Book of Lost Nights

So while everyone else buggered off to have a fabulous (albeit somewhat chilly) time in North Wales at the SFXWeekender, I stayed home and sulked – I could only spare two days and would have spent most of them travelling, so I took an executive decision to give it a miss this time, especially as the book is at a delicate point. Happily I managed to get some non-sulking activity in, and one of the things I did was get to the movies.

I’d been kind of stoked to see Young Adult since last year – despite the fact that I have kind of a love-hate relationship with Diablo Cody. I loved Juno, but thought that while there were some really well-observed and sharp exchanges in Jennifer’s Body, there were also an awful lot of things that were quite poorly done.

Young Adult is more Juno than Jennifer’s Body. That said there are places where it fails to convince – the set piece party meltdown for one. What it does have, however, is Charlize Theron bringing her A-game in a big, big way.

Young Adult (2012)

She plays Mavis Gary, the dissolute YA authoress whose Sweet Valley High-esque series is now ending, and on which she has been little more than a ghostwriter anyway – writing to a strict “series bible” that has been drawn up by the woman whose name actually ends up on the cover. Drunk, depressed, and staring 40 in the face, she has never grown beyond her high school persona, and when she receives an email announcing that her old jock boyfriend and his wife have had a baby, she immediately resolves to go back to her little hick town and “rescue” both him and her golden youth.

It’s a lot of fun, but the really great moment is when she realises that what she has thought of as “our song” with her high school beau now has a completely different meaning for him, and her bewildered increduality, all rendered purely by her expression, just tells you all you need to know about Mavis.

There’s also a fabulous device, whereby Mavis narrates her novel as she writes it, and her current appalling life events are transmuted into trashy prose starring the impossibly perfect heroine of her YA series – the golden “Kendal Strickland” who bewails the fact that it is so lonely to be so beautiful and popular when surrounded by envious dullards. The prose is filled with the dialogue and voices Mavis pilfers from teenagers at the mall, and watching these bits reminds you, uncomfortably, that to write is to be a hairs-breadth from exposure every day of your life.

So, in a nutshell, problematical but so worth it.

No Comments | In: Movies | tags: charlize theron, diablo cody, jennifer's body, juno, reviews, young adult. | #

Better late than never, I guess – I finished the copy of Her Fearful Symmetry that @vintagebooks so kindly sent me and I was pleased that I did. It was a strange and uneven read, but had some beautiful moments.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

The novel focusses on a pair of twins, as one attempts to break free of the controlling influence of the other through relationships, college, and finally darker and more final forms. They have inherited a beautiful flat near Highgate Cemetery, a location that casts a long shadow over the book. A malign influence in the form of Elspeth the ghost seems to offer the more fragile Valentina the way to escape her overbearing twin, but of course everything goes horribly wrong…

The relationship between the twins was deftly handled and the evocation of Highgate Cemetery itself is superb. There is a distinctly 19th century timbre to the novel which appears early on and then disappears, only to come back in the last hundred pages. Niffenegger excels in the small exchanges between characters and also the sense of doom surrounding the final crisis.

That said, I felt that Elspeth the ghost was quickly a too familiar and almost comical feature in their lives, and since everyone could talk to her, through seance appurtenances such as automatic writing and ouija boards, you are almost left forgetting that there is anything wrong with her. But the final hundred pages and their hideous bargain and denouement were wholly rivetting, and I am very grateful for the copy.
Tonight I also saw Jennifer’s Body down at the West India Quay Cineworld (yay for Cineworld membership!).

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Without being too spoilery, there is a thematic connection between Jennifer’s Body and Her Fearful Symmetry, so it was quite cool to think about. Jennifer’s Body is a fun romp of a movie, much as I generally dislike the characterisation of young women as forces of social chaos (which must of course be controlled). There is a fantastically moving moment involving a necklace in the climax that actually managed to haunt me, and during one death scene the dialogue between two characters brought two girls sitting in front of me to near-tears. A flawed movie (the final coda over the credits seemed a bit tacked on when it should have been resolved in the movie proper or not at all), but definitely not a waste of time.

As for Sleepwalker, I made a real breakthrough on Wednesday, and intend to exploit this over the weekend – except on Sunday, when I have a workshop for Gaie’s novel, which I am sure will do well. I am also back on the Latin lessons and next blog post I’ll probably be looking at the Crusades, of all things, from a research point of view. The fun never stops, I guess, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Currently Reading: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson and The Crusades (an extract) by Thomas Asbridge

No Comments | In: Books, Movies, Research | tags: audrey niffenegger, authors, diablo cody, her fearful symmetry, jennifer's body, reviews, workshop. | #