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Little and big genre thoughts
Weird. That new manga store. One of those cases where I seem to be always talking at cross-purposes with someone.
I go in Monday to pick up FMA 12&13 in English, because I'm not so devoted to the series as to need tosee what they're really saying read it in Japanese. 13 is in, 12 has sold out overnight. The terribly genki owner is terribly genki at me. "You've read the earlier volumes?" "Yes, I have up to 11 in Japanese, but you know, manga in Japanese-" "Yes, hard to find," she supplies. "Uhh, no, I get them from amazon japan--" "You do!?" in great surprise, as though amazon is unheard of. "Yes, but they're--" "Oh yes, very hard to read." "Uhh, no. Expensive. The delivery charges, you know." She doesn't know, from the quizzical expression.
So Thursday when her new shipment has arrived I go in to get 12. She smiles all over me in her genki fashion. "Now you'll know what's really happening!"
*Really* happening? Maybe an unfortunate slip of the second language speaker's tongue, but lady, you're giving a very good impression of someone who doesn't *really* believe a round-eye can read an Asian language.
The only other explanation is that she's kerblonxed by my staid middle-aged appearance, but I doubt it. If that were the problem she wouldn't be recommending Anime North to me ("all the fans will be there!" Yes, love; that's why I stay away) and pushing FMA goods on me.
Otherwise I finished Little, Big. Fantoddy to the last, though the very last was excellent. I haven't read much magic realism in English (is there any?) but that's certainly what LB reads like to me. In spite of fairies (the word that, quite rightly in context, people shy away from speaking) the mhh look of the book- the way it looks in my head- and certainly all the bits that happen in the City, including and especially Hawksquill, read like Marquez to me.
Some wag said the difference between fantasy and magic realism is that fantasy's in English and MR is in Spanish. Funny, but no. There's a qualitative difference between them to my uhh my sense of reading, whatever. (Smells with nose, sees with eye, hears with ear, reads with what? All of the above?)
I don't want to start the 'if it's bad it's genre, if it's good it's literature' thing but. Genre has rules. Break the rules and you're out of genre. There are novels that involve a detective story of sorts but that break the detective story rules. Dashiell Hammett, for choice, who drove me mad because I was reading him as a detective story writer. Chandler too. They're good but they're not the genre I'm used to. (For that matter, ten year old me disapproved of Sherlock Holmes for the same reason. 'Broke the rules! Holmes produces the murderer and it's someone I've never met who hasn't even been mentioned! No fair!' I think Conan Doyle is literature too.)
But it seems to me that genre also has latitude: the forgiving attitude of fanfic. What's bad in literature is often good in fanfic, because the latter caters to something other than the head and the critical faculties. (To love, often enough: more and more and more of These Wonderful People. How can it be dull if it's about These Wonderful People?) The self-indulgence of fanfic is something I find also in fantasy. Long ago, far away, utterly different: 'scuse me, I'm too busy world-building to write lean prose and to show not tell. Anyway, my readers *want* to be told.' (Which is often true. Me, I shall never read Mary Gentle because she prides herself- and IMO smugly- on never telling. 'Ima gonna make you *work*, you lazy bastards', or words to that effect.) So it seems to me that even the best fantasy doesn't make it to literature as long as it's being conscious fantasy because it's obeying fantasy rules, not literature ones, and when the two are in conflict the fantasy rules win.
Possible evidence being that the fantasy works that straddle the lit line are things many fantasy readers have said they can't read or can't finish. Jonathan Strange; Gormenghast; Otranto and Frankenstein (Yes, both by amateur writers and so what?); possibly Perdido, though if Mieville was trying for literature he should have worked more on his characters. (But why? They're no more two dimensional than all of Pyncheon's and no one thinks Pyncheon anything but a mainsteam novelist. It's Pyncheon's quasi-here and now setting that makes this so, I say, because Gravity's Rainbow could have happened in New Crobazon's world and then people would be calling him a long-winded writer of pseudo-fantasy instead of, well, a mainstream magic realist.)
I go in Monday to pick up FMA 12&13 in English, because I'm not so devoted to the series as to need to
So Thursday when her new shipment has arrived I go in to get 12. She smiles all over me in her genki fashion. "Now you'll know what's really happening!"
*Really* happening? Maybe an unfortunate slip of the second language speaker's tongue, but lady, you're giving a very good impression of someone who doesn't *really* believe a round-eye can read an Asian language.
