L'enfer, c'est Huis Clos

[hawkwing_lb]

Fortunately, I have distractions.

My most recent (fiction) reading is karentraviss's The World Before. It follows on from City of Pearl and Crossing the Line, neither of which, by the way, I can praise highly enough.

The World Before lives up to its predecessors.

In this future, humanity aren't alone in the universe. They're no longer the most powerful creatures in creation, either, and the alien wess'har are moving to bring home to them the point that they can no longer act with impunity towards other species.

It's impossible to discuss The World Before in detail beyond the first chapter or so without committing major spoiler, so I'm not going to even try. I will say, though, that The World Before seems to me to be a book about consequences, both intended and unintended, and the conflict between the two (Of course, I'm re-rereading Huis Clos for college at the moment, so my perspectives on everything are kind of skewed). Characters develop in unexpected ways, particularly the reporter, Eddie, who comes to a choice between remaining an observer of events and deciding to act to influence them. His choice seems to me emblematic of the larger events of the story, and the larger themes. There are unexpected redemptions, as well, and a touch of grace at the end that left me feeling indefinably satisfied.

The World Before is one of those books that, when you come to the end of them, leave you struggling for words to describe the experience. There are only a handful of books that have left me with the same feeling, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls (I'll just take a minute here to say if you haven't read either of them, you really should. Really.) among them.

So, The World Before= Really Good Book (IMO, anyway). I'm waiting for the next in the series with the greatest of anticipation.

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It was a good thing the TWB was such a good book, since I'm halfway through writing a commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos that's driving me batty. Absolutely stark staring mad. It's my own fault for leaving it this long to start, of course. But still. Boring bloody existentialist crap.

Ahem. Rant ended. I'm going into college tomorrow (Sunday!) to the library to read my secondary reading, little as I want to consider Hegel's (not sure of name. There are so many bloody philosophers) master-slave dialectic as part of my reading of Sartre. I also have secondary reading on Beckett's En attendant Godot and an Archaeology essay to start on the illegal trade in antiquities (main question to consider: who owns the past?), which should at least be more interesting than the French literature part of Things To Do Tomorrow.

Having Things To Do always reminds me of Terry Pratchet's Jingo and Commander Vimes' personal Dis-Organiser. 'Things to do today: die', always cracks me up.

Just thought I'd share. *g*

Off to avoid doing work now.

Comments

Eh bien, continuons.

[otakuloki.livejournal.com]

I just felt the need to come in and offer this bit of cheerful thinking: If you think that Huis Clos is boring, do not read L'Etranger. Trust me on this.

(My third year French was entirely Existentialism. In retrospect I find it to have been more useful than what I was getting in English at the time: Shakespeare as porn writer. This is not to say that I object to the idea of looking at, and commenting upon the raciness in various Shakespeare plays, but when the class spends three weeks on Hamlet, and all but two days of that is spent on in depth in-class discussions of the various incestuous relationships, something is severely off-kilter.)

Re: Eh bien, continuons.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your good cheer :-). Trust me, as soon as I am finished with Huis Clos, any further attempts to get me to read Sartre (or any other French existentialist) will have to be accompanied by either a): a big hammer or b)the promise of Great Things that do not have to do with Meaninglessness.

when the class spends three weeks on Hamlet, and all but two days of that is spent on in depth in-class discussions of the various incestuous relationships, something is severely off-kilter.

That does sound a bit... unusual. We did Hamlet as part of our Leaving Cert syllabus (analogous to US high school, I think), and though incest was part of our study, I recal we focussed more on the anti-heroic aspects of Hamlet. And nihilism. Nihilism was big. :-)

Alas, literature is not something I do for fun. At least not anymore :-).