troisoiseaux

Re-watched the 2020 adaption of David Copperfield, starring Dev Patel and directed by Armando Iannucci (of The Thick of It/Veep and The Death of Stalin fame); I had originally watched this movie before reading the book, a few years ago, and it was super interesting to revist after reading both the novel itself and another adaption of it. It is, technically, a fairly loose adaption of the source material— plot points are shuffled around or blended together (e.g., Creakle's school and Murdstone's factory are blended together, and David meets Steerforth at Strong's school rather than Creackle's); a few are just straight-up changed*— but it was clearly written by someone who knows and loves the source material** rather than someone who was contemptuous of it, so it works.

What really makes this movie a perfect adaption in the spirit, if not the letter, of the source material is that it takes the "autobiographical novel" aspect of David Copperfield and runs with it. The frame story has an adult David as an author doing a public reading of his life story, and frequently breaks the fourth wall, not between David-as-character and the audience but between David-as-narrator and the story as it unfolds. It also does a fantastic job of invoking substance through style: when young David is terrorized by his stepfather, the angle of the camera makes Murdstone loom like a giant; the scene where David hosts his first dinner party and gets tremendously drunk has the sped-up frames, jaunty music, and dialogue in captions of an old silent comedy a la Charlie Chaplin.

Dev Patel is fantastic: so earnest and sweetly goofy. The whole cast is absolutely stacked, especially with Tilda Swinton as Betsy Trotwood, Hugh Laurie as Mr. Dick, and Peter Capaldi as Mr. Micawber. Points for the race-blind casting: e.g., Benedict Wong and Rosalind Eleazar as Mr. Wickfield and his daughter Agnes; Nikki Amuka-Bird as Mrs. Steerforth and Aneurin Barnard as her son.*** I hadn't noticed the first time that the same actress (Morfydd Clark) plays both David's mother and Dora Spenlow— it's certainly a choice, but subtle enough to get away with it, not make it weird? (Again, I didn't notice until my second viewing, and even then I had to check the cast list to be sure.) The only casting choice I'm kind of ??? about is Ben Whishaw as Uriah Heep— not that he doesn't play it well, but even with an unflattering bowl cut and a 'umble hunch, he's just too pretty to be Heep...

Anyway, 10/10, I love this movie.

( Footnotes )

Taking another stab at A Tale of Two Cities, this time as an audiobook, with greater success than last summer— I think one reason I struggled with it was that the language is like 40% more flowery than Dickens' other novels, which it turns out I can appreciate more when it's read out loud. Great voice acting, as well, which amplifies both the emotion and the humor (such as there is) of the book. The narrator's hard-edged drawl for Sydney Carton - which cracks open into such raw sincerity, when confessing his love to Lucie, that I felt vaguely like I was taking a liberty for listening to it - is perfect.

Read Inheritors by Asako Serizawa, a novel in interconnected short stories following a Japanese and Japanese-American family through the 20th century and into the 2020s-30s. The two stories set in the future were the weakest, imo; I liked the ones with a unique framing device - the interview-transcript format of "Willow Run"; "I Stand Accused," which jumps between the central character's flashbacks during an interrogation and witness statements from other characters - the best. "Train to Harbin," about Unit 731 [TW for basically everything, but specifically human experimentation], was deeply haunting; this was the first I've heard of the history behind it.

Read The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison, which was a delight— a Sherlock Holmes retelling set in a supernatural, steampunk-ish Victorian London, with Jack the Ripper thrown in for good measure. This is what public domain/copyright expiration dates were made for! The Holmes character is an angel named Crow who pretty much only exists due to a loophole in the Angel Rules; the Watson character, Dr. J.H. Doyle, is a human surgeon who returned from Afghanistan with ( spoilers! ) I enjoyed the world-building, and the way Addison wove fantasy elements into the original stories without making the solutions hinge on magic.

I started re-reading A Tale of Two Cities at the beginning of May. Progress is being made, slowly. Embarrassingly slowly, considering I read The Brothers Karamazov - which is about twice as long - in a month, during the school year. Part of the problem is that I'm just... not that into it, which is a turn of events I find kind of upsetting— I had a lot of feelings about this book in 8th grade! In retrospect, I mostly had a lot of feelings about Sydney Carton. I would say my current feelings about him are that it's too bad he is a fictional character in the 1780s and can't go to therapy.

