Kassandra

After reading The Reader with it's short chapters and neat little sections, Christa Wolf's Kassandra was a heck of a change of pace. I started trying to read it side-by-side with the English translation, before quickly realising that a) stream-of-consciousness writing does not work in side-by-side mode, and b) the German version was far too dense.

So I switched to straight English translation (I tip my hat to the translator, Jan Van Heurck, who managed to take a completely delirious text and make it completely delirious). It's cheating, but I am trying to read other texts in German. Books more at my reading level (around about 8 Jahre alt, at present). Krashen (who likes to cite himself), Day and Bamford, Brown and a few other theorists would tell you it's better to read within my level or a little beyond it if I want to actually gain anything, linguistically. Too far out of my depth and it all becomes noise.

Kassandra came out at the same time as Bradley's Mists of Avalon and clearly shared a lot of the same Zeitgeist. Both took an essentially "masculine" series of myths and legends and plonked a priestess smack in the middle of it all.

In Bradley's book it was the Arthurian cycles, and she used Morgaine as the focal point. For Wolf, it was the Battle of Troy seen through the eyes of Cassandra. There are a lot of interesting cross-overs between those two books, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone has already written a thesis about it.

These days, all the stuff about priestesses and goddesses is a bit old hat, but back in the early 80s it would have been very much new shoes (oh, look, I've slipped into The Last Resort again). It's very strange to think that, if I were reading these books back when they were first released, I would be thinking about Feminism* - it would be foremost in my mind, and I would be seeing Feminist messages all over the place throughout both texts.

Having read them in the 2000s, though, I just enjoy the story - I have to be reminded that they are Feminist texts by reading other papers as it simply doesn't occur to me.

I think if I had been given a stronger education in "the classics", I would have found Kassandra terribly clever. I couldn't help shake the feeling that Wolf was using Cassandra's stream-of-consciousness ramblings and her role as an unreliable narrator to weave together various versions of the legends that might not be entirely complementary. However, my knowledge of Troy is sadly lacking. I never read The Iliad (well, who has?), or The Aenid, and I'd only read a little of Euripides. 

Besides that, I had a mild obsession with Greek myths in my childhood that lead me to read a few books about gods and things - but children's books never really go into much detail. So a lot of Kassandra was new and exciting and different... and confusing.

Now feel I need to find other works dealing with Troy in order to figure out what was going on half the time. You know - texts that have a beginning, middle and end.


 *I would also have been three years old, and thus a genius.

The Dare

"Nobody reads The Iliad."

Helen had been telling me about the Kindle App, which she had downloaded onto her smartphone. With great excitement she told me she had already downloaded a few free books - including The Iliad.

(Kindle. App. Smartphone. I wonder how long it will be before those words become complete nonsense once again? A few years from now, will any part of what I've just written make sense apart from the words "book" and "Iliad"?)

I asked her why she went to the trouble of downloading a book she was never going to read.

"I am going to read it," she insisted, "I've been meaning to read it for years."
"You're a librarian. If you were going to read it you could have borrowed it long ago."
"But now I've got it on my phone, so I can just read it wherever I am."

I told her I thought portability was irrelevant. It wouldn't matter how easy it was to access, she still wouldn't read it - nobody reads The Iliad.

"People just download it because it's free and it makes them feel smart to think they might read it one day, but no one reads The Iliad unless they have to."
"Well, I'm going to read it."
"No you won't."
"I'm going to start it tonight!"
"Lots of people start reading it - that doesn't count. You won't finish it."
"I will!"

She almost looked like she believed it.

"Okay," I said, "in that case I dare you to read it."
"What?"
"I dare you to read The Iliad."
"You dare me to read this book?"
"All the way from start to finish. And on your phone. I'll give you... $7.50 if you finish it."
"That's ridiculous."
"It's enough to buy a small coffee and a piece of cake. Maybe. And now I've given you a reason to read The Iliad, and I still don't think you'll do it."

She stared at me, incredulously, for a moment. And then:

"All right, you're on."

I smiled, knowing my money was completely safe.

"You're not going to read The Iliad."

And so these little moments pass into our personal mythologies. A few weeks ago I was talking to another colleague about Greek mythology, and they mentioned The Iliad.

"I've never read The Iliad," said Bronwyn.
"Well," I replied, "No one ever does. A couple of years ago I dared Helen to read it."
"Oh, yeah," said Helen, "That's right, you dared me to read it on my phone..."
"And did you?" asked Bronwyn.
"Um. No."

