rezendi

Me at 8AM this morning: I just (puff) got back from a (wheeze) half-hour run on (pant) the beach, and (gasp) boy, do I feel (doubles over, hands on knees, and desperately respires for five minutes) great! (collapses into bed for three hours and feels woozy for entire rest of day.) Lesson: running is a good hangover cure, but don't overdo it, especially when your body is still adjusting to a newish (sub)continent's uh, histamines and whatnot.

I spent the rest of the bipedal portion of today hanging out in cafes snacking and reading. Reviews from, lessee, shortly before leaving Paris:

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood. A straight-up genre science fiction novel, and a terrific one - how it didn't get nominated for a Nebula Award is beyond me. (Well, it was until just now, when I checked to see if it had been nominated, and found a review by Robert Sawyer in which he completely failed to understand the book. Sigh. Speculative fiction and literary fiction; I love 'em both, and they'll never understand each other.) A mildly interesting kind of paint-by-numbers postapocalyptic story frames an explanation of the harrowing dystopia that leads up to it. Minor Atwood, not quite as good as Alias Grace or The Blind Assassin, but a whole lot more disturbing than either.

Death By Hollywood, Stephen Bochco. Yes, that Stephen Bochco. Fastest read ever, largely because in normal print it would probably clock in at around 150 pages. Entertaining cotton-candy Hollywood-venality story that reads like the novelization of an unproduced screenplay, good pace, lots of good lines, one really amusing twist, one interesting character (the narrator). Zero depth or resonance but a fun way to kill an hour or two.

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie. Re-read. One of my all-time top-twenty favourite books, and the one that most thoroughly blurs the line between fantasy and magic realism (and yes, says me, there very much is such a line.) Won the Booker Award, and then the Booker of Bookers (ie was voted the best Booker Award winner ever). People who think that literary fiction is the kind of worthy but painful intellectual equivalent of eating brown rice with steamed vegetables ought to drop everything they're doing and rush out to read this (and Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude) right this very minute.

Ecstasy, Irvine Welsh. There's nobody else even remotely like him. And for this we should be grateful, because I don't think the world could take it. This book, a collection of three novellas about Ecstasy, drug culture, and love, includes several of the most demented, grotesque, squicking, Grand Guignol scenes I've ever encountered, which, even in the hands of a good writer, would come across as puerile cheap gross-out crap. What grossed me out the most, I try in a traumatized way to recall? Was it the burn-victim necrophilia? The scene in which an armless woman uses her prehensile feet to wield a chainsaw and carve up a living man chained to a table? No, I think it was the oh-so-incredibly-wrong (but very funny) bestiality scene written in a loving and note-perfect Regency Romance style.

The thing is, Welsh isn't a good writer. He's a great writer. He's oh-my-God-how-did-he-do-that? jaw-droppingly good. Easy to parody, yes, with his trademark phonetically spelled Scottish slang (though he's capable of way more than that, stylistically, as is shown here), but impossible to duplicate. His characters start off looking like lager-lout caricatures with no possible depth, and some of them stay that way, and then all of a sudden in two short sentences he turns them into real complex human people. The first story is merely good, but the second and third are genius, and all of them are absolutely unforgettable (no matter how hard you may try). But, uh, the first two in particular, you probably want to avoid reading them anywhere near lunchtime.

India: A Million Mutinies Now, V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul, a Nobel laureate, is infamous for being one of the biggest assholes in the literary world - no lesser a light than Paul Theroux wrote a whole book, In Sir Vidia's Shadow, about how big a jerk he is. (Allegedly; I haven't read it.) So why have all three of his books that I've read - A House For Mr Biswas (his masterpiece), A Bend In The River, and this - seem to me like the work of an incredibly wise and compassionate soul?

I don't know. I do know that you'll learn more about India-up-to-1990 from this book than from any ten history textbooks. It's nonfiction, basically Naipaul's contextualized transcription of the life stories of various people he met on a journey in India in 1989, but about, oh, fifty times more lively and entertaining than that sounds (granted, I benefit from reading it in India, but still, unlike some Nobel winners, Naipaul didn't get his for being a worthy but boring writer; his prose is flat and sparse, but it sings.) In fact you'll probably come away feeling like you've learned something about humanity in general. I did.