Neverwhere

“Under the streets of London there’s a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.”

Neil Gaiman has been getting a lot of press lately, since his book American Gods was chosen as the first for an online Twitter book club, 1 Book 1 Twitter. I haven’t read American Gods yet, but I thought it was about time that I write about the last book of his I did read, Neverwhere.

Neverwhere was originally written as a tv series for the BBC in the 90s. According to Neil’s prologue to my copy, there were things that he wrote which were cut from the final script for the show. And so he wrote the “author’s preferred text,” which is what I read.

The plot is extremely interesting. The idea is that there’s a whole world under London (under many large cities) and that it’s made up of the people that our society tries to make invisible. But one man, Richard, crosses that line when he rescues a girl called Door.

Once you’ve gone into London Below, you can’t come back.

It’s an adventure story, with unique characters and interesting twists. Gaiman uses well known London landmarks in clever ways. This is Gaiman’s genius - he makes his stories believable. There’s a subtlety to Gaiman’s writing that you don’t often see in fantasy books. Usually, fantasy novels try so hard to create this elaborate world and spend a great deal of the book describing it in great detail to prove it to you (Hello, Tolkein!) Neil Gaiman doesn’t need to do this. His worlds are believable in a much more simple and eloquent way.

I also watched the miniseries. It was very similar to the book, and it was enjoyable. But the 90s style of it was a bit distracting.

“‘You’ve a good heart,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.’ Then she shook her head. ‘But mostly, it’s not.’”

“He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more informative), to comprehend the city…”

“…and she would whisper to him how much she loved him, and he would tell her he loved her and always wanted to be with her, and they both believed it to be true.”

There are some other quotes I flagged but when I reread them they seemed to give away too much of the plot, so I think you should just read it for yourself.

War stories

I’ve been a bit lax on posting about the book I’ve been reading for my 50 books in a year, but I read two books back to back a couple of weeks ago that formed a post in my head from the beginning.

I started off by reading The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I know, you’re surprised I never read it before, right? It wasn’t required for school and the Second World War isn’t generally my thing. But it’s like, a classic, so you have to read it eventually, right?

Also, Chandra bought it because she’d never read it. Then she handed it to me in class and said she’d finished reading it quickly so that I could read it after her, like we’d talked about. So I started reading it.

The next book I read, immediately afterward, was The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I bought it a while ago, on recommendation from Fae. I didn’t really realize, as I sat down on an EasyJet flight to Paris, that I was about to start reading the second book about the Second World War in as many weeks.

“They’re strange, those wars. Full of blood and violence - but also full of stories that are equally difficult to fathom.” - The Book Thief

I think these are the only books I’ve ever read about the Second World War. Truly, my love of history stops at about 500 CE and starts up again during the Cold War. Nothing had ever brought the World Wars to life for me, really. It was all a blur of battles and mud and air strikes and assasinations. There were no faces to the stories, no names to the tragedies.

I think that’s probably why a lot of people are forced to read Anne Frank in school.

I can’t say that I thoroughly enjoyed The Diary of a Young Girl, per se. It dragged on in lots of parts, and I wasn’t terribly interested in how much a 13 year old girl hates her mother. But it was undeniably real. It was the real voice of a real girl and the horrible things she had to go through. And even the parts that were annoying were real. It was her life. And sometimes it was horrible and terrifying and other times it was so shockingly normal.

I only picked out one quote from The Diary of a Young Girl.

“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”

It’s pretty powerful to think of a quote like that coming from a girl who spent more than a year in hiding above a warehouse, hoping for the end of a war.

The Book Thief, on the other hand, was entirely fictitious, but also very poignant. And much better written, no offense to Anne. I adored The Book Thief. It was a truly unique book. It’s told from the perspective of Death, watching over a girl called Liesel, who encounters him a number of times. It’s full of really interesting foreshadowing, intertextuality and interesting devices like pictures and short lists. The style is very interesting, and being narrated by Death means that it has a lot of really great one liners, my favourite.

“It’s the leftover humans. The survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, although on many occasions, I still fail.”

“When she came to write her story, she would wonder exactly when the books and the words started not just to mean something, but everything.”

“It’s hard not to like a man who not only notices the colours, but speaks them.”

“Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened. Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day. That was the business of hiding a Jew.”

“It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, God damn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a holiday.”

“The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better. What good were the words?”

I’ve had enough war stories for a while. It was pretty intense, reading these two books next to each other.

It All Changed in an Instant

I have a lot of catching up to do in regards to posting about the books I’ve read in the last few months, but I’m not going to start from the beginning. Instead, I’m going to start with the latest one!

At least two people I know have attempted the 50 Books in a year since I did, most recently my former roommate and dearly-missed friend, Kristen, who just started a lovely blog called Living Literary. I was reading her newest post last night and thinking about how I had failed to post about my books recently, but also that I seem to fail to provide any criticism, most of the time, of what I read.

Well, that isn’t going to change in this post.

It All Changed in an Instant is the new six word memoir book from Smith Magazine. I read their earlier books, Not Quite What I Was Planning and Six Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak for last year’s 50 books in a year. I really love the format, just as I love websites like onesentence.org. I got an email a while ago saying that one of the six word memoirs I had posted to the Smith Magazine website had been chosen as a finalist for the new book. I hadn’t heard anything since then, but I was still hopeful that maybe it would be in this book.

