Throughout my teen years Chuck Palahniuk was my favorite author. I read all of his books and most of them several times over and I became pretty familiar with his style of writing and his darkly satirical wit. My love of his works reached a peak after I read Rant: An Oral History of Buster Casey. For me that book was the pinnacle of his writings and since then I haven’t found his new works to be as exciting or funny anymore. I’ve since been rummaging around for a new author on whom to hang my literary hat, a new Chuck Palahniuk, if you will.This brings me to Kurt Vonnegut. I first read Slaughterhouse Five about three years ago and again at the end of 2010. Vonnegut was a name that was familiar to me, I had seen it over and over again in the quotes praising Palahniuk’s books, always something along the lines of ‘Palahniuk is like a modern day Kurt Vonnegut.’ It was only a matter of time before my search for a new Chuck Palahnuik led me to Kurt Vonnegut. As I read Cat’s Cradle I couldn’t help but make the same connection.
Vonnegut’s style is something that I can get behind. I like his deadpan delivery and no-frills prose, the way he’s able to make the absurd seem mundane while mocking the absurdity of the mundane. Ideas come left and right, some so brilliant they require you to stop and think, others so true that you’re convinced that you’ve had the very same thought a thousand times, though have never put it into words. He certainly has a way with those things.
Now for some reason, all of those brilliant words, placed into biting, sharp and poignant sentences, wrapped up into short staccato chapters and packaged in one of the most celebrated books of the last 50 years, didn’t add up for me. I didn’t dislike the book, but I wasn’t crazy about it either. Perhaps my expectations were too high, perhaps I’m a big dumb face, but the story itself was underwhelming to me. The satire and ideas were more interesting that the characters or the plot. I just didn’t find myself to enthralled by anything; there was no hook, no impetus for me to keep reading until the end. As such, the book took me eight days to read though it felt much longer than that.
It could be that I’m just spoiled. That I want my cake and for Jurassic Park III to be as good as the previous two movies. It could be that Vonnegut simply left the characters and the plot flat in order to drive his point home. Or that I’m just missing the point entirely. I don’t know. I just don’t know. It always bums me out a little to get to the end of a book and feel, much like Aaron Lewis from the ultra-cool band Staind, that I’m on the outside, looking in, wondering what all the fuss was about. It happened with Moby Dick and it happened again here. The only way I can see to remedy this literary outsider tension that some books give me is to read more. So read more I will. And I think a fair amount of books I read in the coming years will be Vonnegut books.
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Read this book. Seriously, I mean it. I won’t go so far as to say that this book should be required reading for everyone, but I do think that a lot of people will be just a little better off for having read it.
This is the story of a young man on a quest for enlightenment (or meaning, purpose, or self) and the different stages of understanding he reaches as he ages. The tale of Siddhartha covers his life from being a son to being a friend, to a devoted student, to a faithful friend, to an impassioned lover, to a greedy business man, to a man beaten into despair, to an old wise man, and finally to a father. In every stage of his life, there are lessons to be learned and deep wisdom to be mined from even the most direst of situations.
The plot and the prose are both simplistic, which serves to drive across the rather ‘simple’ wisdom contained within. The truths in this book are incredibly simple in theory, but have proven time and again almost too hard to reach for the majority of the human race. It is filled with passages of little gems of wisdom that you thought you thought you knew until you see them in print and entirely different perspectives on a wide array of many aspects of life and living. There were many instances when I came across a sentiment so profound that I had to look up from my Kindle and just stare out into nothingness.
I can go on and on about the wonders of this book, but to paraphrase one of the main pearls of wisdom collected by Siddhartha in his life, true wisdom can only be experienced, never learned.
The Filth - Grant Morrison
Reading Grant Morrison makes me feel profoundly smarter and dumber at the same time. For all intents and purposes, Morrison is an idea man. Inside his head must be a rushing tidal wave of Bowie-level freaky ideas whizzing around not unlike the doors in the Monsters, Inc. factory. But that doesn’t mean he is incapable of telling a good story, actually it’s far from it. When I read his stuff for the first time, I feel like an archaeologist who stumbled onto some ancient, unprecedented artifact. I know it’s awesome, that the ramifications of such a find are monumental, and that I’m dealing with something much larger in scope than can be gleaned upon initial inspection. There is so much to process, so many layers, that it takes some extra work to get the full effect of the work. Put simply, Grant Morrison makes me think things I’ve never thought before. And that is why he is my favorite comic book author, and perhaps, favorite author period.
The Filth is chock-full of crazy ideas that leap off of the page and burrow deep into my brain. As with most of Grant Morrison’s works, The Filth kind of defies synopsis. I could tell you how it’s about a tired old social outcast whose life has two purposes, his cat and porn, until it is revealed to him that he is a member of an ultra-secret organization with the mission of cleaning up the nastiest of the nasty that civilization has to offer; and how this man struggles with the notion that he’s insane and making the whole thing up because that would be the saner of the two scenarios. I could try to summarize it in some terribly convoluted sentence, but the above doesn’t really get to the heart of the story, or more importantly, set the framework for the monsoon of ideas conveyed by the narrative.
Since I’m still making my way through the rather extensive Grant Morrison canon, I don’t want to make any fancy claims, but I think this might be his best graphic novel (creator-owned category, All-Star Superman is unsurpassable). As soon as I finished this one I wanted to start right over. Why didn’t I? I don’t know, but I am not putting this back on the shelf until I give it another go. As far as recommendations go, if you haven’t read anything by Grant Morrison yet, it’s probably best not to start here. I’d go with some of his more recent Batman offerings, his New X-Men stuff or the aforementioned All-Star Superman.
I guess since this is a comic book that I should also mention the art. For me this is something I usually overlook in my assessment of comics and it only comes up when it's bad or bland. Chris Weston does a bang up job on these pages, so no complaints here.
No comments:
Post a Comment