Anne always makes me laugh–or cry–and her greeting today just cracked me up:
Happy St. Urho’s Day! St. Urho is said to have chased the grasshoppers out of Finland, thus saving the grape crop. God bless the humble grape. I trust you’re wearing the traditional colors of Royal Purple and Nile Green.
Until I realized it was not Anne’s humor but the truth!
Hot piled roast beef (10″) grinders with sauted onions, roasted peppers and Coopers cheese. Total cost? $2.50 each when you make them yourself. Compare that to the $7-10 spent on MacDonald’s and you’ll understand why I totally disagreed with nutrition class’ estimation that the poor were obese because of the fast-food people. My point: it really is cheaper and better to eat at home.
At last, a slightly more accurate pinpointing of the time setting of this novel:
When the main feature finally started we had been seated for at least half an hour, and I saw with some relief it was to be the science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey — a favourite of mine which I never tired of seeing. (p. 93)
Well neat. That places it somewhere after 1968 and while the language of the book is still a bit dated and formal, it settles me into the storyworld a bit more comfortably. As the movie is referred to by the narrator as a classic, I would assume the time period stands somewhere between 1975 – 1995 when the book was published. Then I am jerked out of my comfort zone with this:
As soon as those impressive opening shots of a prehistoric world appeared on the screen, I could feel myself relaxing, and I was soon comfortably absorbed in the film. We were well into the central section of the narrative — with Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner on board the spaceship bound for Jupiter — when I heard… (p. 94)
Huh? Dirty Harry and the King of Siam weren’t in this flick; what’s going on here?
Then it hits me; I must open my mind to the story and accept it as it is given to me. Fiction, after all, is exactly that.
It’s taken 19 years, but my husband is accustomed to my frugal ways and so in these times of financial uncertainty we’ve more easily weathered some of the necessary changes caused by job loss and its aftermath.
I’m an ant all year-round so that in bad times, my grasshopper can come out and play to offset the worry and fill in the sudden wealth of time that comes with the sudden loss of money. Our friend Gus said just the other night that he’s heading to our house in case of a total meltdown since he’s aware of my hoarding nature and my stocked shelves in the basement. BTW, I finally figured it would be a smart idea to put a manual can-opener down there too.
The other day I made stuffed cabbage again (with beef this time, and barley and chick-peas) and though I made fewer than usual, I always put a can of crushed and a can of plum tomatoes into the pot. Usually the only other thing I add to flavor it is a little salt and fresh garlic cloves because the meat mixture is spiced up enough. Well, I had a lot of tomato sauce left over this time and it was so good–picking up the flavor of the cabbage-rolled meat after a few reheatings that I couldn’t just throw it away.
Being just enough for two people I added two cubes of pesto (homemade and frozen in ice cube trays), a splash of red wine, and some peeled shrimp and heated it to put over spaghetti. While the Italian cook may sneer at the bits of cabbage mixed in, I must say, it was delicioso!
There has to be something I simply haven’t caught onto yet in this novel, as the inconsistencies mount and are far beneath a prizewinning author unless they are planned and point to a reasonable cause.
Sophie grasped my arm. ‘If you want, I’ll make a completely clean breast of it. I’ll tell you everything. Everything you want to know about…’
‘Look, how many more times do I have to say this? I’m not in the least interested. All I want just now is to unwind. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on me over these next few days.’
She continued to hold my arm and for a while we walked together in silence. Then she said quietly: ‘It’s so good of you. To be so understanding.’ (p. 89)
Uh, that just doesn’t compute. In his state of mind why wouldn’t he want to find out what Sophie has to tell him? Surely her words are intrigueing and I don’t get his rebuff. And then, when he’s told us several times that he hasn’t a clue about his schedule and seems to plan on winging it instead of breaking down and asking someone, he now tells us that “there’s going to be a lot of pressure on me over these next few days.”
How weird is that?
I doubt that Ishiguro has flubbed it; I may have missed something or I may simply need to be patient or a bit quicker of mind.
Science, physics, astronomy, all, like politics, are facts as seen from a particular view and like it, are subject to change if one is open-minded.
This February 18th article in the Scientific American, Was Einstein Wrong? A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity, upsets our world with possibility and it challenges our beliefs. It’s likely disconcerting to realize that something so neatly tied up and stored as truth is open to the possibility of being wrong.
To quote Elmer Fudd, ” There’s something vewwy scwewwy going on awound here.”
While I realize that my reading in spurts of this novel (busy on other stuff like writing and learning web setups) is partly to blame for my lack of ‘getting it’ so far, there’s still an obvious manipulation on Ishiguro’s part of the narrative. While it seems fairly straightforward in a linear timeline, there are the quirks of the interplay between characters that don’t follow normal processing.
It appears that while Mr. Ryder’s confusion about what he’s doing in this hotel, in this city, seems to upon occasion clear up, the dialogue doesn’t jive with the facts as we learn them. For example, he meets an elderly porter at the hotel who talks him into going to see his daughter and grandson and Ryder, upon meeting them, realizes that it is his wife and son. She doesn’t ask why he’s staying in a hotel but leads him on a merry chase through the back alleys of the city until he ends up losing her, going back to the hotel, only he has her child–his son–with him. He proceeds to dump the kid off on his grandfather without any acknowledgement of who he is (and why doesn’t he seem to know his father-in-law anyway?) and goes out to meet with Sophie–his (maybe) wife.
