. I even find myself thinking something similar sometimes, when I read about attempted rape in the newspapers. How can I think that? Then I shouldn't be able to wear all the short skirts that I do wear.

I really enjoyed this book. Even when I disagree with Jong, she's a good writer, and a funny one, even though she uses the alliteration technique you learn in writing class far too many times. I am tempted to read more of her books, only I am afraid of being disappointed. I need to read more about her, anyway. Off I go.

*This edition: 1975, Granada Publishing Limited

The Shadow over Innsmouth, 5.-14. August (Sunniva)

As this is the first review, I have no idea how to do this. Will it be full of spoilers? Will I refer to conversations I've had with Juan, the other person in this project? Will I try to make it commercial in case a magazine editor happens to stumble over our hidden little blog and think 'wow, this is the best review I've ever read, I will hire Sunniva and give her lots of money'? I think, so far, the answers to all these questions is no. So let's just start and see how we go.

I read this story in the beginning of August, when I went between finishing a much-worked with text, working as a volunteer at the charity shop every day, getting back as a volunteer with the Red Cross and the student newspaper, signing up with two recruitment agencies, and getting a part-time job with a not-quite-charity called Global Dignity. I had a minor breakdown one day, because all the expectations became too much for me. I'm still working on balancing all these responsibilities. I mainly read the story at breakfast, to avoid nightmares (very susceptible to nightmares, everything I read at night colours my dreams).

The Shadow over Innsmouth is a short story, or maybe a novella, by science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, of whom I'd heard a lot, but never read anything. I will admit to something, though: When we were talking about which books we could read and review for this project, H.P. Lovecraft came up on some list or other of books to read before you die. The main reason I agreed, and the main reason I chose The Shadow over Innsmouth, is that Neil Gaiman (one of my favourite authors) speaks a lot about Lovecraft in general, but has also written a short story called Shoggoth's Old Peculiar, set in another, British Innsmouth, but definitely inspired by Lovecraft. I never could understand this short story. It seems full of injokes that I'm not in on. I suspect that I partly wanted to read Lovecraft, and especially this one, just because of that.

Character I sympathise the most with: The main character? Or, actually, maybe more the agent at the station ticket-office, who gets to tell the stranger all about the local myths about Innsmouth. He does try to say that going to Innsmouth, especially on that old bus, is a bad idea, but at the same time he seems happy to be able to part with all this information and old stories about the small town. That would be me.

At the end of the story (no linear reviews here, do you hear), I realised that I've heard of Ctulhu before. Probably through listening to too many Neil Gaiman interviews. I've now realised that H.P. Lovecraft created the Ctulhu Mythos, which is all over the second hand book shops of Tromsø, especially in the fantasy and science fiction sections.

proof

There are no appropriate soundtracks. Listening to music while reading books has never been anything for me – the disappearing into a book and only being pulled out of it by a phone ringing, the sound of car tires, or the cat wanting to go outside, is the best experience you can have (before the pulling out).

Now there's hardly space for the actual review. I might go away from the guidelines for the next book, because I have so many feelings about it.

Let it just be said. H.P. LOVECRAFT! THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH! That's all. Brilliant.

It started out as (how I imagine) a classic science fiction/fantasy story from the 1930s, with the truth being told from the start, only with the main character not knowing this. And then came the end, and SPOILER ALERT (not really) the big twist that left me wishing for more text, more stories, and more knowledge about the Ctulhu Mythos. Without reading too much online before this review, I've already found that H.P. himself wrote more stories concerning Innsmouth and the Old Ones, which I will try to find after this.

In addition to the tons of authors and writers and cartoonists who have been inspired by Ctulhu to write directly about him and the rest of the Old Ones, I realised just how many modern science fiction and fantasy authors have been inspired by him. Plenty. Especially this idea that the human mind shrinks away from the truthful appearances of supernatural beings, or that seeing these beings can make persons mad as the brain is trying to protect us from seeing the entire truth. Namely in Mark Chadbourn's The Age of Misrule series is this one of the main points.

To conclude: I loved this story. While I read it I wasn't too sure, it was all right, with some good descriptions here and there. Then the end. Seriously. 

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" - H.P. Lovecraft (12-21 August)

It took me a while to make a solid impression about this one, I think because the first few pages (A4 - first chapter) are so loaded with stories about The Esoteric Order of Dagon, The Marsh Refinery, the Miskatonic University at Arkham, that I quickly forgot how the narrator had begun the story: "there was something unspeakable down below Devil Reef, and he was going to tell the truth of it."

Although the "matter-of-factly" tone of the conversation between the travel agent and the narrator kept these "horrors" at arm's length for a while, I was slowly absorbed by the language in which everything was told. Perhaps this has more to do with the books I've chosen to read lately than with my English proficiency, but it had been a while since I felt like looking up so many words in a dictionary (with pleasure), and not only that, but every detailed description gave me an overwhelmingly whole image of whatever the topic was. When describing the first tiara he encounters:

"Among these reliefs were fabulous (as if he didn't believe they were possibly real) monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity (describes both the physical appearance and the perceived spirit of the creatures) - half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory (of course, later one realizes it might have been his actual memory, but at this point I thought of these creatures being distantly connected with humans, thus the pseudomemory, and not actual memory), as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral (perhaps, inevitable? like genes one can't simply scratch out)"

This I enjoyed. A lot. Not a word is wasted. Had it been, for example, a George R.R. Martin story it could have easily taken him over a few hundred pages to narrate just the same. Of course, I think George R.R. Martin's case is different because his stories are largely based around extremely widespread and dense genealogies, a greatly expanding imagined geography and so on, so his sometimes-unnecessarily long descriptions serve another purpose - as in, you're already a few thousand pages into a same story, to read three hundred words describing the banquet that such and such morbid lord and lady were feasting their hostages with, doesn't seem like it's unnecessary anymore, really.

