[book post] Two books
Dec. 9th, 2021 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaEat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
I remember my mom reading this for book club waaaay back in the day, and I remember her hating it, so much that she raged about it to me over the course of multiple dinners. So when I found some battered old copy of this in a little free library thing, I was like—okay, haha, let's see what all the hate's about.
This book, indeed, could've been designed in a lab specifically to annoy my mom. My mother is somewhere between a fast-food-erryday type and an eat-to-live type, and thus, she finds foodie culture somewhere between "bafflingly tedious" and "actively sinful"—ergo, the entire Italy section irked her. Anything with a whiff of ~*~spirituality~*~ to it makes mom roll her eyes; ergo, the entire meditating-in-an-ashram-in-India section bored her. And, in general, mom's got a strong baseline suspicion of carpe-diem-y urban types who possess more money than sense, so uh... yeah! This whole book is just not her kinda thing! Sort of hilariously so; it was fun to read some of these passages and think to myself, "god she must've hated this bit" :P
I, being a more urban and less Baptist and (regrettably) a more foodie-ish person, didn't hate the book, but thought it was merely... fine? Like, not great, but not rage-about-it-over-multiple-dinners awful. I was mostly curious about puzzling out why this, in particular, was such a smash hit—there's plenty of other Rich, Self-Absorbed Person Travelogues as competition, after all—and I guess the key is, while I've read vastly better travelogues, I haven't often read ones that are this accessible—accessible in a Da Vinci Code kinda way, mind: short chapters, cheap thrills, stock characters. If she were writing this nowadays, I imagine she'd do this as a travel blog or as a series of Instagram posts instead of a book. I learned a couple interesting tidbits (especially in Italy, where she actually seems qualified to talk about some of the history and culture), and I cringed mightily over some of the bits she breezes over (e.g. I guess good on her for at least acknowledging Bali's violent history, but uh, big cringe at how her explanation breezes over the whole colonialism thing, y'know, the whole reason for that history)... but I mean, it's an Oprah book club pick, so I expected some base rate of caricature and shallowness, and it was there, though it could've been worse, yaknow?
...you can tell I'd fit in poorly at Mom Book Club, huh. Anyway, yeah! That's that peek into mid-00's mainstream culture!
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde
I actually finished this one months and months ago, and kept dragging my feet on doing a writeup, because while I enjoyed it greatly, it defies concise description. This book reminded me of nothing so much as that very first comparative literature class I took, my very first year of college, where I sat mesmerized as the two professors, with over twenty languages between them, delivered these masterful lectures that ranged easily between classical Chinese novels and Icelandic sagas and Spanish poetry, drawing connections between them (thematically, historically, linguistically) that were so striking and beautiful that they intimidated me out of the major entirely—not because of any lack of encouragement or warmth on the professors' part (they were lovely!), but because I simply could not conceive how someone could possibly know all that stuff, and self-selected out of the endeavor.
Hyde achieves a somewhat similar feat here, and as I'm no longer an easily-intimidated coed, I can be more fulsome in my appreciation of the thing.
Broadly, Hyde's interested in "trickster" stories from around the world, and what they tell us about how we've thought about cultural evolution, transgressiveness, and so on, in various times and cultures. The first section of the book is essentially one very delightfully-meandering and very thoughtful close reading of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, paired with other usefully-illustrative myths (including the wonderful "Raven Becomes Voracious," which, when talking to a friend about this book, I misremembered as "Raven Becomes Ravenous," which is the only thing I'm calling it now because... lol... raven... ravenous... do you get it...).
Even without the analysis, this book would be worth it for the myths alone—if you devoured mythology books as a kid, you'll love this. But luckily, the analysis is good and sharp—this man is no Elizabeth Gilbert, haha. While he's drawing on a variety of sources, there's no lazy orientalisms or shallow descriptions here. Indeed, if anything, he's a little too thorough; some of the latter chapters drug as he kept piling up evidence to further prove points that had already been thoroughly argued.
There's too many lovely stories and thoughts crammed in here to summarize—every time I've tried, I've given up for the sheer magnitude of the endeavor, hence the tardiness of this writeup! So, for the sake of actually finishing this post, I'll mention that I adored his chapter exploring the "Coyote and the Shadow People" myth, and his chapter exploring some striking connections between various art-world obscenity controversies (Piss Christ, Mapplethorpe obscenity trial) and classical myth... and okay now that I've plucked the book off my shelf, I'd totally forgotten the bit where he talks about Frederick Douglass at length and yeah that ruled... see what I mean? Broad! Ranging! Cool! Unsummarizable!
