Posts tagged review

The Queue
by Vladimir Sorokin

First published in 1985, six years before the collapse of the political environment that serves as both its subject and its setting, Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue delineates human society by zeroing in on a massive line of people in a Muscovite suburb in the 1970s. During and around that period it was perfectly normal for a citizen to fall in line and wait for his turn to buy imported quality goods, even when he’s unsure of the length of time he had to endure before he finally arrived at the head of the line and more unsure of the exact nature of the products he’s about to purchase. In The Queue, Sorokin, a writer who clearly possesses a sharp eye for the minutiae of life ordinary, presents an often amusing analysis of the quotidian phenomenon that is the queue and shows off its little-known and seldom acknowledged capacity for social commentaries and personal revelations.

Queues, particularly the long and winding ones, were ordinary occurrences in Soviet Russia. Just ask Sorokin himself, who, in his afterword to the novel, waxes nostalgic about the disappearance of the monster queue upon the dissolution of the Soviet era. But while The Queue may sound like a ballad dedicated to days gone by, right at the outset the contemporary relevance of this quarter-century-old novel is already hinted at, beginning as it does with a newcomer uttering a variation of a question frequently asked today in light rail transit stations, ATM booths, Apple product launches, and disaster relief goods distribution centers: “Comrade, who’s last in the queue?” It’s a question, it turns out, that was more frequently asked then. Back in the Soviet era whenever something from abroad was put up for sale, be it a heap of American blue jeans, a stockpile of Turkish footwear, or a collection of Japanese electronic appliances, people were naturally expected to line up by the thousands. Sorokin makes a spectacle out of this observation in his novel, where he conjures up a formidable group of characters, most of them unnamed and only a handful of them brought to the fore of the story, compelled to queue up for whatever is waiting for them—or, rather, whatever they’re supposed to be waiting for—at the head of the line.

—They’re nice imported ones, I saw them.
—I couldn’t get up there. Couldn’t even get near.
—I saw some that a woman had got.
—Nice colour?
—Quite nice—greyish-brown.
—Suede-look?
—Uh-huh.
—Nonsense, young man. They’re leather.
—Leather?
—Really?
—They can’t be, I saw them myself…
—Quite right, but they only had the suede type this morning; they ran out by lunchtime. Now they’re leather—dark brown.
—Oh, hell.

The Queue is, from start to finish, true to its name. Structurally it’s nothing more than a sequence of sentences, phrases, fragments, interjections, omissions, and even unintelligible murmurs. It does away with any and all traditional forms of narration, description, and authorial intervention and operates instead with a succession of quotation dashes and unattributed lines of dialogue, as exemplified by the foregoing excerpt. In the absence of dashes and dialogue there is only silence, a break in the narrative, if it can be called that, in the form of blank acid-free pages signifying the queuers’ collective suspension of consciousness, their taking refuge in sleep after a day of waiting, talking, complaining, arguing, pushing, roll-calling, smoking, drinking, and trying their luck at love. Yes, love and life and Levi’s.

A singularly engaging debut novel by one of the most luminous figures of contemporary Russian literature, The Queue is unabashedly postmodern. In its justified peculiarity a microcosm teeming with the absurdities of everyday life emerges; a celebration of organized chaos as the oxymoronic term applies to human society the novel, if indeed it can be called that, becomes.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
by Lynne Truss

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
     “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
     “I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”
     The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
     “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

This joke, which appears right at home as a filler on a page of Reader’s Digest and hardly calls for a round of badum tish, has become a classic illustration of the importance of correct punctuation since the publication of the bestselling book that made it famous several years ago. The book in question is Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. “So, punctuation really does matter,” the book says, “even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.”

I’m a self-styled grammar and punctuation stickler, but I’ll be the first one to admit that the chances of a black-and-white, primarily herbivorous bear-like animal entering your business establishment or even your home, eating your burger and fries, firing gunshots in the air, then exiting as though what it just did was perfectly normal on account of an extraneous comma in a reference book that transformed a pairing of a simple present tense transitive verb (eats) and its noun-phrase direct compound object (shoots and leaves) into a series of simple present tense habitual verbs (eats, shoots and leaves) are practically nil. Translation: Don’t panic. Unless pandas stop being complacent and go beyond cutely eating bamboo shoots and leaves and cutely sneezing to their mothers’ surprise in YouTube videos by developing the advanced facility to read and the even more advanced ability to recognize ambiguities caused by grammatical faux pas, we don’t have to worry about them taking our favorite food and endangering our precious lives. But I stand firm like the sarcasm-denoting temherte slaq (although I’m in no way being sarcastic) in supporting Truss’s (yes, that’s an apostrophe and an s) proposition that we pay attention every now and then if not ideally all the time to proper grammar and punctuation. I told you I’m a stickler.

“Sticklers, unite!” is Truss’s battlecry, and its reverberations are felt throughout the book. She is, of course, calling for grammatical sticklers like her to band together and counter the decline of punctuation, which may or may not be the decline of civilization itself. For those who don’t know what a grammatical stickler is, Truss gives a pretty accurate definition:

Grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. Honestly, what an annoying bunch of people.

Indeed, Truss, not unlike her stickler friends (myself included), can be so annoying and ruthless as to say,

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler.

Apparently, I’m no average stickler, or else I’d be guilty of multiple homicide. Thank God.