It wasn’t, but that’s okay. Because my six word memoir, which I wrote last year after reading Not Quite What I Was Planning, was “Happiest pretending to be someone else.” And while that was quite perfect for me at that point in my life, it’s not true anymore. And so, I posted some more over there and hold out hope for the next book.

I truly love the six word memoir books. The people at Smith Magazine set out to do something different - to challenge people to tell their story in only six words, the way Ernest Hemingway had (For sale: baby shoes, never worn.) and in the process proved that you really can tell a powerful story with only six words. Sometimes, I’d say, a great deal better than with 6,000 or 600,000.

I’ll be thinking in six word sentences for a couple of days now.

My favourites?

Writing is easy. Life is hard.
Nearing 60, still on rough draft.
Friendship test: willingness to be inconvenienced.
Only I define who I am.
Why walk when you can fly?
“Give up.” “Never.” “You’ll die.” “Maybe.”
A series of self fulfilling prophecies.
Last chapter hasn’t been written yet.
We’re both someone else’s problem now.
Off in my own little world.
Journalism? Hah! Just make stuff up.
I’m holding on with both hands.
One plane ride can change everything.

Comment in six words. I dare you.

The Secret History

Apparently The Secret History by Donna Tartt is quite a famous book. Apparently, people read it in high school. Not much in North America, as far as I can tell, but often in Britain. Which is odd, because it’s a very American book, in my opinion. It mimics books like Catcher in the Rye and the Great Gatsby. It is full of their themes, of their types of characters. Of their discoveries.

The first part of The Secret History was very good. The plot starts with the narrator joining a small Greek class at an elite arts college, handpicked by a professor who is charismatic, mildly famous and quite the classicist. The parts in the beginning where they talk about classics, either Greek translation or classical plays, were my favourite. I thought surely the plot would follow some sort of classical theme, and I was ready for it. I got all the references they were making, and I loved it.

Then the book suddenly turned into a murder mystery and abandoned the idea of classics all together for most of the novel, save a few brief references. I found the plot intriguing, and wanted to see how it ended, but there was definitely a part in the middle of this very long (629 pages!) book that I was bored and had no idea where they were going with it. Then the ending was good, especially the epilogue.

I had higher hopes for this book than panned out, but it was still a good read.

My favourite lines, mostly from the beginning:

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

“There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death - those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement - been so brutal or painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.”

“‘After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories, the ones that we love the most? Precisely these. The murder of Agamemnon and the wrath of Achilles. Dido on a funeral pyre. The daggers of the traitors and Caesar’s blood - remember how Suetonius describes his body being borne away on the litter, with one arm hanging down?’
‘Death is the mother of beauty,’ said Henry.
‘And what is beauty?’
‘Terror.’
‘Well said,’ said Julian. ‘Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.’”

Fragile Things

I love Neil Gaiman. It’s official. I used to only love Stardust, but now that I’ve read his book of short stories, Fragile Things, I can officially say that I love him, too.

I bought Fragile Things in an amazing second-hand bookstore in Alnwick, UK. Alnwick is one of my favourite towns in the UK so far. It’s home to the beautiful Alnwick Castle, where the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland live and where they filmed parts of Harry Potter. It’s also an adorable little town - I’ve been a few times because I was doing some volunteer work for a museum there. My favourite cafe in England (so far) is there too. And this bookstore, Barter Books, which was the original point of this paragraph (I have had FAR too much caffeine today).

Anyway. Fragile Things is a collection of “short fictions and wonders” by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman is truly a wonderful story teller. All of the stories are very different. Some of them I liked better than others. But they were all very engaging. Gaiman has a knack for create a very powerful narrative voice.

He also has a knack for great one liners, which you may or may not have noticed by now are my absolute favourite things in books/songs/movies/life.

“I like things to be story-shaped. Reality, however, is not story-shaped, and the eruptions of the odd into our lives are not story-shaped either.” - The Flints of Memory Lane

“I’ll tell the wind my name, and no one else./ True madness takes or leaves us in the wood/half-way through all our lives. My skin will be my face now.” - Going Wodwo

“In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving.” - Bitter Grounds

“You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrow’s state here.” - Strange Little Girls

“‘And if I could,’ my father wrote to me,/huge as a bear himself, when I was younger, ‘I would dower you with experience, without experience,’/and I, in my turn, would pass that on to you./But we make our own mistakes. We sleep/unwisely./It is our right.” - Locks

“We owe it to each other to tell stories,/as people simply, not as father and daughter.” - Locks

“‘Your turn in the chair next time,’ said October.
‘I know,’ said November. He was pale and thin-lipped. He helped October out of the wooden chair. ‘I like your stories. Mine are always too dark.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said October. ‘It’s just that your nights are longer. And you aren’t as warm.’
‘Put it like that,’ said November, ‘and I feel better. I suppose we can’t help who we are.
‘That’s the spirit,’ said his brother. And they touched hands as they walked away from the fire’s orange embers, taking their stories with them back into the dark.” - October in the Chair

“Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only the poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known.” - How to Talk to Girls at Parties