Month: August 2019

The Trial Review

This book gets 1 out of 5 culturally significant rebels. Also this photo is terrifying.
[A Guy Fawkes Mask is hidden in some foliage. It smiles at you like it knows something you don’t. It gives you the creeps.]

This book gets 1 Archibald Tuttle out of 5. (Skip to end for Brazil reference).

Yes, I know, I’m mixing my metaphors; I’ve got Brazil, I’ve got V for Vendetta, and I even considered somehow referencing 1984 right in my opening, but it just wasn’t happening. Now, without further ado, let’s talk about Kafka.

  • Why did I pick this book up? 

Nearly seven years ago (I know this because it somehow popped into my Facebook memories recently) I went on a used-book buying spree. As a 19 year old, I decided that my collection would be incomplete if it didn’t include any Franz Kafka. After all, he has a whole word to himself, and I knew “Metamorphosis” was hailed as a great classic. Luckily for me, the bookstore had both a collection of his short works, and The Trial. 

These books have sat on my shelf, daring me to open them ever since. I even once brought the short works on holiday, and never made it to them. So, on my latest holiday, I decided I would read The Trial. I figured it would be as good a time as any to read about bureaucracy, especially since I was in the process of applying for government jobs. You can never have too much bureaucracy, right? Intrepid reader that I was, I carried this book to the beach all summer. I managed to make it 167 pages in. That is approximately ⅔ of the way in. I thought I could push through and finish it, but it turns out the real trial is the act of reading this goddamn book.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

As you can perhaps tell by the fact that I didn’t finish this book, I personally would not recommend it. I would not recommend it because reading it seems to be as tedious an experience as being the protagonist of this book. Of course, the book is great at demonstrating the folly and sheer annoyance of bureaucracy, but there are so many better ways to satirize judicial and administrative insanity. 

The foreword of my copy of The Trial had an introduction that contextualized Kafka’s writing. This is where I learned that during his life, Kafka did not publish the majority of his work. By the time of his death, he only had a few stories (Metamorphosis being one of them) published, and had apparently instructed his friend Max to destroy all his unpublished works. This guy Max, an idiot in my opinion, obviously decided that even though Kafka wasn’t a good writer he was a white man with ideas, and those ideas had to see the light of day. Max is the reason that most of Kafka’s work is published, and all I can say is that Max should’ve listened to Kafka. But I suppose a white man must always fail up, and heaven forbid he not be hailed as a genius. 

This is not my copy of The Trial as my copy got left on the Sunshine Coast. This copy looks more interesting than mine.
[A thumb fake-holds a book; really it is just held in front of an image on a computer screen. It is a copy of The Trial. The cover is orange and covered with cartoon eyes looking at you. Above the book, my computer webcam also peers at you.]
  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The Trial tells the story of Mr K (K, like KAFKA, GET IT?! Wowie wow), who one morning is informed that he is under arrest, and that a trial will be underway shortly. Now, I made it to page 167 and had yet to figure out why K was under arrest/or what he stood accused of. Instead, K is given the run around, forced to talk to all sorts of low-level judges and administrators, all of which do not know any details about his case, yet always have a very logical explanation as to why no one has the authority to clarify the matter. 

Apparently (I garnered this yet again from the dustjacket and introduction to the book) Mr. K is eventually told that he must prove his own existence. Unfortunately, I did not make it to this point, and from the dustjacket expected this existential conundrum to be more central to the story and to the intellectual exercises that the bureaucratic Catch-22s make your brain do. 

  • Overall brain gushings :

This book was bad. Just a great wall of text – often a character would speak for pages on end – that had a tendency to repeat the same argument and thought experiment. It was tedious. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that all Kafka is translated, and that maybe it would sound less tedious in German? I feel doubtful. Also the main character has a super weird habit of grabbing and kissing random women, so there’s also that going on. Who knew that Kafka would be so good at predicting President Trump and his near-totalitarian regime?

  • What does it mean?

