Books: May 2003 Archives

Managed to get over to the Bill Bryson reading at Stacey's Books yesterday. For those who haven't heard of him, he's the author of the extremely funny Neither Here Nor There, Notes From a Small Island and several other books, mostly travelogues. He was reading from his latest, A Short History of Nearly Everything which sounded weighter and more serious, but still had several giggly moments in it, at least in the part he read. I just got my Stacey's bonus; perhaps it will go towards this (even though I am one of those weird people who dislike reading hardcovers ((too hard to read in the bathtub)) ).

My favorite part of the reading was the Q&A afterwards; someone asked him what he was planning to write about next. He said, "I'd love to go to Canada and do a book about it. The trouble is that publishers go white when you mention Canada. No one wants to read about Canada. Even Canadians don't want to read about Canada."

Bill Bryson has an interesting accent. He's originally from Ohio, but moved to England, married, and lived there for two decades (they moved back to the U.S. for seven or eight years, but are now heading back over — I wanted to ask if politics had anything to do with it, but didn't dare). As a consequence, although he looks like your typical burly Midwestern guy, his speech is a blend of American Rs and softly trailing sentences that just somehow sound English English. Note, please, that he doesn't sound anything like the put-on way Madonna talks. Please.

Just raced through Jeffrey Brown's Clumsy and Marjane Satrapi's Persopolis. The former is the tale of the brief relationship between Jeffrey and Theresa. It jumps back in forth in time and depicts a number of incidents of the kind that are so charged with meaning when you're in love (and suspect the relationship is doomed to end.) The drawing style seems very crude, but I think it's the product of someone a lot more sophisticated than he lets on. Although you sometimes want to tell the characters to grow up, the story, such as it is, does manage to suck you in. I'll be curious to read his next book too.

Clumsy was finished barely two weeks after Jeffrey and Theresa's relationship ended. Persopolis, on the other hand, had the benefit of a lot more hindsight, since the events it covers took place two decades ago. The drawing style is much more sophisticated. For example, there's a great scene between two groups of women demonstrators; the women wearing white outfits on the right with their eyes angrily open face a group of women robed in back with their heads tilted back and their eyes closed in what seems like ecstasy. Marjane herself looks like a Persian Madeline.

The story itself follows her life growing up in a very westernized and well-off family; she reads comic books about Marxism and imagines long heart-to-heart chats with God (she wants to be a prophet when she grows up). Of course, historical events impinge on her life, and to make a long story short, her parents send her out of the country when she is 14, fearing that she will get in trouble (or killed) otherwise.

Some reviewers have complained that the book isn't emotionally weighty enough; there have been a few unfavorable comparisons to Maus. I think that's unfair. The definitive telling of the Islamic revolution it's not, but it is a compelling story about one girl living through those times, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequels to find out what happened to her next. (And to her parents — they come across as very interesting characters.)

-->Interview with Jeffrey Brown
--> Interview with Marjane Satrapi