The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, 2011)

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, 2011)

My Wand is Better Than Yours

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
D: David Yates
S: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman

There’s something not quite right in saying that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment in the popular film series based on J. K. Rowling’s ridiculously successful collection of seven children’s books about a mostly hapless boy wizard, is the worst among all eight entries in the Warner Bros.-powered franchise. To say so is to assert that the film is, actually, bad. It is not. A more accurate manner of describing the film relative to its cinematic siblings is to say that it’s the least good of the bunch. If anything, this belief, held both by most viewers and by most critics, betokens the singular richness of the film series’ source material as well as the skill with which the filmmakers, within the span of a decade, adapted it—all six and two halves of it. 

Order of the Phoenix was the series directorial debut of the then virtually unknown David Yates. The film was a modest success (which is still saying something, considering that what is being spoken of is a goddamn Harry Potter film), fraught as it was from the start with the hazards of condensing the longest and arguably least good (not worst) Harry Potter book into two hours, more or less, of celluloid. The result was at best pleasant, a corrugated affair having many a montage sequence, more than what a typical inspirational sports movie holds. Nevertheless, it was indicative of Yates’s nascent flair for character- and plot-driven fantasy, away from his usual forays into social realism. Yates went on to direct the remaining installments, thereby displaying his developing authorial confidence: from his mind’s eye emerged the deliciously somber Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the affectingly wistful Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and, finally, the frantically fleet-footed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. But montage sequences are, three films and four years since the release of Order of the Phoenix, still among the things up Yates’s sleeve. To his credit, though, in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 their use is more compulsory than convenient. 

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pelikula

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 3) “The El Bimbo Variations” by Adam David (2010). Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” has been translated to numerous languages, not including, not surprisingly, Filipino. But not to worry: Adam David proudly presents “The El Bimbo Variations,” the closest thing—probably the only thing—Philippine literature has to a local version of Queneau’s masterpiece of verbal smithing. In it David subjects the famous first line of the Eraserheads song “Ang Huling El Bimbo” (“Kamukha mo si Paraluman nung tayo ay bata pa.”) to different sorts of formal treatments. Often he takes his cue from the work his literary forebear put in “Exercises in Style,” but he also includes new forms and techniques of playful textual manipulation interspersed with ingenious graphic material made in collaboration with illustrator Josel Nicolas and inspired by Matt Madden’s own tribute to Queneau, the graphic novel “99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.” Finding a more entertaining collection of renditions of a single line from a song will likely be an exercise in futility. “Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo” by Will Self (2005). J. G. Ballard’s disturbing novel of automotive paraphilia, “Crash,” is recalled in “Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual,” a fantastical yet sometimes all-too-real tale of a family man gone astray. It is the first of two short stories by English enfant terrible Will Self collected by Penguin UK as part of its series of 70 super-slim editions published in celebration of its 70th anniversary. The other is “A Story of Europe,” the tale of a toddler in London and a German businessman. It’s laden with wordplay, but it’s unnerving enough to warrant a comparison with any piece of New Yorker short fiction by Shirley Jackson. (Reviewed here.) “Mr. Thundermug” by Cornelius Medvei (2007). Fables, by conventional definition, is chock-full of animal characters. More often than not these animals talk, but they do only on their own plane of understanding and interaction, divorced from human comprehension and interference. Cornelius Medvei’s debut novella has for its main character a talking animal, a baboon inexplicably gifted with language—that most human of human abilities—and burdened with the reality of a mostly shortsighted society. But “Mr. Thundermug” is less a fable than an allegory, touching upon the elusiveness of intelligent conversation and emphasizing the importance of standing up for oneself even if one can hardly stand erect. (Reviewed here.) “Icarus at the Edge of Time” by Brian Greene (2008). This boardbook with words by popular astrophysicist Brian Greene and pictures by the Hubble Space Telescope reworks the Greek myth of Daedalus’s disobedient son into a futuristic tale that substitutes Icarus’s wax-bonded wings with a snazzy micro-warp-drive engine and couples its source’s lesson in overambition with an introduction to time-space dilation. Turns out rocket science makes much more sense when it’s outfitted with art direction by book designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd. (Reviewed here.) “Smaller and Smaller Circles” by F. H. Batacan (2002). The geometry implied in the title of this Palanca award winner hints at a case of asphyxiation waiting to happen. And it’s not a question of whodunit so much as an examination of a system oblivious of its own disease that this crime novel chooses to tackle. Shut the windows; this book is so invested with a perpetually gloomy atmosphere that reading it might bring about a thunderstorm.  Previous: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 3)

