December Meme, Question #7

[osprey_archer]

For evelyn_b: What are the best and worst books you read in 2015?

The best book was Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which I would urge everyone to read - at least the first volume; the three volumes together are about three thousand pages long, and in some ways volumes two and three are simply elaborations on the first volume, although they’re still worth reading if you have the time.

But he’s tremendously insightful, both about the particular problems with the Soviet regime and about the wider nature of good and evil. In Bolshevik ideology (and this part of their ideology, they realized quite thoroughly), individuals are valuable only insofar as they further the cause of the proletariat. (In a lot of my Soviet history classes, I and many of my fellow students had a hard time understanding that the peasants don’t count - aren’t they poor, too? But they really don’t. The proletariat is the industrial proletariat and the industrial proletariat alone.)

In this schema, people who oppose the revolution are of course worthless, but not only active opposition but simply being inexpedient to the proletariat is, on its own, cause for liquidation. Hence the justification for working people to death in the gulags. At least this way the state can wring a little value out of them.

As for the nature of good and evil - well, let me leave you with this Solzhenitsyn quote:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

***

For the worst books, let’s see. I don’t think I read anything rage-inducingly terrible this year. I was very disappointed with the new American Girl series, about the 1950s girl Maryellen, because they seemed so shoddy and ill-constructed - not even any illustrations! In an American Girl series! The outrage! But they were really too flat and uninteresting to provoke long-lasting rage.

Oh, and there was Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which I might have appreciated more on its rather slender merits if my friends hadn’t recced it to the high heavens beforehand. As it was, Richard’s ability to win through obstacles by sheer force of his protagonisthood made me cranky - I think the most aggravating moment was when, despite his total lack of hunting experience, Richard managed to slay a beast that had just killed a legendary hunters.

I was also not impressed by the fact that Richard spent the whole book careening from terror to terror, desperate to get home… Only to get home and then decide that actually life was much more interesting in the underworld of magical homeless people, and then toss his cozy life aside. If Gaiman wanted me to buy this ending, he needed to show Richard becoming fond of his unpleasant magical underworld more than three pages before the end of the book.

Gaiman couples his aesthetic of gritty darkness with a glib understanding of evil. Richard is a modern middle-class Londoner; he has never been betrayed before, certainly not in a life or death situation (because he’s never been in a life-or-death situation before), and yet when it happens, he takes it almost casually and forgives it at once. He is mildly perturbed to be find himself somewhere where people die casually, but it doesn’t bother him all that much.

Gaiman’s “darkness” is skin deep. There’s no sense that suffering has any weight or leaves any lasting marks and I find that incredibly grating.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Neil Gaiman! He's one of the authors I persistently feel bad about not being able to get into. I have mostly managed to jettison my guilt about books, but not always. The difficulty I have with him is hard to pin down because I've never lasted long enough with one of his books to notice things like whether his understanding of evil is glib -- the closest I got was skimming the Death and Dream comic whose name I can't remember now.

Poor Maryellen. :( We could have had it all!

I read Solzhenitsyn a long time ago, which means I should probably do a re-read now that I'm an adult, but I'm reluctant to dive back into that gulag ocean. I get very used to reading candy.

This comment is no good because my brain is fried, but this is a good post. Someday my brain will be less fried.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I feel like Neil Gaiman is one of those very iddy authors, and his id fortuitously matches up with quite a lot of people who are deeply involved with geek culture (is that a phrase?), so he's got a massive and evangelical fanbase.

I miiiight still try Good Omens, because Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote that together and I do like Pratchett's work. Maybe that will overcome the Gaimanness of it all.

I can think of so many ways that the Maryellen books could have been better. So many. Like, say, maybe she could have gotten polio during one of the books, instead of as this piece of rarely referenced backstory. That would have added a lot of pep, right? Or, you know, the sad version of pep.

But obvious she would get better and not end up in an iron lung, so not too sad.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Gaiman’s “darkness” is skin deep. --A powerful critique in the context of the quote from Solzhenitsyn.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I sometimes wonder if I'm not giving Gaiman enough credit, because so many people love him that I feel like there must be something there, surely?

But he has so many fans that it's not like it matters if I like him or not, after all.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think you need to worry! Sometimes stuff just doesn't resonate...