Funny In Different Ways

I finally finished The Love Secrets of Don Juan by Tim Lott and Jennifer Government by Max Barry this week. I still have a long way to go to finish the rest of my Must-Finish-Reading-Now! List. This, while, my To-Be-Read-Shelves are filling up by the week.

Jennifer Government is set sometime in the future where the world is divided into US Federated and non-US Federated Economic Bloc countries, and governed by corporations. The corporations, meantime, belong to either one of two loyalty programs, Team Advantage and US Alliance.

Everyone speaks with an American accent. Australia, New Zealand and many other countries are part of USA (Malaysia included, according to the map furnished at the beginning of the book).

Each individual is identified by their employer so if you work for Nike, your name is John Nike. If you switch jobs to Pepsi, then your name is John Pepsi. If you're unemployed, well, you're just John. No one wants to be 'just John' so nobody admits to being unemployed.

The heroine of the story, Jennifer Government is (obviously) a government agent (with a cool barcode tattoo under her left eye) assigned to investigate and apprehend those responsible for the killings of 14 people whose apparent common thread (and bad luck) was to purchase a pair of coveted Nike shoes.

Why and how this happens is unveiled very much early in the story so this is no whodunit. If you thought businesses today are run ruthlessly, those companies are just sugar and spice when compared to the corporations in Jennifer Government.

So we get drawn into the chase as JGo goes after the perpetrators and tries to pin them down. The story shuttles between Australia and US. The plot twists and the characters can be hard to follow at first but once you get a grasp of how the system works, it's pretty fun-going.

I found Jennifer Government scary and funny at the same time. Scary because I really think things can go this way, if not in my lifetime, in the next, and funny because the author injects an unapologetic, wacky sense of humour into it.

Max Barry is Australian so you can't help wonder if he's really taking the mickey out of American consumerism and our obsession with brands. It’s not a story where you should take too seriously but it’s still enough to make you aware of the possibility that something like it could happen.

There are bits where it's pretty out there, especially where killings and anarchy are nonchalantly accepted, but taken in the spirit of the dark satire that it is, Jennifer Government presents a refreshing view of how consumerism (or is it capitalism?) can make a devil out of you.

While both books were funny, Love Secrets is not fast and rollicking in the way that Jennifer Government is. It's a slow burn, an introspective humourous analysis of lessons in love as learnt and recalled by one Daniel 'Spike' Savage.

He's going through a bitter divorce and upon his therapist's suggestion, decides to put on paper, by way of a flip chart, the experiences he has had with women, the lessons learnt from them and thus, how not to cock things up again.

There's an air of desperation throughout as Daniel rushes to meet an unannounced deadline as he contemplates what has been, what is and what he hopes to achieve by doing this. Through flashbacks, we meet the 3 Great Women of his life (because apparently everyone has the '3 Great Ones' of their life) and with the benefit of his hindsight, get to see what went wrong and what effect they had on him.

There's not much dialogue in this book. Even so, I couldn't help but be engaged and drawn into his reflections and theories of men-women relationship, and found myself marking out paragraphs which I felt were spot-on.

Midway, he gets a bit psycho (but then again, don't all of us at some point or another get that way too when in a relationship?) but I couldn't help but root for the guy, even though I was a bit disappointed with the ending.

And that's why The Love Secrets of Don Juan was a good read. It reminded me that in life, the ending that you get is not necessarily the one that you expect.

"I'm lonely, and sometimes I'm desperate and want to die. But it passes. Everything passes. Even the belief that everything passes, passes. So next week, I'm going out on a date - in the hope that the collapse of my belief in the future will pass. I'm aware that you're meant to feel great about yourself before you start dating. I know that you only find someone when you're not looking, when you don't care. But that's unrealistic. Everybody cares. Nobody feels great about themselves. The thing is to pretend. To learn to lie."

Interview with Tim Lott from The Scotsman

Interviews with Max Barry:
Weekly Dig
Suicide Girls

Note To Self II

A reminder for me to get this book.
 
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NEW STRAITS TIMES: BOOKS
July 14, 2004 
 

DEAD UNTIL DARK

by Charlaine Harris, Orbit

RM35.50, pp326

 
 

Saving the dead from the living
Bitingly different from many stories in the supernatural genre, this horror/comedy-cum- detective tale starring protagonist Sookie Stackhouse marries the wacky with the reality by employing irrefutable charm, writes U-EN NG.    
 
TWILIGHT descends on the Louisiana bayou. A few miles out of Shreveport in the state's northeast, citizens of the little town Bon Temps make their way slowly to Sam Merlotte's watering hole to wash away the remains of the day.