“The El Bimbo Variations” by Adam David (2010). Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” has been translated to numerous languages, not including, not surprisingly, Filipino. But not to worry: Adam David proudly presents “The El Bimbo Variations,” the closest thing—probably the only thing—Philippine literature has to a local version of Queneau’s masterpiece of verbal smithing. In it David subjects the famous first line of the Eraserheads song “Ang Huling El Bimbo” (“Kamukha mo si Paraluman nung tayo ay bata pa.”) to different sorts of formal treatments. Often he takes his cue from the work his literary forebear put in “Exercises in Style,” but he also includes new forms and techniques of playful textual manipulation interspersed with ingenious graphic material made in collaboration with illustrator Josel Nicolas and inspired by Matt Madden’s own tribute to Queneau, the graphic novel “99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.” Finding a more entertaining collection of renditions of a single line from a song will likely be an exercise in futility.

“Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo” by Will Self (2005). J. G. Ballard’s disturbing novel of automotive paraphilia, “Crash,” is recalled in “Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual,” a fantastical yet sometimes all-too-real tale of a family man gone astray. It is the first of two short stories by English enfant terrible Will Self collected by Penguin UK as part of its series of 70 super-slim editions published in celebration of its 70th anniversary. The other is “A Story of Europe,” the tale of a toddler in London and a German businessman. It’s laden with wordplay, but it’s unnerving enough to warrant a comparison with any piece of New Yorker short fiction by Shirley Jackson. (Reviewed here.)

“Mr. Thundermug” by Cornelius Medvei (2007). Fables, by conventional definition, is chock-full of animal characters. More often than not these animals talk, but they do only on their own plane of understanding and interaction, divorced from human comprehension and interference. Cornelius Medvei’s debut novella has for its main character a talking animal, a baboon inexplicably gifted with language—that most human of human abilities—and burdened with the reality of a mostly shortsighted society. But “Mr. Thundermug” is less a fable than an allegory, touching upon the elusiveness of intelligent conversation and emphasizing the importance of standing up for oneself even if one can hardly stand erect. (Reviewed here.)

“Icarus at the Edge of Time” by Brian Greene (2008). This boardbook with words by popular astrophysicist Brian Greene and pictures by the Hubble Space Telescope reworks the Greek myth of Daedalus’s disobedient son into a futuristic tale that substitutes Icarus’s wax-bonded wings with a snazzy micro-warp-drive engine and couples its source’s lesson in overambition with an introduction to time-space dilation. Turns out rocket science makes much more sense when it’s outfitted with art direction by book designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd. (Reviewed here.)

“Smaller and Smaller Circles” by F. H. Batacan (2002). The geometry implied in the title of this Palanca award winner hints at a case of asphyxiation waiting to happen. And it’s not a question of whodunit so much as an examination of a system oblivious of its own disease that this crime novel chooses to tackle. Shut the windows; this book is so invested with a perpetually gloomy atmosphere that reading it might bring about a thunderstorm. 

Previous: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2) “Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories” by Dan Rhodes (2000). Dan Rhodes puts his mastery of the literary double take on display in this collection of a hundred and one funny and sad short short love and unlove stories each told in a hundred and one words. (Reviewed here.) “Reportage on Lovers” by Quijano de Manila (1977). Nick Joaquin assumes the identity of his journalistic alter-ego in telling a quick succession of tales of, among many others, stolen kisses, inter-municipal liaisons, and love not at first sight but on second thought. There are only so many permutations of true love stories, whether ending in joy or tragedy, one can report before one shades into tedium, but Quijano de Manila seems equipped with a limitless writerly faculty that makes an otherwise dull and repetitive collection even more interesting than fiction.  “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” by E. L. Konigsburg (1967). The Newbery honors committee seldom, if at all, rewards a mediocre book, and one of the best of the best books to receive the award-giving body’s highest mark of recognition for a work of children’s literature is this novel about two siblings who run away from home to hide in a museum. But perhaps a greater honor is having joined J. D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” in inspiring key scenes in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.” (Reviewed here.) “03” by Jean-Christophe Valtat (2010). Devoid of paragraph breaks, “03” can surface and gasp for air only within the spaces, short as they are, intrinsic to periods and within the pauses, shorter still, afforded by commas, semicolons, and parenthetical marks. Jean-Christophe Valtat’s English language debut, smoothly translated from the French by Mitzi Angel, is the continuous monologue of a boy waiting at a school bus stop and admiring the “retarded” girl of his Joy Division-soundtracked dreams standing with her mother right across the asphalt-covered street. Its brevity and formal daring suggest a mode of unfoldment along the lines of Roth and Hrabal, but in its fixation with time, memory, and such precisely remembered acts as turning around inside acrylic curtains until one is wrapped tightly and out of breath, “03” is more Proustian than meets the eye. (Reviewed here.) “Exercises in Style” by Raymond Queneau (1947). A man walks into a bus. Leave it to Raymond Queneau, a founding member of the Oulipo school of constrictive writing, to take care of the rest, by applying above-phrase-level elegant variations—no less than 99 figures of speech, narrative tropes, and shifts in perspective—to counterpoint the banality of an altercation in a communal vehicle followed by the provision of unsolicited sartorial advice in a train station. “Exercises in Style,” which has been translated and at points adapted from the original French to over two dozen languages, most famously in English by Barbara Wright, is a primer in the appreciation of the flexibility and malleability of words. (Reviewed here.) Previous: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 1)Next: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 3)

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)

“Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories” by Dan Rhodes (2000). Dan Rhodes puts his mastery of the literary double take on display in this collection of a hundred and one funny and sad short short love and unlove stories each told in a hundred and one words. (Reviewed here.)

“Reportage on Lovers” by Quijano de Manila (1977). Nick Joaquin assumes the identity of his journalistic alter-ego in telling a quick succession of tales of, among many others, stolen kisses, inter-municipal liaisons, and love not at first sight but on second thought. There are only so many permutations of true love stories, whether ending in joy or tragedy, one can report before one shades into tedium, but Quijano de Manila seems equipped with a limitless writerly faculty that makes an otherwise dull and repetitive collection even more interesting than fiction. 

“From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” by E. L. Konigsburg (1967). The Newbery honors committee seldom, if at all, rewards a mediocre book, and one of the best of the best books to receive the award-giving body’s highest mark of recognition for a work of children’s literature is this novel about two siblings who run away from home to hide in a museum. But perhaps a greater honor is having joined J. D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” in inspiring key scenes in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.” (Reviewed here.)

“03” by Jean-Christophe Valtat (2010). Devoid of paragraph breaks, “03” can surface and gasp for air only within the spaces, short as they are, intrinsic to periods and within the pauses, shorter still, afforded by commas, semicolons, and parenthetical marks. Jean-Christophe Valtat’s English language debut, smoothly translated from the French by Mitzi Angel, is the continuous monologue of a boy waiting at a school bus stop and admiring the “retarded” girl of his Joy Division-soundtracked dreams standing with her mother right across the asphalt-covered street. Its brevity and formal daring suggest a mode of unfoldment along the lines of Roth and Hrabal, but in its fixation with time, memory, and such precisely remembered acts as turning around inside acrylic curtains until one is wrapped tightly and out of breath, “03” is more Proustian than meets the eye. (Reviewed here.)

“Exercises in Style” by Raymond Queneau (1947). A man walks into a bus. Leave it to Raymond Queneau, a founding member of the Oulipo school of constrictive writing, to take care of the rest, by applying above-phrase-level elegant variations—no less than 99 figures of speech, narrative tropes, and shifts in perspective—to counterpoint the banality of an altercation in a communal vehicle followed by the provision of unsolicited sartorial advice in a train station. “Exercises in Style,” which has been translated and at points adapted from the original French to over two dozen languages, most famously in English by Barbara Wright, is a primer in the appreciation of the flexibility and malleability of words. (Reviewed here.)

Previous: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 1)
Next: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 3)

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 1) “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). The first of quite a few books I read this year in tandem with watching their respective film adaptations, “Never Let Me Go” is a prime example of how and why science fiction and so-called literary fiction aren’t mutually exclusive. This novel by a perennial Booker favorite depicts a vaguely recognizable past retrofitted with advances in biogenetics as it deals with questions of identity and humanity and finding love in an emotionally cold climate.  “Winter’s Bone” by Daniel Woodrell (2006). Debra Granik may well have a nascent proclivity for film projects with the word “bone” in their titles, but it’s really no wonder why the “Down to the Bone” director dug up this “bone” from relative obscurity and made it into one of the best relatively obscure films of last year. This quiet story of a girl down on her luck in the wintry slopes of the Ozarks is an uncompromising look at the exigencies of finding (familial) love in a hopeless place.  “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu (2010). With his nonexistent canine sidekick, his clinically depressed personal digital assistant, and his daddy issues constantly in tow, time machine repairman Charles Yu attempts to navigate the future meta-science-fictional Minor Universe 31 in this dizzyingly crafty novel written by present-day, happily-married-with-two-kids Charles Yu. Naturally, along the way the fictional Charles Yu stumbles upon a guide book titled “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.” Don’t panic: “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” the novel, is genuinely respectful of the legacy of the great Douglas Adams, even as its protagonist seems intent on seeking an answer other than 42 to life, the universe, and everything.  “Room” by Emma Donoghue (2010). The narrator is a boy named Jack. He’s only five years old, but he already has an idea of negative integers. There is, however, a lot of things he doesn’t yet understand as clearly as other kids of his age already do. Jack has seen nothing of the world beyond Room, where he and his beloved Ma are kept captive by a heartless man they call Old Nick. Inspired by the famous Fritzl abduction case, “Room” reverberates with alternating currents of domestic peril and universal concern.  “True Grit” by Charles Portis (1968). Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is the story of socialite Jay Gatsby eloquently told by his friend, Nick Carraway, “True Grit” is the story of marshal Rooster Cogburn told by the older and wiser voice of his teenage companion, Mattie Ross. True, but only partly; “True Grit” is as much Cogburn’s tale of heroism as it is Mattie’s bildungsroman. And like “The Great Gatsby,” “True Grit” is a Great American Novel. True, wholly. Next: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 1)

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). The first of quite a few books I read this year in tandem with watching their respective film adaptations, “Never Let Me Go” is a prime example of how and why science fiction and so-called literary fiction aren’t mutually exclusive. This novel by a perennial Booker favorite depicts a vaguely recognizable past retrofitted with advances in biogenetics as it deals with questions of identity and humanity and finding love in an emotionally cold climate. 

“Winter’s Bone” by Daniel Woodrell (2006). Debra Granik may well have a nascent proclivity for film projects with the word “bone” in their titles, but it’s really no wonder why the “Down to the Bone” director dug up this “bone” from relative obscurity and made it into one of the best relatively obscure films of last year. This quiet story of a girl down on her luck in the wintry slopes of the Ozarks is an uncompromising look at the exigencies of finding (familial) love in a hopeless place. 

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu (2010). With his nonexistent canine sidekick, his clinically depressed personal digital assistant, and his daddy issues constantly in tow, time machine repairman Charles Yu attempts to navigate the future meta-science-fictional Minor Universe 31 in this dizzyingly crafty novel written by present-day, happily-married-with-two-kids Charles Yu. Naturally, along the way the fictional Charles Yu stumbles upon a guide book titled “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.” Don’t panic: “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” the novel, is genuinely respectful of the legacy of the great Douglas Adams, even as its protagonist seems intent on seeking an answer other than 42 to life, the universe, and everything. 

“Room” by Emma Donoghue (2010). The narrator is a boy named Jack. He’s only five years old, but he already has an idea of negative integers. There is, however, a lot of things he doesn’t yet understand as clearly as other kids of his age already do. Jack has seen nothing of the world beyond Room, where he and his beloved Ma are kept captive by a heartless man they call Old Nick. Inspired by the famous Fritzl abduction case, “Room” reverberates with alternating currents of domestic peril and universal concern. 

“True Grit” by Charles Portis (1968). Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is the story of socialite Jay Gatsby eloquently told by his friend, Nick Carraway, “True Grit” is the story of marshal Rooster Cogburn told by the older and wiser voice of his teenage companion, Mattie Ross. True, but only partly; “True Grit” is as much Cogburn’s tale of heroism as it is Mattie’s bildungsroman. And like “The Great Gatsby,” “True Grit” is a Great American Novel. True, wholly.

Next: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)