The only other explanation is that she's kerblonxed by my staid middle-aged appearance, but I doubt it. If that were the problem she wouldn't be recommending Anime North to me ("all the fans will be there!" Yes, love; that's why I stay away) and pushing FMA goods on me.
Otherwise I finished Little, Big. Fantoddy to the last, though the very last was excellent. I haven't read much magic realism in English (is there any?) but that's certainly what LB reads like to me. In spite of fairies (the word that, quite rightly in context, people shy away from speaking) the mhh look of the book- the way it looks in my head- and certainly all the bits that happen in the City, including and especially Hawksquill, read like Marquez to me.
Some wag said the difference between fantasy and magic realism is that fantasy's in English and MR is in Spanish. Funny, but no. There's a qualitative difference between them to my uhh my sense of reading, whatever. (Smells with nose, sees with eye, hears with ear, reads with what? All of the above?)
I don't want to start the 'if it's bad it's genre, if it's good it's literature' thing but. Genre has rules. Break the rules and you're out of genre. There are novels that involve a detective story of sorts but that break the detective story rules. Dashiell Hammett, for choice, who drove me mad because I was reading him as a detective story writer. Chandler too. They're good but they're not the genre I'm used to. (For that matter, ten year old me disapproved of Sherlock Holmes for the same reason. 'Broke the rules! Holmes produces the murderer and it's someone I've never met who hasn't even been mentioned! No fair!' I think Conan Doyle is literature too.)
But it seems to me that genre also has latitude: the forgiving attitude of fanfic. What's bad in literature is often good in fanfic, because the latter caters to something other than the head and the critical faculties. (To love, often enough: more and more and more of These Wonderful People. How can it be dull if it's about These Wonderful People?) The self-indulgence of fanfic is something I find also in fantasy. Long ago, far away, utterly different: 'scuse me, I'm too busy world-building to write lean prose and to show not tell. Anyway, my readers *want* to be told.' (Which is often true. Me, I shall never read Mary Gentle because she prides herself- and IMO smugly- on never telling. 'Ima gonna make you *work*, you lazy bastards', or words to that effect.) So it seems to me that even the best fantasy doesn't make it to literature as long as it's being conscious fantasy because it's obeying fantasy rules, not literature ones, and when the two are in conflict the fantasy rules win.
Possible evidence being that the fantasy works that straddle the lit line are things many fantasy readers have said they can't read or can't finish. Jonathan Strange; Gormenghast; Otranto and Frankenstein (Yes, both by amateur writers and so what?); possibly Perdido, though if Mieville was trying for literature he should have worked more on his characters. (But why? They're no more two dimensional than all of Pyncheon's and no one thinks Pyncheon anything but a mainsteam novelist. It's Pyncheon's quasi-here and now setting that makes this so, I say, because Gravity's Rainbow could have happened in New Crobazon's world and then people would be calling him a long-winded writer of pseudo-fantasy instead of, well, a mainstream magic realist.)
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The difference between fantasy and magical realism: yes, exactly. People get hung up on, 'if it has dragons or wizards or so on and so forth, it's fantasy,' when really, it's all about what the book tells you to expect. The way, when you watch medical dramas, you know who's going to live and die because character X needs to be taught a lesson or character Y needs to prove herself or Z is on the edge and it serves the story to push him one way or the other. And the more constrained a genre's rules are --take Christian romance for example, or the majority of formulaic BL novels, just because I had to put them in a sentence together-- the further you get from Literature even if the book is very good as an exemplar of its genre. And the more the genre lends itself to parody.
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So when the book gives you no sense of what to expect it's literature? ^_^ That is, when the rules all seem to be off and there's no telling what may happen. Which means genre embraces a lot more fields than I'd have thought.
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You could be right about Gormenghast, I did try...but just couldn't get into it...I simply put it down to it being of too many words, me not being appreciative of those words and most likely just not in the right frame of mind.
There is a book...I'm not recc'in it or anything..just wondered if anyone has read it or even heard of it..
The Silver Sun by Nancy Springer...a short little book...well thumbed through and read over and over again, I have two copies of it now the first one sort of disintergrated through over use. Its probably just a zan thing. Hee! ^_^
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PD James read just fine in Japan when I was homesick for my culture, but I'm not sure how she'd do over here. Besides her tendency to think that incestuous murderers may be Bad People because they're incestuous and murderers, but they're still OK as long as they appreciate good architecture and the lines of a Queen Anne drawing room. A really weird morality, that.