Well, I think The Trial is a meditation on state control and state surveillance. An interesting precursor to Fascism and the surveillance state of today, The Trial is noteworthy for its ability to predict the increase in collection of data (or knowledge in this case) and the difficulty that the everyday citizen has navigating a technological and bureaucratic society. 

However, in the introduction to the text, I learned that Kafka was briefly engaged to a woman. Apparently, Kafka managed to cast doubts as to her desire for marriage, and made himself look like an unsuitable partner (he said he was boring and that life with him would be too sad. Based on his writing, I agree. Also, if a man tells you he isn’t good enough for you, can you blame the woman for believing it?). This led to an intervention of sorts, where the woman’s family ‘interrogated’ and ‘humiliated’ him. The engagement was broken off, and Kafka apparently set to writing The Trial right away. This came as no surprise to me, as the book seems very concerned with reputation, and the idea of a verbal altercation, or a battle of words. Kafka seems concerned with what makes a person’s reputation, and how to change someone’s mind once it is made up. All in all, The Trial seems like a bitter meditation on a failed love story, an attempt to justify his own role in the relationship’s end. Kafka sees himself as persecuted and powerless to stop the interrogation.  Also, it definitely seemed like the rantings of a spurned lover who has decided all women are manipulative and dishonest. 

*MAJOR SPOILER*

Lest you think that by not finishing the book I have robbed myself from truly experiencing and understanding The Trial, well guess what?! I committed the cardinal sin of not only not finishing a book – I also skipped to the end and read the last page, praying that maybe it would have a great and insightful ending that would convince me to keep reading. BUT NO!

The book ends with K being stabbed/executed quote ‘like a dog’. Nice. I basically scoffed when I read this. However, Wikipedia lets me know that apparently Kafka thought this book was funny. So either everyone is reading The Trial wrong, or Kafka had a fucked up sense of humour. Or actually maybe both?

  • Favourite passages : 

Hard to pick a favourite passage in a book that made me want to stab my eyes out, but there were a couple standouts from the muck. Also full disclosure: since I no longer have my copy of The Trial on my person, I totally raided GoodReads for whatever those readers have thought are the most memorable passages. Ya. That’s bad. But so is this book.

 “I had to arrange things as well as I could. That’s obviously a very bad place for the bed, in front of the door. For instance when the judge I’m painting at present comes he always comes through the door by the bed, and I’ve even given him a key to this door so that he can wait for me here in the studio when I’m not home. Although nowadays he usually comes early in the morning when I’m still asleep. And of course, it always wakes me up when I hear the door opened beside the bed, however fast asleep I am. If you could hear the way I curse him as he climbs over my bed in the morning you’d lose all respect for judges. I suppose I could take the key away from him but that’d only make things worse. It only takes a tiny effort to break any of the doors here off their hinges.” 

Franz Kafka, The Trial

“They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” 

Kafka, The Trial

“it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.’ ‘A melancholy conclusion,’ said K. ‘It turns lying into a universal principle.”

Kafka, The Trial.

So yeah. That is basically it. Only a few noteworthy quotes, as most of the text is full of variations of the above contradictions which while at first seem interesting and insightful, quickly turn tedious and boring.

  • Things that made me go “ugh” :

Everything. Every thing in this book made me want to cry. So many times I wanted to throw this book into the garbage (which is a big deal because I love books almost as much as food). Eventually my partner recommended I stop torturing myself, and that was the moment when my brain stopped turning to mush, and when every cell in my body stopped going “ugh Kafka sucks”.

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

No matter what you think of The Trial, if you want to see this concept done properly, I can’t suggest watching Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil enough. A disturbing and funny satire, Brazil does all the things that The Trial fails at: it is engaging, it accurately portrays the feeling of entrapment and heaviness tied to bureaucracy and surveillance, and it is a serious mind-fuck. So if you liked The Trial, you will love Brazil, and if you hated The Trial you will love Brazil! So do it, treat yourself to a weird movie that makes the novel version pale in comparison, something I don’t say often about literature/film pairings!