Therefore, I’m strongly of the opinion that Ryder is not a person at all, but a representation of man’s memory or conscience. It seems that the people he meets are those that he has either been in contact with at some point (Sophie, his son, his old schoolmate) or someone who he doesn’t appear to know but who prevails upon him to right a wrong that’s been done in their own childhood or something they’ve done to a child (the hotel manager’s son, the old porter).
There is a theme of childhood emotional abuse and Ryder may be this baggage that these other characters are harboring. Interesting concept. Sort of Jacob Marley-esque.
I don’t know why I read this political tripe anymore, except I suppose to get it from the most direct source. The designated spokesman answers a few reader questions and voiced worries:
“Karen from Newell, AL wrote “I am a school teacher in this very rural place…. This economic crisis is really hurting this little place. We will lose 7 teachers at my school which translates to increasing my class size from 15 to 20. This may not seem like much but it makes a big difference to students who need a lot of individual help.”
Oh suck it up, Karen. My elementary school class was 60-strong. And the teacher was locked up with these same students in the same classroom all day except for a lunch and recess break when the good sister would probably head for the convent and down some aspirin or perhaps a nip of wine. Are five extra kids really going to knock you for a loop? Then I think you’re in the wrong profession. You wanna see a school with a problem? That little girl who wrote to President Obama about her school in Georgia (?) where they barely had a roof over their heads, well now, that’s a problem.
And this:
Finally, several people, like Keith from Sitka, Alaska suggested that the Task Force have something with “average, middle-class Americans in an open forum to listen to what problems they face and what solutions they can offer.”
Well Keith, read the paragraph prior to this:
When the money is distributed at the state and local levels, we plan for it to be put to use where your community needs it most, whether you need teachers, firefighters, cops, paramedics, or bus drivers. President Obama put my boss, Vice-President Biden, in charge of overseeing the distribution of the funds that, among many things, will create jobs that will restore the prosperity of the middle class.
And best of luck to you in obtaining your teaching cert, or plan B, the firefighters training, or C, paramedics are good, or if you’ve got a license, D, a bus driver. Other than that, you’re shit outta luck.
God knows, just when I reach a stage of my life where I’m feeling free enough to draw upon my hidden past to get a bit more risque with my writing, I’m planning on developing a children’s reading site.
See now, I knew that “hates small children” on my Hypertext 2008 bio would come back to haunt me.
Reading about the Madoff swindle, I find so many folks laughing and figuring that the rich deserved what they got. But the rich pay big taxes and are the main source of income for charity groups. In an article in Vanity Fair, there’s this:
The center of the storm was the predominantly Jewish Palm Beach Country Club. The sand-colored building, with its fine restaurants and 18-hole golf course, sits between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Worth. Membership is based not on what you have—the $350,000 initiation fee is the least concern of the admissions committee—but on what you give away. Madoff became a member in 1996. “You won’t get in unless you can demonstrate that you’ve been charitable in a big way,” said Richard Rampell, an accountant with a number of clients who are members. “They want to see a history of many years of giving every year at least what the initiation fee is, and they ask you to prove it.… I have a few clients who give 10 to 20 times that much every year to charity.” One member told me, “We built the hospital, we built the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. We built it all. This is just not a come-and-have-a-party group.”
You hurt the big guys, and believe me, the little guys are going to get hurt as well.
Dan Green’s reading of The Virgin Suicides brings him to some interesting notes about the importance of choice in point of view. I like the idea of “we” of this particular novel.
This consideration of POV is of particular notice to me as I read the first-person narrator of The Unconsoled as ‘he’ breaks all rules and leads me to wonder if indeed the character is a a metaphor alone.
A very spot-on post by Charles Deemer on the elation and the loneliness sometimes of the writer as he creates a fictional world where his characters, for a time, are his closest friends.
It reminds me of the brief note of apology I once wrote to Annie, the protagonist of my first novel written and rejected ten years ago.
I had me one of these once, a very long time ago. Same color, and it had a rollbar.
(Photo: ’63 Corvette from http://www.bcautos.com/musclecars/index.html)
I’m beginning to get a sense that the main character of Mr. Ryder is a metaphor for a part of our minds, whether it be memory or regret or conscience or such.
In another small episode, we get the inner thoughts of two different characters, and this, from the absent first person narrator. Since the other characters seem to be very familiar with Mr. Ryder and his memory goes from complete ignorance of an event to detailed memory, this seems to me a plausible explanation.
Relevant to my prior post about ‘something funny going on’ here, Ishiguro is slowly unraveling his world and evidently, the characters understand the rules.
The rain continued to fall steadily as we travelled through the night-time streets. The young man remained silent for a long time and I wondered if he had become angry with me. But then I caught sight of his profile in the changing light and realised he was turning over in his mind a particular incident from several years ago. (p. 65)
So is Ryder able to read people’s thoughts? Nope, nothing that simple, as after we get the scene played out for us that Ryder refers to, Stephan evidently understands that Ryder is now aware of it.
“I realise it’s none of my business, and I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but I do think you’ve been treated rather unfairly by your parents over the matter of your piano playing. (…)”
The young man considered this for several moments. Then he said: ” I’m grateful to you, Mr. Ryder, for giving my position thought and all that. (…)”(p. 71)
Which all means that it’s just me who doesn’t quite get what’s going on. This is, then, a different world.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology