Liesl & Po, and Trilby
Jul. 30th, 2013 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI am behind on my book reviews! I am usually behind on my book reviews, until I hit on a book that I just have to write about - in this case, Lauren Oliver's Liesl and Po.
It reminded me of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret (not least because of the lovely, atmospheric illustrations) and Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy, and even a bit of Kate diCamillo's The Magician's Elephant and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book - okay, so this is a book positioned squarely on the conventions of contemporary juvenile fantasy. It does these conventions well, and it's very enjoyable if you enjoy that numinous faintly fairy-tale feeling, but it's basically reorganizing tropes rather than doing anything new with them.
It is individual only in that it has the least conclusive ending ever. It doesn't so much cliff hang as leap off a cliff and dangle in midair in a manner that suggests that maybe they just somehow forget to attach the last few chapters.
Seriously, maybe I should go check the copy at the other library and see if maybe there's another chapter going on. Because really.
***
Otherwise I have been reading George du Maurier's Trilby, which was so massively popular that they named a hat after it - and, indeed, a number of other things, because the Trilby craze was huge.
And I can see why: the book kicks off with an absolutely enchanting series of chapters about life in the bohemian artistic sections of Paris in the 1850s, as seen through the golden glow of nostalgia from the 1890s, when du Maurier wrote the novel. (He is, incidentally, the grandfather of Daphne du Maurier, who wrote Rebecca.) Little Billy, Taffy and the Laird share a studio so full of ineffable camaraderie as to be irresistibly attractive.
And it is not merely the reader who feels this enchanting pull, but the titular Trilby, too: Trilby, the half-Irish, half-upper-class-English French grisette. She's cheerful, charming, statuesquely beautiful in the best 1890s fashion; du Maurier says that if she had been living in the 1890s, people would have worshipped at her feet - which, incidentally, are the most beautiful feet in the world; he lavishes whole pages on Trilby's feet - but as she lived in the 1850s, no one was quite sure what to do about her style of beauty.
Naturally Little Billy falls madly in love and asks Trilby to marry him thirty-three times; but of course he can't marry a grisette who used to pose in the nude. They are torn apart, he falls into a massive depression, and she falls into the greasy-haired clutches of Svengali the anti-Semitic caricature.
Du Maurier seems to be vaguely aware that collapsing Svengali's Jewishness and villainy together like this is a problem. Thus you get odd passages, such as, "in his winning and handsome face there was just a faint suggestion of some possible very remote Jewish ancestor - just a tinge of that strong, sturdy, irrepressible, indomitable, indelible blood which is of such priceless value in diluted homeopathic doses, like the dry white Spanish wine called montijo, which is not meant to be taken pure..."
Way to dig yourself in deeper, du Maurier. All this rather detracts from the welcoming warmth of bohemia that is otherwise so alluring.
It reminded me of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret (not least because of the lovely, atmospheric illustrations) and Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy, and even a bit of Kate diCamillo's The Magician's Elephant and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book - okay, so this is a book positioned squarely on the conventions of contemporary juvenile fantasy. It does these conventions well, and it's very enjoyable if you enjoy that numinous faintly fairy-tale feeling, but it's basically reorganizing tropes rather than doing anything new with them.
It is individual only in that it has the least conclusive ending ever. It doesn't so much cliff hang as leap off a cliff and dangle in midair in a manner that suggests that maybe they just somehow forget to attach the last few chapters.
Seriously, maybe I should go check the copy at the other library and see if maybe there's another chapter going on. Because really.
***
Otherwise I have been reading George du Maurier's Trilby, which was so massively popular that they named a hat after it - and, indeed, a number of other things, because the Trilby craze was huge.
And I can see why: the book kicks off with an absolutely enchanting series of chapters about life in the bohemian artistic sections of Paris in the 1850s, as seen through the golden glow of nostalgia from the 1890s, when du Maurier wrote the novel. (He is, incidentally, the grandfather of Daphne du Maurier, who wrote Rebecca.) Little Billy, Taffy and the Laird share a studio so full of ineffable camaraderie as to be irresistibly attractive.
And it is not merely the reader who feels this enchanting pull, but the titular Trilby, too: Trilby, the half-Irish, half-upper-class-English French grisette. She's cheerful, charming, statuesquely beautiful in the best 1890s fashion; du Maurier says that if she had been living in the 1890s, people would have worshipped at her feet - which, incidentally, are the most beautiful feet in the world; he lavishes whole pages on Trilby's feet - but as she lived in the 1850s, no one was quite sure what to do about her style of beauty.
Naturally Little Billy falls madly in love and asks Trilby to marry him thirty-three times; but of course he can't marry a grisette who used to pose in the nude. They are torn apart, he falls into a massive depression, and she falls into the greasy-haired clutches of Svengali the anti-Semitic caricature.
Du Maurier seems to be vaguely aware that collapsing Svengali's Jewishness and villainy together like this is a problem. Thus you get odd passages, such as, "in his winning and handsome face there was just a faint suggestion of some possible very remote Jewish ancestor - just a tinge of that strong, sturdy, irrepressible, indomitable, indelible blood which is of such priceless value in diluted homeopathic doses, like the dry white Spanish wine called montijo, which is not meant to be taken pure..."
Way to dig yourself in deeper, du Maurier. All this rather detracts from the welcoming warmth of bohemia that is otherwise so alluring.
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no subject
Date: 2013-07-31 10:45 pm (UTC)Oh, dear. Perhaps we could get Quentin Tarantino to bring Trilby to the big screen...
"...just a tinge of that strong, sturdy, irrepressible, indomitable, indelible blood which is of such priceless value in diluted homeopathic doses, like the dry white Spanish wine called montijo, which is not meant to be taken pure..."
While I am aware that a common antisemitic stereotype of the past invoked savagery and sexual insatiability (as is still true of racist stereotypes overall), it's somewhat amusing to me as an American of Jewish descent to compare that with the "nerdier" stereotypes of today. Of course, back then, Jews weren't considered white, even Ashkenazim...
no subject
Date: 2013-08-01 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-01 01:29 am (UTC)Also there's the phenomenon of completely opposite stereotypes being operant at the same time and in the same people's, er, "minds"...