Currently, my feelings on Charles Darnay are ( annoyed. )

Hi! It's been a minute! I have a heavier courseload this semester as well as more on my plate outside of school, so while I've still been taking time to read for fun and/or to distract myself from These Unprecedented Times™, something had to give and writing up weekly book reviews was it.

Recently read

- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, about twin sisters whose paths diverge when one chooses to pass as white and the other to reject the colorism that their small Louisiana hometown had taken to its illogical extremes, and their daughters, who meet twenty years later, having lived very different lives. Shades of Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Bird, Snow, minus the fairy-tale elements and with a better grasp on respectfully depicting transgender characters.

- Artists in Crime by Ngiao Marsh, a country-house murder mystery with a bohemian twist. I loved the dynamic that arose from setting the story among a small group of art students, close-knit by circumstances but certainly not by personal preference. Great cast of characters, great clues, and a twist I saw coming a mile away but which still managed to be one of the creepier scenes I've encountered in Golden Age detective fiction.

- Clockwork Boys and The Wonder Engine by T. Kingfisher— a forger, an assassin, a disgraced paladin (which seems to be a T. Kingfisher specialty?), and a teenaged scholar-priest walk into a bar an enemy city-state on a probably doomed mission to discover the workings of said enemy's machimagical war engines. It's got reluctant teamwork! Mutual pining! Side quests involving vengeful crime lords and demonic possession (not at the same time)! Very entertaining.

- Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony, which I initially felt kind of what the entire hell is this about, but I'm glad I kept reading because it was ultimately really good. Half ghost story and half political satire, the narrative bounces between a reclusive taxidermist in Victorian England and a young, closeted, power-hungry Republican congressman obsessed with Ronald Reagan in modern-day Washington, DC, their stories connected by a taxidermied aardvark and parallel experiences and ( spoilers )

Currently reading

I picked up Charles Dickens' David Copperfield after watching The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020, dir. Armando Iannucci) on New Year's Eve, so I've been making my way through that. Quickly realized the filmmakers made a TON of changes from book to movie— they reshuffled a lot of the plot (smushed David's time at Creackle's school and Murdstone's factory together, shifted his meeting Steerforth to young adulthood/Strong's school, gives Mr. Mell's storyline to Micawber and sets it at Strong's school instead of Salem House, etc.) and played up a tone of comedic absurdity that I'm not getting as much from the book— it does appear in flashes (the chapter in which David gets roaringly drunk for the first time jumps to mind, as do most scenes with Miss Trotwood) but the overall tone is much bleaker than the film.

102. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Finally finished after ~3 months of sporadic reading! ( Spoilers )

103. Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

This was a wild ride, pun totally intended. Just 400-odd pages of terrible decisions resulting from some combination of ego, recklessness, and/or an outright belief that rules were for other people.

104. A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova (tr. Barbara Heldt)

I'd purchased this as an e-book a couple of months ago, after reading about it in the Paris Review, but it took me a few false starts to get past the first chapter and I probably would have bailed on it entirely if I hadn't spent money on it. I can't quite pinpoint why it didn't work for me, because the premise - of both the story and its structure - was intriguing enough.

Originally published in Russian in 1848, it's a slim volume of ten chapters, written in a mix of prose and poetry. Each chapter follows one day in the life of Cecily Alexandrovna von Lindenborn, an aristocratic young woman who secretly dreams in poetry despite her prim and proper upbringing, which her mother proudly believes trained her out of having any imagination whatsoever. Despite these dreams, which express her subconscious longing for a life free from (in Pavlova's words) her "mental corset," Cecily finds herself lured into the meaningless, constrained life of a high-society wife.

( Read more... )

105. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

The novel’s titular character - George Washington Black, called Wash - is born into slavery in Barbados in 1819; when he is eleven years old, the owner of Faith Plantation, where he was born, dies and the operation passes into the extraordinarily cruel hands of the man’s oldest nephew. Soon after, the new owner’s brother - an abolitionist and dabbler in the natural sciences - shows up and chooses Wash as his manservant/assistant for the duration of his stay, a whim of fate that changes Wash's life and results in a daring escape via hot air balloon, a five-year odyssey across four continents (including the Arctic), and a career as a scientific illustrator.