Now, as for books that I thought of when reading The Trial, a few came to mind; I would say read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for a great satire, 1984 for ruminations on the surveillance state, and The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall for a good read on what it means to be accused, and what the judicial system does to victims, families, and the accused. 

Also, don’t let my review dissuade you from reading this book! Maybe you will enjoy it! Kafka apparently loved Russian lit and I hate it, so if you like that stuff Kafka is for you! Also, if you read the Wikipedia page for it, it does give some other possible insights into the text (although it also says that critics often try to fit the text into insightful frameworks more than the text itself indicates, so HAH) so maybe you will get more out of it than I did!

Stay tuned for my next review, There, There by Tommy Orange.

Sexing The Cherry Review

This book gets 4 out of 5 cherries

One day, I decided I needed to start a book blog. This combines a love of reading and writing with the practical need to create some sort of portfolio to prove that I can indeed strings words together not only into sentences, but thoughtful ones at that. The whole “we won’t give you a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job” Catch-22. So, finally, here I am, typing out some musings on Jeannette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.

It must be noted that although it is easy to read while on vacation somewhere with no internet, it is much harder to blog about it. I’m already 3 blog posts behind and hoping that my pace will improve. Ugh.

There should be fruits in this photo.
[ A hand holds a copy of Sexing the Cherry: it appears to be a collage of reddish/greens that forms a textured and gritty image of a woman. Behind the book is a fantastical treehouse on a cliff: my childhood home! ]

Sexing the Cherry has been sitting on my shelf for at least seven years — ever since I devoured her debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I have somehow managed to also read and reread her novel Written on the Body, while never cracking the pages of Sexing the Cherry.

Now, if I had, I would have seen that the book seems to be divided by small drawings; pineapples, bananas, and dancing women. This is similar to what is done in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and as someone who read Oranges I would have been super intrigued. In Oranges, fruit, and the literal meaning of the title, are meant to represent non-normative sexualities, particularly that of the author/protagonist. As soon as I opened Sexing the Cherry to see a pineapple etched at the top of the page I was curious and promptly discovered the other drawings dividing the sections in the book. What did these symbols mean in this book? There are many potential answers, some of which I will explore later on, post-spoiler warning. Technically the symbols are not a spoiler because if you look at almost any page of the book, you will see one. So that’s my rationale for ‘spoiling’ that. Plus, anything to reel you into some Jeanette Winterson!

  • Why did I pick this book up?

I picked this book up after it had sat on my shelf for many many years. Jeanette Winterson’s books Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Written on the Body are some of my favourite books, and I decided this was as good a time as any to delve back into some lesbian lit! I knew based on the reviews included at the front of my copy that although set in the 17th century “to suggest that the novel is set in any one period or place would give a false impression, for Winterson wants to question customary thinking about what time is” (London Review of Books).

Based on Oranges I knew that Winterson liked to play with the genre of historical fiction and I knew that it would be highly referential: of politics, history, religion, and odds are – knowing Winterson – fairy tales. 

  • Would I recommend: why/why not ?

I would recommend this book if you like weird lesbian magical realist historical fiction, or even just one of those adjectives. Odds are you have not read much like it! If you like post-modern stuff, this is the book for you! If you like books that will philosophize on time, reality, love, and identity politics, then this book will do all those things for you! As is standard with Winterson, there is a lot of beautifully written prose that is worth the read, and many other things This is definitely not the book for you if you only want linear, realistic narratives. If you don’t like any of the things I’ve mentioned before, then this book may not be for you, but it is also not very long so I would say “why not give it a shot?” 