I felt this guy telling the story of Innsmouth was slightly more pedantic, maybe? Not witty like Tolkien, or incisive like Gaiman, but still as rich. I think I'll stick to what I said before about it: perhaps at the cost of making the narrator somewhat dull or lacking personality, not a word is wasted. Somewhat hand in hand, I had never felt so geographically well-located and oriented in a story as I did walking around Innsmouth: every time he stopped to describe his immediate surroundings I felt, at first a bit bored, but later thankful that I could turn around anywhere in Innsmouth and know, more accurately than usual, what I would be looking at.

Come to think about it, all of these meticulous descriptions seem somewhat off balance with the ending of the story. Assuming the narrator is telling everything in hindsight, after he has decided not to commit suicide and join "the deep ones", it seems a bit odd that his "narrator persona" actually conveys the dread and vertigo he feels when running from Innsmouth. Although he is an architect, isn't he? Measured, careful, precise.

Enough about style... I now realize it's hard to get rid of the dredges of boring academic analysis.

Along with all the careful descriptions and impressions packed with hints and connotations (when describing the Innsmouth locals one of the first times, he says "they seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding - despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of being". Wonderful.), one thing in particular I enjoyed about the story and the writing, and this is the only feature I can compare to other pieces I've read: I felt the sole purpose of the story is to build upon a single point of emotion.

The plot is not surprising - from the very beginning one knows there's some kind of terror in Innsmouth and that the narrator will have some sort of horrific (but not deadly) encounter with it, as he is alive to tell it now. The narrator (I'm tired of calling him the narrator now, and I looked up that his name is actually Robert Olmstead, so I'll call him Robert from now on) is a bit of an empty fictional character, which makes it easier for me, as a reader, to experience what he does - the fear, the tension. All other characters are only passers-by that build around the history of the place, but there are no intricate relations or anything. The core of the story is to build this impending and inevitable realization: the abhorrent and croaking horror within Robert.

Taking this realization of the horror within oneself a bit further, I read it as a modern horror-version of the myth of the wolf inside us all. After all, someone in the story also refers to these fish-frog-men as being all around the world, and being able to take over at any moment, if only they felt so inclined. I guess the oceanic associations are very useful not only because it is most unknown (I seem to remember reading that scientists know, presumably, proportionately more about visible outer space than about the deep seas) and mysterious, but also closer to all of us than, say, ideas about a "cosmic collective consciousness" or extra-terrestrial life or whatever. We all (think we) know the sea, but if we're daring or unfortunate enough (or fortunate, perhaps?) to try to dig below the surface, as Robert tried to do with Innsmouth, we might be surprised by what we find. After all, was it his own uncle who took it upon himself to do a similar trip years before, and also disappeared or committed suicide? But even after that, it doesn't seem to be a destructive nature they give in to. Yes, they're creepy and they chased him all around Innsmouth with no clear purpose, but that I remember, these "deep ones" weren't really guilty of anything else besides freaking visitors out. And, well, the disappeared tourists here and there could be attributed to them, but I'm inclined to think they disappeared because they somehow discovered their true calling, as Robert did.

Or that's what they would have you believe, I suppose.

(this is what http://quantumbranching.deviantart.com/ believes would happen, should Cthulu awaken and the deep ones arise. would definitely be more interesting than a zombie apocalypse, and seems much more realistic given sea level variations in the last decades, right? ...right? I am, however, more inclined to give in to them rather than planning all that military defence nonsense)

The only story that comes to mind (as I had never read any horror literature before, besides another Lovecraft short-story) is the poem "The Raven" (Edgar A. Poe), in which, similarly, the core purpose (that I could discern, at least), was to express this ever-growing and all-consuming feeling of loss - the irreparable void that comes after losing a loved one.

Of course, Lovecraft does build much more than just "disgust", "grotesqueness", fish-frog men and the stench of the sea around this, and yes, there is a well elaborated imagery around the myth of Cthulu, and The Esoteric Order of Dagon, and Innsmouth, and Arkham. But reading the story by itself, I felt that this creeping realization was something enjoyable in and of itself, and for me, that was the marrow of it.

And now I realize that I don’t practice what I myself appreciate: this ecology of language that I appreciated in Lovecraft. Here I am, two pages later (A4), having covered only two of the points we said we’d cover... I’ll try to persuade you that it’s OK because this is the first one we publish, but you’ll decide whether you forgive my carelessness or not. Maybe the following, as an epigraph, will serve to justify some of my opinions above, at some level, in spite of this transition completely devoid of delicacy.

At the moment I am spending the summer back where my biological family lives – Caracas, Venezuela. As I write this I feel goose bumps  down my spine because I feel an odd parallel between myself and Robert, digging into his own family history and realizing where (at least half of) his blood actually comes from.

Caracas is nothing like Innsmouth. If you anything about either one, that might have been stating the obvious. But I seem to have a love/hate relationship with this city, probably having a lot to do with the fact that I don’t live here most of the time, but only come and spend a month or two every few years. This makes it hard to link myself to some parts, some of the changes, some of the people, but at the same time, most of my childhood and (only a few of my) old friends are still here, so of course there are tracks that never get old. I spent the previous year in Northern Norway, and these two months are a kind of interlude before I move back to England again for another year, so this just adds to the feeling of arriving/departing almost at the same time. Perhaps because of this I might have slightly romanticised Innsmouth and fallen for the tale of “rushing back to the primitive” – but only as I read it.

Still without a better idea for a fitting musical piece other than a stereotypical classic horror movie soundtrack – though some lyrics in Epica’s metal symphony “We will take you with us” make me think of the potential gospels sung deep down Devil Reef, the music itself is far from oceanic.