Nobody reads the Iliad.

The Last Resort

The other day, as I was browsing through the graphic novels in the Teen Fiction section of my local library, I stumbled across The Last Resort.

This seemed a bit odd to me, as it isn't a graphic novel - it's a picture book - and the last time I stumbled across this book it was in the Junior Fiction section. Mind you, that was very possibly a different library.

I can see why people would have difficulty classifying this book - it's an odd bingdingle of a thing. It is a picture book, but it's on the deep side. The book is very literary, and the more classic texts and old movies you've encountered the more you are likely to appreciate it. I would have loved it when I was ten, because I was the kind of freak who wanted to read unabridged classics as a child.

This is a picture book for people who love picture books, and a picture book for people who love literature. It's a book for people like me - which is probably why I've come back to it a few times.

I've borrowed it a couple of times - and will probably buy it if I stumble across it in a store - and I usually read it several times over when I have it in my possession. And yet I don't know if I like it - or, if I do, why. It's strangely compelling, for a book I can't completely engage with.

The Last Resort is clearly Roberto Innocenti's baby. It's the only work I've seen by this illustrator, and I love it. I am completely captivated by every image in the book. I find myself sinking into the pictures and feeling stirred by the hints of story woven into them. The resort he has illustrated is so well realised that I want to jump into his pictures like the chalk drawings in Mary Poppins.

Every now and then I see a picture I wish I'd seen as a child, because I would have loved to let my imagination roam through the image the way I used to when I was a kid. I haven't lost the ability completely, but I know I'm not as good at it as I used to be. The Last Resort is full of images that I want to bubble through my dreams.

But then... But then the story itself is oddly distancing. I don't know what it is, but I just can't sink into the story (as written) the same way I sink into the story as illuminated in the pictures. It's as if the text is moving at a different rhythm to the illustrations.

I've noticed this a few times, when I've found a book that was clearly driven by the illustrator, but not written by him. It's almost as if the writer cannot catch the illustrator's fire the same way the illustrator can catch the writer's. While the story is obviously Innocenti's story, the text is by J. Patrick Lewis. I don't know if it consists of Lewis' original words, or if he translated much for Innocenti, but it seems oddly hollow - as if it is skimming across the surface of the story without diving in.

There's something odd about the way the story is told. It's as though the book is trying to be poetic and prosaic at the same time - inspiring a sense of wonder and mystery, but revealing the answers almost as soon as it poses the questions. There are points where you feel like saying: "No, wait, let me play with this a bit more", but then the story has moved on to something else...

Some of that will be Innocenti's story, and some of it will be Lewis' words - it just always feels as if there's something missing. Some lost opportunity. There are riddles posed at the end of the book that should have been posed at the beginning. There are clues that seem to be delivered almost out of order. In the end, you can't quite work out if it was magical and wondrous, or just a strange little story.

Speaking of the story - it is a little bit magical and wondrous. An artist (Innocenti) has lost his imagination and decides to go on a trip to find it. On a whim, he pulls off the main road onto a dirt track and drives to the end of it - where he finds The Last Resort.

This is a magical beach-side resort (it seems to have the ability to grow rooms at whim and - TARDIS-like - is bigger on the inside) with an odd assortment of guests - all of which have lost something. They seem to have found their way to the resort, and now they are waiting for whatever they've lost to come and find them there. Once they've found it (or it has found them), they have to leave to make room for new guests.

If these characters seem a little familiar, that's probably because you may have read about them before. They are characters from books, writers, historical figures, actors - and there's even one archetype.

The mystery of the book is in working out who these guests are... or is it? The artist doesn't seem to take long puzzling over it. And while some characters are quite obvious, some are never clear.

The mystery of the book is working out how these characters are connected to each other... or is it? There are a few moments, but nothing that actually feels like a story, as such. You find out that one character was looking for another character barely a moment before he finds her.

The mystery of the book is in working out what each character needs to find... but then, you don't learn the other half of each matching set until the very end.

Ah, but what's not to love about a magical sea-side resort run by a parrot in which guests can come from every corner of fiction or history to search for something they've lost?

It's uneven, yet marvellous. I'm not sure I enjoyed reading it the last time, and yet I want to read it again. It will push you and pull you and take you to a place that is so very much worth visiting, yet leave you with a sense of unfinished business.

An odd bingdingle of a book, indeed.