A vampire walks into the bar, his dark eyes resting temporarily on Sookie Stackhouse the waitress before he sits down at a table. Remember, Louisiana is the home of the Vampire Lestat. On seeing a suave vampire, normal human beings either swoon with delight or run away screaming.

"Take me, O immortal prince," a modern Morticia might say. "Long have I desired to journey forth into the great Dark. I am ready." Etc, etc.

Not so Sookie. She's blond, pretty good looking by her own account, and all she says is "hot diggity".

"He was pale, of course; hey he was dead, if you believed the old tales. The politically correct theory, the one the vamps themselves publicly backed, had it that this guy was the victim of a virus that left him apparently dead for a couple of days and thereafter allergic to sunlight, silver and garlic." Sookie's problem is that she's a mind-reader, and it's a big problem. She can't turn her gift on and off at will; in fact, most of the time, she exerts considerable energy just trying to keep everyone's thoughts out of her head. As a result, she's a little weird. She has no friends and no life to speak of. "Imagine," she asks, "knowing everything your sex partner is thinking. Right. Along the order of ‘Gosh, look at that mole ... her butt is a little big ... etc." The beautiful thing about The Vampire Bill (that's his name, not Lestat, Antoine, or Basil or something) is that Sookie can't hear a single thing in his head on account of his being a vampire. A definite plus.

Bill is "mainstreaming", i.e. trying to assimilate with regular humans, since the law now recognises vampires as legal personalities. He possesses in buckets that good old-fashioned Southern manners (having been born before the Civil War), and he's interested in Sookie. Another definite plus.

Even Grandma Adele thinks highly of him and wants him to give a talk at the local historical society (in the evening, of course. Bill would fry during the day). That about does it for the plus thing.

The problem with Bill is his past. He hangs out with some seriously dodgy vampires who have a homicidal record — they're vampires who don't give a cucumber sandwich for humanity except for the blood and a bit of mindless, voluntary slavery from "fang-bangers" (vampire groupies).

Things start to get hot when single women in Bon Temps turn up dead: strangled, with vampire bites on them. Fingers naturally start pointing at Bill and Sookie has to do something to help protect her new old friend.

In this, the first Sookie Stackhouse novel, author Charlaine Harris demonstrates a knack for fusing together elements of chick lit, gothic horror and detective fiction into a whimsical, often racy and occasionally horrifying thriller.

She disdains the detailed — and often embarrassingly self-important — pseudo-mythologies that some writers in this genre have felt themselves obliged to obey — pseudo-mythologies that, as a result of all this seriousness, read more like manifestos for a demented gothic subculture.

Of course there are stakes, garlic, and the usual lot of nonsense peculiar to vampire stories, but Vampire Bill is more likely to discuss kitchen designs than drink your blood (he's fine with synthetic, made in Japan).

And Vampire Bill is a fan of Kenny G's. Not a plus in this reviewer's book, but that should say something.

All the same, beneath Harris's levity lurks a more sinister reality. Discrimination is a principal theme, with decent law-abiding vampires considered social pariahs and hounded around town by policemen. Often, Harris's real monsters are human — child molesters, for example, as well as rapists and a new kind of criminal whose business is the illegal extraction of vampire blood (thought to be a kind of rejuvenating aphrodisiac).

All of this is made apparent by the crisis precipitated by the murders. Angry human residents of Bon Temps burn down a house with three vampires within; Sookie's cat is strangled because of her boyfriend. When someone kills old Grandma Adele, Sookie's blood boils over. But who are the suspects? Bill unfortunately comes out tops — but so do a few hundred other people. Anyone might be the murderer — human or vampire, and it's up to Sookie to set things to rights before Bill too is engulfed by the violence.

The Sookie Stackhouse mysteries are not the Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice. They do, however, possess a vampiric charm of their own; so much so that one trusts Harris will keep on writing.

Empty Wallet, Full Bookshelf

I need a reading vacation soon.

