Cross-posted on Soaping.net

 

The Pentrals starts credibly enough, with a strange first person narration of a girl watching another girl. The vantage is odd and disorienting, and it's only when you realize that the narrator is the girl's shadow that the angles lock, and you can finally orient yourself in both space and understanding. The narrator, Antares, is the shadow of Violet, a denizen of the futuristic city of Talline, which gleams from a thousand mirrored surfaces in a canyon in the desert. The Pentrals of the title refers to beings of shadows or reflections, which in the supernatural architecture of the novel, are sentient beings enacting penance for something done in another life.

 

As a set up, this is neat stuff: the brightness of the future city juxtaposed against the Gothic shadow, the doppelganger reading and commenting on the bright lived life through its negative image. Unfortunately, this tense imagery is squandered, and quickly. Not only does The Pentrals deny the reader much in the way of resolution, but the basic mechanics of both the supernatural world of the Pentrals and the society of Talline are so confused (or, often, downright stupid) that any resolution is close to meaningless. Altogether, this was one of the more frustrating novels I've read in a while.

Cross-posted on Soapboxing

 

There’s this old joke from the Simpsons where Bart sees the movie based on the Burroughs novel Naked Lunch, and then quips, “I can think of two things wrong with that title.” The beautiful part of Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Disaster is most certainly wrong, but I think the disaster part is also a misnomer. Disaster implies a sudden destruction, something out of the hands of the affected, but this novel is a long, Mordorian slog through the absolute worst character traits that bloom into their inevitably dreary conclusion. Beautiful Disaster is like slowly adding chlorine bleach to ammonia, and the toxic fog that results is both unsurprising and cheerlessly boring. That I’ve struggled for nigh on three months to come up with a review is probably more due to my burnt throat than anything. What do I even say about a novel this fucking dumb?

The Giantess

At that time when Nature in her powerful ardor
Conceived monstrous children each day,
I would have loved living near a young giantess,
As a voluptuous cat at the feet of a queen.  

I should like to have seen her body flower with her soul
And grow freely in her dreadful games;
And guess whether her heart conceals a somber flame
From the wet fog swimming in her eyes;

Feel at my leisure her magnificent shape;
Climb on the slope of her huge knees,
And at times in summer, when the unhealthy suns,  

Wearying, make her stretch out across the country,
Sleep without worry in the shade of her breast,
Like a peaceful hamlet at the foot of a mountain.

The problem with reading poetry is that generally it is not something you simply read over once and then put it back on your shelf. Some of the older poetic forms, such as Dante, Homer, and Milton, you would do that, namely because the poetic form was used as a means of telling a story. Modern poetry however cannot be read in the same way. Instead, as my English teachers would tell me, you read it once, think it over, read it again, and think over it again. To say that this is only done with modern poetry though is a misnomer because similar short form poems had been written throughout history (though I suspect many of the ancient poems that we have were probably written to music so are more like the lyrics of a song), and Baudelaire was not the first to use this form (considering he wrote after Blake, and substantially after Donne and Shakespeare).

 

Poetry is like painting a picture with words, and this is what Baudelaire does in Flower's of Evil (I will get to Paris Spleen shortly). While the poetry is beautiful, it also paints a very dark and seedy side to Paris. Paris has always been a city of beauty and romance, however that was something that Baudelaire did not see in the 19th century. Instead he saw a dirty and crime ridden city with prostitutes hiding in the shadows trying to eek out a living. Apparently when these poems were released there was outrage, though reading them in the 21st century (and quickly at that) I cannot see much that would cause outrage. It is sort of like describing the scene where Roudolph and Emma have sex in Madame Bovary, which when I read it turns out that is pretty much of a non-starter (Emma constantly says 'no, no, this is wrong' and then she gives in, and the book suddenly skips to them returning home).

 

 

In another way I do not feel like over-analysing these poems, or even writing deeply on a couple of them, because in a way I do not believe that that is necessary. The poems, as I mentioned, are like word pictures,which paint the rather dark and depressing underbelly of Paris. Also these poems are a translation (they were originally written in French) so it adds a further layer of difficulty to the poem.

 

Paris Spleen is of another order entirely, and that is what they call prose-poetry. Personally I do not really see the point. It is not that I don't get it rather it is that I don't think that it works. To me poetry is poetry, and prose is prose: they are two different literary forms. While people may experiment by bringing them together for me it simply does not work. I guess then it is trying to use the imagery of poetry and a prose composition, but then the novel is telling a story in prose as opposed to the poetic form that was used previously.