With playful chapter titles like “That’ll Do, Comma” and “Cutting a Dash,” Truss puts forth both a brief history of punctuation and a straightforward punctuation guide in Eats, Shoots & Leaves. She considers, not without humor and self-reference, the versatile apostrophe (which greengrocers tend to violate in their signs for “FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLE’S”), the ubiquitous comma (whose appearance has been likened by Nicholson Baker to “the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiralling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas”), the intoning question mark (of which Gertrude Stein was not a fan), and the snooty semicolon (which Donald Barthelme thought was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”), among other common punctuation marks. She also mentions the rise of the punctuation mark-based emoticon and, in the manner of Roger Ebert pointing the finger on the growing popularity of e-books for what he perceives as the present generation’s underappreciation of The Great Gatsby and 10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories (It took me great restraint not to put an Oxford comma between Toasts and and.), says that the Internet—you know, that place with all the grammatically challenged but deadly cute feline creatures—and text messaging are partly responsible for the widespread mistreatment of the subtle art of punctuation.

Truss is a prolific print and broadcast journalist hailing from England, and Eats, Shoots & Leaves is decidedly British, retaining its British English conventions in its American edition. But Truss, rather scathingly, makes sure to point out a few important differences between American and British English punctuation terms and rules, with which the very British Lord Voldemort himself agrees:

You say “parentheses” while we say “brackets”—but to people who call an apostrophe “one of them floating comma things” it doesn’t matter very much. They are unlikely to spot that American usage interestingly places all terminal punctuation inside closing quotation marks, while British usage sometimes “picks and chooses”. (Like that.)

All the same, whether you’re on this side of the Atlantic or that, whether you’re inclined to write, “A woman, without her man, is nothing,” or “A woman: without her, man is nothing,” and whether you uphold the Oxford comma or not, there’s something to like about and plenty to learn from Truss and her trigger-happy panda.

Light Boxes
by Shane Jones

It’s not discombobulating so much as overwhelming. In Shane Jones’s debut novel slash fable slash collection of fragments, February not only refers to a month but also to a man, not only to a man but also to a mental state, not only to a mental state but also to a multitude of other similar metaphors. Often, it’s all of these at once, and the effect is not discombobulating so much as overwhelming.

February—in this sentence or in any of the succeeding sentences or in any of the many sentences in the book that succeed at effecting in the reader simultaneous confusion and amazement, whether the word specifically means a month, a man, a mental state, or a multitude of metaphors, is in the long haul not a matter of utmost import—has outstayed its welcome for at least three hundred days in a town that by Jones’s sporadic direct descriptions appears to be a cross between a Seussian village and a set straight out of a Henry Selick production. The town would have had its “mountains on top of mountains” blanketed with arcadian contentment and its idiosyncratic inhabitants filled with the most simple joy of, among many others, flying kites were it not for February’s cruel decision to overstay. But what’s the deal with February anyway? He wants to stay a while longer, and by “a while” it means three hundred days or more. So what? The town, you see, is also very likely located in the Northern Hemisphere, that part of the world where February is synonymous to winter, and now you see February take on another form: not an entire season so much as a climate, one of cold and darkness, one of gloom and desperation.

If winter is indeed nature’s way of saying, “Up yours,” then in the novel February is practically giving the townspeople the finger. He is something of a meteorological tyrant. He loathes anything that flies and hates the very idea of flying with a passion so burning, obviously from being phenomenally cold, that he wants anything that flies banned and the very idea of flying eliminated. He enlists a band of residents obsequious enough to help him enforce his law: “They confiscated textbooks, tore out pages about birds, flying machines, Zeppelins, witches on brooms, balloons, kites, winged mythical creatures. They crumpled up paper airplanes the children had folded, and they dumped the pages into a burning pit in the woods. […] Some of the priests felt tears roll down their cheeks but didn’t feel sadness.” Such horrifying deeds must be at least explained if not completely justified. Surely February has his reasons for enlisting priests, of all people, for his army of law enforcers and above all for punishing a town where people just want to fly kites?

February does have his reasons. Jones just chooses not to divulge them right away because February chooses not to divulge them right away (hint, hint), and it’s not until just past the halfway point of the novel that a straightforward clue about February’s intentions for cursing the town with never-ending winter as well as about the why and wherefore of the novel itself is given in the form of a list of “Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness,” which includes J.K. Rowling and the creator of MySpace as well as postmodern literary heavyweights such as Richard Brautigan, author of one of the novel’s obvious inspirations, In Watermelon Sugar, and Italo Calvino, author of the seminal If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (again: hint, hint).

Suffice it to say that following February’s commandment is a war effort aimed at putting an end to the unpleasant combination of frigid weather conditions and more frigid personal dispositions brought about by February, led by an intrepid husband and father named Thaddeus and a group of bird-masked former balloonists who call themselves, whether appropriately or not remains to be seen, the Solution. What takes place thereafter is a deceptively beautiful and poignant story of family and community, of strange sentences (“I vomit ice cubes.” “Thaddeus faced the Solution, holding his basket of apples tight against his chest.”) and precious phrases (“an iceberg melting in her folded hands,” “the girl who smelled of honey and smoke”), of strife and resistance, of multiple narrators and zero quotation marks, of hope and resilience, of poetic digressions and typesetting tricks (some prefer the somewhat pejorative term, gimmicks), of yearning and loss, of creation and re-creation. It is a fairy tale playfully hiding behind a façade of metafiction (Oops. Sorry, I slipped.) supposedly about the horror of seasonal affective disorder. Hence the title, Light Boxes.