![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Rant: Possession
Jun. 21st, 2004 01:04 amI am on page 128 of A. S. Byatt's Possession and I want to smack Mortimer Cropper, who has spent the last fifteen pages driving while quoting his autobiography to himself, opening a letter, and preparing to quote himself for another - excuse me while I flip ahead - three and a bit pages. I wouldn't mind shaking several other characters either. Which goes to show that my appreciation of "high" art remains fairly theoretical and it's very well that I've never had any ambitions to study literature.
I'm fairly infuriated with how the characters inter/act. There's a great deal ofmenial mundane misery on display, a fair amount of non-communication and daily existence in the depressingly petty, without the small things that make the pettiness endurable: oozing out the door in time for a striking sunrise, the pleasure of appetizing food (speaking as someone who eats her own learning-by-experience cooking, bland, slightly scorched or otherwise, this is seriously underrated), the electric moments of little discoveries: an excellent gift, the sale at the video store, the five you left in a pocket last summer when you had money to lose. Everyone's living very much in their heads, where they're all obsessed with the same fictitious Romantic/Victorian poet, who I can't bring myself to give a damn about. Except when they're sniping at each other over who's more obstructionist to the study of Randolph Henry Ash's life, with which everyone seems to identify with to an unhealthy degree. If this is academia, I'll run screaming into the night, thanks. Don't any of these people have friends? As in, people they call up, write, occasionally dine or play cards with?
(The lack of "with"-ness is what's really killing me, I think. I'm only a sixth of the way in, granted, but so far interpersonal interactions feel very limited: there's pauses for extensive backstory when characters are introduced, which trips up the pace, and many of the people who seem to be major or prominent secondary characters all seem fairly dissatisfied with their lives. People, get a hobby. One that doesn't involve your deep suspicions you've been subsumed by a dead poet.)
Page 128 of 605. I hope Val has the good sense to leave her unemployed postdoc boyfriend to his emerging academic partner of the cornsilk and bound-up hair. I really hope Mortimer Cropper takes some pratfalls on his Anglicized "American" dignity. And most of all I hope the rest of the book isn't as tedious as chapter six.
In other news, corn was on sale today: eight for a dollar. I spent $1.50. I plan to have a sickening amount of corn on the cob this week, and see if anyone's interested in dinner at my place. Potatoes are also on sale this week, and it's fairly hard to mess up the basics.
I'm fairly infuriated with how the characters inter/act. There's a great deal of
(The lack of "with"-ness is what's really killing me, I think. I'm only a sixth of the way in, granted, but so far interpersonal interactions feel very limited: there's pauses for extensive backstory when characters are introduced, which trips up the pace, and many of the people who seem to be major or prominent secondary characters all seem fairly dissatisfied with their lives. People, get a hobby. One that doesn't involve your deep suspicions you've been subsumed by a dead poet.)
Page 128 of 605. I hope Val has the good sense to leave her unemployed postdoc boyfriend to his emerging academic partner of the cornsilk and bound-up hair. I really hope Mortimer Cropper takes some pratfalls on his Anglicized "American" dignity. And most of all I hope the rest of the book isn't as tedious as chapter six.
In other news, corn was on sale today: eight for a dollar. I spent $1.50. I plan to have a sickening amount of corn on the cob this week, and see if anyone's interested in dinner at my place. Potatoes are also on sale this week, and it's fairly hard to mess up the basics.