I'll also tentatively note that a friend recommended me this book after we had a long conversation about some of my more neopagan-y beliefs (uh, basically me bitching about why "neopagan" sucks as a label because it includes a bunch of woo shit and lazy scholarship that I very much don't buy into, but, unfortunately it's a more concise label than anything else for my whole deal)—so I'm pleased to report it resonated with me very much on that front. Like, throw out whatever Llewellyn shit and read this if you want some light on how I think about the world, from a guy much more clever and educated than I am.
I remember my mom reading this for book club waaaay back in the day, and I remember her hating it, so much that she raged about it to me over the course of multiple dinners. So when I found some battered old copy of this in a little free library thing, I was like—okay, haha, let's see what all the hate's about.
This book, indeed, could've been designed in a lab specifically to annoy my mom. My mother is somewhere between a fast-food-erryday type and an eat-to-live type, and thus, she finds foodie culture somewhere between "bafflingly tedious" and "actively sinful"—ergo, the entire Italy section irked her. Anything with a whiff of ~*~spirituality~*~ to it makes mom roll her eyes; ergo, the entire meditating-in-an-ashram-in-India section bored her. And, in general, mom's got a strong baseline suspicion of carpe-diem-y urban types who possess more money than sense, so uh... yeah! This whole book is just not her kinda thing! Sort of hilariously so; it was fun to read some of these passages and think to myself, "god she must've hated this bit" :P
I, being a more urban and less Baptist and (regrettably) a more foodie-ish person, didn't hate the book, but thought it was merely... fine? Like, not great, but not rage-about-it-over-multiple-dinners awful. I was mostly curious about puzzling out why this, in particular, was such a smash hit—there's plenty of other Rich, Self-Absorbed Person Travelogues as competition, after all—and I guess the key is, while I've read vastly better travelogues, I haven't often read ones that are this accessible—accessible in a Da Vinci Code kinda way, mind: short chapters, cheap thrills, stock characters. If she were writing this nowadays, I imagine she'd do this as a travel blog or as a series of Instagram posts instead of a book. I learned a couple interesting tidbits (especially in Italy, where she actually seems qualified to talk about some of the history and culture), and I cringed mightily over some of the bits she breezes over (e.g. I guess good on her for at least acknowledging Bali's violent history, but uh, big cringe at how her explanation breezes over the whole colonialism thing, y'know, the whole reason for that history)... but I mean, it's an Oprah book club pick, so I expected some base rate of caricature and shallowness, and it was there, though it could've been worse, yaknow?
...you can tell I'd fit in poorly at Mom Book Club, huh. Anyway, yeah! That's that peek into mid-00's mainstream culture!
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde
I actually finished this one months and months ago, and kept dragging my feet on doing a writeup, because while I enjoyed it greatly, it defies concise description. This book reminded me of nothing so much as that very first comparative literature class I took, my very first year of college, where I sat mesmerized as the two professors, with over twenty languages between them, delivered these masterful lectures that ranged easily between classical Chinese novels and Icelandic sagas and Spanish poetry, drawing connections between them (thematically, historically, linguistically) that were so striking and beautiful that they intimidated me out of the major entirely—not because of any lack of encouragement or warmth on the professors' part (they were lovely!), but because I simply could not conceive how someone could possibly know all that stuff, and self-selected out of the endeavor.
Hyde achieves a somewhat similar feat here, and as I'm no longer an easily-intimidated coed, I can be more fulsome in my appreciation of the thing.
Broadly, Hyde's interested in "trickster" stories from around the world, and what they tell us about how we've thought about cultural evolution, transgressiveness, and so on, in various times and cultures. The first section of the book is essentially one very delightfully-meandering and very thoughtful close reading of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, paired with other usefully-illustrative myths (including the wonderful "Raven Becomes Voracious," which, when talking to a friend about this book, I misremembered as "Raven Becomes Ravenous," which is the only thing I'm calling it now because... lol... raven... ravenous... do you get it...).
Even without the analysis, this book would be worth it for the myths alone—if you devoured mythology books as a kid, you'll love this. But luckily, the analysis is good and sharp—this man is no Elizabeth Gilbert, haha. While he's drawing on a variety of sources, there's no lazy orientalisms or shallow descriptions here. Indeed, if anything, he's a little too thorough; some of the latter chapters drug as he kept piling up evidence to further prove points that had already been thoroughly argued.
There's too many lovely stories and thoughts crammed in here to summarize—every time I've tried, I've given up for the sheer magnitude of the endeavor, hence the tardiness of this writeup! So, for the sake of actually finishing this post, I'll mention that I adored his chapter exploring the "Coyote and the Shadow People" myth, and his chapter exploring some striking connections between various art-world obscenity controversies (Piss Christ, Mapplethorpe obscenity trial) and classical myth... and okay now that I've plucked the book off my shelf, I'd totally forgotten the bit where he talks about Frederick Douglass at length and yeah that ruled... see what I mean? Broad! Ranging! Cool! Unsummarizable!
I'll also tentatively note that a friend recommended me this book after we had a long conversation about some of my more neopagan-y beliefs (uh, basically me bitching about why "neopagan" sucks as a label because it includes a bunch of woo shit and lazy scholarship that I very much don't buy into, but, unfortunately it's a more concise label than anything else for my whole deal)—so I'm pleased to report it resonated with me very much on that front. Like, throw out whatever Llewellyn shit and read this if you want some light on how I think about the world, from a guy much more clever and educated than I am.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 11:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 08:31 pm (UTC)Hm, maybe? I was actually surprised that the romance was much less of the overall story than I was expecting—she doesn't find her paramour until quite close to the end, and all her relationships before that are strictly platonic.
But! I could imagine it feeling like this wonderful escapist fantasy if you were in a certain frame of mind—in the opening, Gilbert's stuck in a marriage where she's desperately unhappy, and she's realized she doesn't want kids, and instead of just putting up with What You're Supposed To Do, she... gets a divorce and then gets paid to flounce across the world for a year! accountable to no one but herself! (Probably this felt more exotic some 15 years ago? I know a lot of techies, and it's a bit of a cliché among them to quit their job sometime in their 20s/30s and do something self-indulgent for a few months to a year, haha.) I could certainly imagine someone who's intimidated by the thought of international travel finding this particularly comforting/wish-fulfilling—after all, Gilbert is just some ordinary person, and she manages to travel to all these beautiful places by just figuring stuff out as she goes along; maybe travel is something I could do too, etc.
I think also it helps that Gilbert's both very chatty and very down-to-earth, because it means she makes friends everywhere she goes, and those character profiles are pretty lovingly drawn—you feel for, e.g., the chatty Indonesian guitarist who'd lived in NYC for a few years, before getting deported from the US in an infuriatingly unjust bout of post-9/11 paranoia (he and Gilbert end up going on a short road trip through Bali together to nostalgically relive the "American road trip experience"), and also it's delightful to read Gilbert's chats with the tomboyish teenage girl at the ashram, who grew up nearby and has some Strong Opinions about her family's plans for her... I definitely finished the book thinking Gilbert would make for a somewhat exhausting friend (lots of drama, lol), but an excellent person to chat with at a cocktail party, and I could see why that'd be endearing enough to "make" the book for a lot of people.
(And yeah, definitely marketing, haha. I doubt her publisher paid that hefty advance without planning to market the heck out of the result!)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 09:18 pm (UTC)Like, there's not much there there, but what there is can be boiled down to an actually helpful statement for the book's target audience (i.e. people who would like to be able to write this sort of memoir).
no subject
Date: 2021-12-10 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-10 08:41 am (UTC)Aren't some of the examples really inspired? The connection to the Mapplethorpe obscenity trial as an example really struck a chord with me, and I think the book has just kind of burrowed into the skin of my consciousness regarding how I think about some certain things.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-21 12:37 am (UTC)and, yeah, same re: the examples; i've been surprised over the past couple months how much little bits from it keep coming to mind... normally "here's a connection between [modern thing] and [old story]" feels forced/cheesy to me, but most the ones in the book felt either clever or just very thoroughly right. good stuff
no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 03:27 pm (UTC)I just had to stop at Eat, Pray, Love because even though I haven't read the book (or seen the film) myself, I remember the Hype surrounding it. Your review on it was hilarious, especially the way you reflected all the ways your mom must've hated it. :D Anyhoo, adding you because book reviews are always a treat.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 07:31 pm (UTC)