Times Bookshop Warehouse Sale (Members' Preview)
24 June 2004

1. Negotiating With The Dead, Margaret Atwood
2. Wanderlust, Chris Dyer
3. The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing, Melissa Bank
4. The River At The Centre Of The World, SImon Winchester
5. An Area Of Darkness, V.S. Naipul
6. Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It, Geoff Dyer
7. Emma, Jane Austen
8. Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, Orlando Figes
9. Desert Dawn, Waris Dirie
10. War Paint, Lindy Woodhead

Time Bookshop Warehouse Sale (The Sequel)
29 June 2004

11. How to Murder A Millionaire, Nancy Martin
12. Dead Girls Don't Wear Diamonds, Nancy Martin
13. A Thousand Country Roads, Robert James Waller
14. No Way To Treat A First Lady, Christopher Buckley
15. The Most Important Thing I Know, Lorne A. Adrain (1997)
16. The Most Important Thing I Know About..., Lorne A. Adrain (2001)
17. Swift As Desire, Laura Esquivel
18. Kate Remembered, A.Scott Berg
19. Intrepreter Of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
20. Eight Men And A Duck, Nick Thorpe
21. Housebroken: Confessions Of A Stay-At-Home Dad, David Eddie
22. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
23. The Invention Of Solitude, Paul Auster
24. An Introduction To Egyptology, James Putnam
25. An Introduction To Greek Mythology, David Bellingham
26. The World Of Bread, Alex Goh

Bangkok
5 July 2004
27. Sex And The City: Kiss And Tell, Amy Sohn
28. The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer
29. Bangkok People, James Eckhardt

Food For The Soul

A recent news item caught my attention:

After 60 years, France finds Saint-Exupery's plane
By Angela Doland
ASSOCIATED PRESS
1:08 p.m. April 7, 2004

PARIS – It was one of French aviation's enduring mysteries: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the pilot and author of the beloved tale "The Little Prince," took off on a World War II spy mission for the Allies and was never seen again.

After 60 years, officials have confirmed that the twisted wreckage of a Lockheed Lightning P-38, found on the Mediterranean seabed not far from the rugged cliffs of Provence, belonged to Saint-Exupery, Air Force Capt. Frederic Solano said Wednesday.

In France, the discovery is akin to solving the mystery of where Amelia Earhart's plane went down in the Pacific Ocean in 1937.

(Read more here.)

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was a colourful character. He lived quite an extraordinary life and apparently now, died an extraordinary death as well.

I was instantly reminded of a favourite quote from The Little Prince:

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

This is just one of the many lessons from this enchanting tale. Feast on.

Laughing Out Loud Alone

OK, so it wasn't on my current reading list but the cover was kind of cute so I succumbed. And I laughed.

Here's an excerpt from Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About by Mil Millington.

"I don't see the problem. Just ask her out, for God's sake. What's the worst that could happen?"

"That's right," I agreed. "In all probability, she'll just say no. You'll have a moment of agonising humiliation. Then you'll lie in bed every night for several months, replaying the moment in your mind, each time being flooded with searing embarassment and pulling your duvet over your head just wanting to disappear and die. Every second you're in the shop, you'll worry about her coming back in, then when she actually does, you'll prickle with awkwardness and horror. She'll come to buy something, cripplingly self-conscious at the shared knowledge of your failed approach, you'll probably try to make some sort of joke to break the curse, but it'll fall flat and she'll look at you with a rich mixture of pity, contempt and amusement. With luck, you won't have to quit your job and spend a year in a blurry, half-world of wine-deadened self-pity."

"Oh, cheers. You've really helped him get this in perspective."

"Well, yes, I have, actually. 'What's the worst that can happen?' - Lord above, that's dangerously female advice from which I need to protect him. Rejection destroys the strongest of men. Just imagine what it could do to Roo. I mean, look at the state of him now."

"It's better to know the situation for sure," Tracey stated.

"It IS NOT better to know the situation. Absolutely anything is better than a woman you fancy saying she doesn't want to go out with you. Far, far better that he gives up hope without trying, or becomes delusional, or continue to simply dream about the possibility while alone in his flat in a nightly orgy of masturbation."

"We're not entirely alone in this cafe," Roo pointed out.

"You are a woman. You don't know what it means to have an advance rejected. I wouldn't put it past you, in fact, to be the type who'd reply, 'Ahh - that's really sweet.' Having an approach rebuffed is maiming a man - and being dumped, well..."

"Hold on, hold on," huffed Tracey. "If I can just interrupt this stream of bollocks for a moment. I think you'll find women are upset by being dumped too. I remember I was dumped once and I was absolutely distraught for about six weeks."

Roo and I explosively laughed out loud.

"There you go." I clapped. "Your honour, I need call no more witnesses. Six weeks. A man is bizarrely resilient if he's traumatised only for six years. Women have a damn good cry, a few chocolate-and-anguish-driven evenings with their friends, and then it's on with the rest of their lives. Men just implode. It's a fact that men who are divorced die younger."

Tracey shrugged. "That's probably a hygiene issue."