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Posts Tagged ‘The Love Monster’

Holiday Book Recommendations: The “Funnest” Reads Edition Part I

Posted in Books, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 19, 2012| Leave a Comment »

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This post was originally going to be a “top 5 books” I had the most fun reading this year. Clearly, I too much of a good time, because there were so many fun books I was loathe to exclude that the post is now a top 10 in two parts. If I was still working at the bookshop, these are the titles I would handsell dozens of. Like a boss.

Nick Harkaway – Angelmaker (Alfred A. Knopf): This book was an absolute blast! It is raucous and original. Mild-mannered clockworker with gangster heritage, octogenarian former super-spy with ugly pug sidekick, super-villain with creepy minions, elegant doomsday machine with… bees. What more could you ask for? The writing is snappy and funny, and the book is chock-a-block with great characters. If you’re looking for a bit of clever fun, look no further. The book is so good that months later, I am still thinking about it and chuckling about some of the best bits. Seriously. Just buy it. It’s fantastic.

Dan Rhodes – Little Hands Clapping  (Canongate): By turns macabre, hilarious, moving, and disturbing, this is the perfect novel for those people on your shopping list who are a bit dark and twisted. Set primarily in a German suicide museum, the story weaves together the tales of the museum’s caretaker, its patrons, its visitors/victims, and a local doctor. Two of the main characters are rather sinister and conspire in disturbing ways, breaking taboos that some readers might have a tough time stomaching. But, there is also a very charming love story and several fascinating characters. The story can be gruesome, but it is also enchanting and funny. It is a rather macabre fairy tale and a refreshingly original read.

Missy Marston – The Love Monster (Vehicule Press): This darkly hilarious tale of Margaret H. Atwood (not to be confused with the writer) is wonderfully lively and honest about the miseries of our quotidian existence. It is an excellent character study of Margaret (separated, psoriasis-riddled, bad job, bad attitude, and observed by aliens) and the people in her orbit, as well as an astute catalogue of many types of love (good and bad, romantic, platonic, familial, etc.). The conclusion was a bit “Hollywood happy-ending”, brought about by a deus ex machina (or more properly, an alien ex ufo), but it works because the bulk of the story isn’t sickly sweet. By the end, the reader is really rooting for Margaret, foibles and all. The story is incredibly well written – snappy and funny and poignant – and is a pleasant change from usually dour Canadian fiction. One of my favourite CanLit reads of the year.

Susan Hill – The Small Hand (Profile Books): Okay, this is “fun” in the way that having the bejesus scared out of you can be fun. Hill is a master of the ghost story novella, as evinced by The Woman in Black. However, the story here is more masterful than the Gothic exercise that her first ghost story was. Still here though, are the tropes of the isolated, dilapidated house, the tragic death of a child, and the questionable psychological state of the protagonist. Woven into this conventional tapestry are threads of memory, guilt, and dread. This is a first rate ghost story, tense and well-wrought, and suitable for gobbling up in a single sitting on a cold, dark, winter’s night.

Jasper Fforde – The Eyre Affair (Penguin): Again (as with The Book Thief in the previous post), I’m way behind on this one. I’ve had it on my shelf for years, and just never got around to it, as is often the case with books I’m quite certain I will enjoy. I’m sure there’s a word for that particular syndrome, and if there isn’t, there should be. In any case, this was great fun to read. It’s the action-packed story of Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, who gets caught up trying to solve case involving the kidnappings of literary characters from the pages of their books, particularly one Jane Eyre. It’s funny, surreal, and full of literary jokes. What’s not to like? If you are already on the Jasper Fforde bandwagon, the seventh book in the Thursday Next series, The Woman Who Died A Lot, is available now.

 

 

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Sadness and the Single Girl: Existential angst and the contemporary female protagonist

Posted in Books, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2012| 3 Comments »

I have noticed a pattern in my reading material of late. Three of the novels I finished over the summer have as their protagonists three very quirky single women.

Alexis M. Smith’s charming and quiet novel Glaciers (Tin House, 2012) gives us a single day in the life of a hipster heroine, Isabel, who works in a Portland library repairing damaged books, recalls with nostalgia a childhood in Alaska, shops at thrift stores, and crushes on a former soldier colleague. The surreal Radio Iris by Anne-Marie Kinney (Two Dollar Radio, 2012) features Iris, a loner who works in an office building for a mysterious and shifty boss (at a company whose purpose or product she cannot determine), and who feels drawn to a strange man in an office down the hall. Missy Marston’s The Love Monster (Vehicule Press, 2012) is a portrait of Margaret H. Atwood: senior editor at an insurance company, psoriasis sufferer, soon-to-be divorcee, best friends with a bottle of gin, and object of affection of an alien observer. No, not that Margaret Atwood. Yes, an actual alien.

While all three novels are tremendously different in tone (gently nostalgic, vaguely sinister, and darkly comedic), they all seem to address a fundamentally existential angst. All of these women are seeking fulfillment, meaning, and emotional connection. Unsurprisingly so, the project proves more difficult than advertised. In a refreshing twist, these are not the sad and silly women of Chick Lit who obsess over shopping, socializing, and snagging a man. Nor are they the glamorous women of Sex and the City, and for that I am grateful, for those women always made me feel like a failure at my own small life.

Smith, Kinney, and Marston imbue the quotidian with significance. They do not shy away from the loneliness, the isolation, or the confusion of their characters. They do not pathologize singlehood; nor do they pathologize solitude. They do not diminish the existential crises of their characters by solving those crises with shoe shopping or going for martinis with “the girls”. Their jobs aren’t glamorous; their love/sex lives aren’t fulfilling. There is no guarantee of Hollywood happy endings, and there are questions about what form any “happiness” might take.  Smith, Kinney, and Marston look the sadness of the single girl right in the eye, and accept it for what it is – a path to self-awareness and self-acceptance, and an acknowledgement of the importance of the fleeting pleasures and human connections of this world. Isabel, Iris, and Margaret are recognizable and real, and will resonate with readers because the struggle for connection and for a meaningful life strikes a chord in our increasingly technologically connected, but ultimately emotionally disconnected, world. C.S. Lewis is purported to have said, “We read to know that we are not alone.” In these three female characters, I found kindred spirits.

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