( Read more... )

106. Mislaid by Nell Zink

A young, white lesbian at an all-girls college in 1960s Virginia sleeps with her professor (a gay man and world-famous poet) resulting in her pregnancy, expulsion, and a shotgun marriage to said poet that implodes - inevitably - ten years and two kids later. She takes the younger of her kids and gets the hell of dodge, using the stolen birth certificate of a deceased child her daughter's age to build new identities for both of them. The birth certificate in question says they're both black; her daughter is a blue-eyed blonde. Zink's explanation of how this ruse works at all is "1970s Virginia." Meanwhile, her son is being raised by his now-single father and old-moneyed paternal grandparents. The two siblings eventually end up at the same university. Hijinks ensue.

( Read more... )

I finished The Disappearing Spoon on Wednesday night; since both of the books I planned to read next were still on hold, I picked back up on Nicholas Nickleby rather than start something new. The plotline about the terrible school resolved itself more quickly than I expected (which is a relief, because Not Being In The Mood For That was the reason I’d been neglecting this book for so long) and things have been moving at a brisk pace since then.

I’m most invested in Kate’s plotline, at the moment, and I have a very soft spot in my heart for Newman Noggs, because of course I do. I’m warming up towards Nicholas, because initially he struck me as having all the personality of mashed potatoes [the better to use as a vehicle to introduce a shifting cast of absurd, satiric side characters with, my dear!] with a dash of “I’ll kick your ass! I’ll kick everybody’s ass! I’ll kick my own ass!” for spice, but I found myself won over by his quietly amused, “adult life is already so weird, this might as well happen” reaction to life in the Crummles’ theater troupe.

I got to about the halfway point of Nicholas Nickleby by Sunday night, when – literally just as Nicholas overheard Sir Mulberry and Lord whatshisface?? Some Mysterious Strangers being disrespectful about his sister and was, presumably, about to go kick their asses – I got an alert that it was my turn for Elton John’s memoir, Me, on Libby!

I grew up on Elton John’s music – both knowingly (my dad’s a big fan, because he grew up listening to Elton John) and unknowingly (The Lion King, The Road to El Dorado) – but I’ve never been the kind of person who knows a lot about the musical artists they like? So, Elton John has been a consistent but abstract concept in my life until two weeks ago, when I watched half of Rocketman (2019) on a plane and immediately came down with a bad case of Feelings about it. And then I stumbled across a couple of reviews of his new memoir - including this article about all the wild celebrity stories in it - and knew I had to get my hands on it immediately.

(‘Immediately’ turned out to be closer to two weeks, because I managed to beat the rush & be the first person to put it on hold on Libby, but someone already had it out and took forever to return it.)

It always feels weird to “review” memoirs, because a. it’s, like........ a person’s real life?? you can’t really comment on the plot or characterizations; and b. most of the famous-person memoirs I’ve read have been by people who had political/politics-adjacent careers, so you have to take them with a grain of salt.

That being said: I found Me a very frank, funny memoir, and wildly enjoyable to read. Possibly because I’d read the aforementioned article ahead of time and had already gone through every possible emotion about, say, the idea of Katherine Hepburn sternly scooping a frog out of Elton John’s pool, or the time he and John Lennon hid from Andy Warhol like middle school mean girls (SHHH, PRETEND WE’RE NOT HERE!) because the annoying guy with the ever-present camera is not the person you want hanging around while you’re doing illegal drugs, I found myself slightly less interested in the celebrity cameos than in, say, the insight into his musical influences and the backstories of certain songs.

A large chunk of the book dealt with his struggles with addiction; I kept thinking, as I read that part, how I could see another celebrity memoir taking a defensive approach (“LOOK. I was on so much cocaine! It was the 80s! Every rock star was on so much cocaine!”) or a maudlin one, but he had a wryly self-mocking sense of humor about it - very god, I was such a tit back then - while not downplaying the seriousness of the impact his addiction had on him and everyone around him, or how much work he put into his recovery. [Disclaimer: of course there’s no One Right Way to talk about addiction, especially for someone speaking about their own experiences, but what I’m trying to say here is that I think he did a good job of it!!]

Anyway, Elton John is a good egg and I came out of his memoir feeling very happy for him, that he’s had such a hugely successful career and now he plans to retire from touring (for real, this time!) to spend more time with his husband and kids.