  • Quick synopsis:

Cherry is a story that alternates between two primary narrators: Jordan (represented by a pineapple) and his adoptive mother, Dog-Woman (represented by a banana). From the outset, we are told by Dog-Woman that Jordan will abandon her. Through Jordan and Dog-Woman we are taken through a fantastical retelling of the events leading up to and following the execution of Charles I, as well as Jordan’s adventures sailing the world, looking for a dancing princess. What follows is a disjointed narrative that touches on colonialism and the European drive to perpetuate empire, Cromwell and Puritanism, the imprisonment – metaphorical and literal – of women, and the idea of love as destruction and essential.

  • Overall brain gushings:

From the moment you open Cherry you are confronted with an epigraph that unsettles any perception of reality:

“The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present, and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?

Jeanette Winterson, pg. 8.

From the get go, Winterson shows you she means business: don’t expect a book that won’t make you think, a fun summer read, or a fun story with a tight plot. No, this book is going to make you take your time with it parsing out all the historical and literary – particularly religious – references that fill its pages. Winterson uses the English Civil War and the regicide of Charles I to explore a variety of themes. At times she reflects on the hypocrisy of Christianity only to then use this historical context to ponder questions of authenticity and identity. The character of Dog-Woman is full of idiosyncrasies, which seem to serve the purpose of revealing our own idiosyncrasies, particularly in regard to religion and spiritual beliefs.

  • What does it mean?

So many papers could be written on all the things this book could mean, and to touch on any more than I have would be to spoil it. Of course, there is also the fact that as a post-modern text, it can be argued that to expect meaning and impose one’s view of the text would be to betray the narrative’s intent. So there. Read the book and try and figure out what it means to you. 

  • Favourite passages:

Winterson is one of those writers that manages to turn everything into poetry, and poetry into hardcore philosophy. This means that on nearly every page I could have found something that made my heart sigh and go “wow that must be my favourite passages”. But I’ll list a couple here, just to give you a taste and get you hooked on the Winterson drug. 

“When Jordan was a boy he made paper boats and floated them on the river. From this he learned how the wind affects a sail, but he never learned how love affects the heart.” 

Winterson, pg 19.

“When I was a child my father swung me up on to his knees to tell a story and I broke both his legs. He never touched me again… but my mother, who lived only a while and was so light that she dared not go out in a wind, could swing me on her back and carry me for miles. There was talk of witchcraft but what is stronger than love?” 

Winterson, pg 25.

Here Winterson blends magical realism with an interesting comment on women and witchcraft, the power of love, and the gendered nature of sacrificial love. 

“The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me… I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I’m missing the point – perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain.” 

Winterson, pg 102.

Winterson links exploration of the Earth and the nature of time to explore knowledge of self, and the ways in which our relationships and perceptions affect our identity. 

  • Things that made me go “ugh”:

There were actually only a few things I didn’t like about this book, which when you are actively taking notes on a text, must be a pretty good sign! In fact, most of my distaste centred around the graphic and obscene sex scenes between members of the clergy. Although I could understand the function of those scenes, the crudeness really stood out next to the rest of Winterson’s eloquent and delicate prose. Again, this juxtaposition could very well have been intentional, and was of course successful, but in a text where the pleasure of reading the words and pondering the implications of them, this interruption seemed to have been given too much attention. 

There were also times where the ‘postmoderness’ of the text was a little overbearing and at the expense of unity and clarity in the text.  This seems like an obvious complaint about a post-modern text, and yet when compared with Oranges, Cherry lacked a balance between genre exploration and narrative storytelling. I found it harder to parse out what I thought Winterson might want me to get out of the text. 

Sometimes I would be reading and go “WTF?” is happening/what does this mean?! I would get taken out of experiencing the text by trying to analyse it only to get frustrated when my brain would start feeling mushy.

  • Get on these books next:

If you liked Cherry, and made it this far, you should definitely consider reading any other Jeanette Winterson, in particular Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit! Some other texts that came to my mind when I was reading Sexing the Cherry were Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the graphic novel Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro. Carter’s is a collection of feminist retellings of classic fairytales. It is very sensual, erotic, and dark. Bitch Planet is a satire of exploitation genres, and includes a wealth of diverse feminist and queer representations.