Final Quotes of Awesome, August 2012

Melinda Beasi on La Cordo d'Oro: "For while I realize that the story of a teenager prioritizing her feelings for a boy over a personal dream she’s worked her ass off to achieve is probably more realistic than most of us would like to acknowledge, I think it may have finally eclipsed my tolerance for the series’ lack of devotion to its subject. "

Jason Thompson on Hoshin Engi: "It's like Chekov's gun: don't show a snake pit in your manga unless you're prepared to have the hero get thrown in it and survive!!"

Khursten on est em: "I love how Est Em picks stories from the most random of places. It’s as if she saying that no matter what space we occupy, people will always have their stories to tell."

F.J. DeSanto on Cyborg 009: "There's more of a hopefulness in 'Cyborg 009' where the cast takes this awful thing that's happened to them – that they've been abducted and turned into weapons of destruction – and uses it for the exact opposite purpose for what they were intended to do. I think in there, there's a message for these times that it's not always about power but it's about what you do with them."

Melinda Beasi on Tokyo Babylon: "I knew the truth, but I didn’t expect the consequences, if that makes sense."

Brain Vs. Book on Gad Sfortunato: "And I cannot get enough of multiple perspectives on the same event. I love seeing how a single event can impact people in so many different ways. It’s fascinating to me that an afterthought for one person can be lifechangingly significant for another."

Give a writer a break, here (Kingyo Used Books)

I came across this bit of a review in one of the brief moments I was able to look at some other people's blogs in the last six months (I promise I'll be more faithful in December once my commitments for this semester end), and it made me think as a writer.

"For all the tears and shouting, however, Kingyo Used Books is dramatically unpersuasive. The stories are too literal, positing a simple, direct connection between the content of a book and a reader’s subsequent behavior; it’s as if I read Middlemarch then decided to dump my pedantic boyfriend — sure, it could happen, but literature tends to effect us in subtler, less obvious ways, influencing our perception of things, rather than what we do. "

While I don't disagree with these statements, I wonder if maybe we need to cut the author a little slack.  If the author didn't show that simple, direct connection that leads to action, these would be stories about people making not-really dramatic, not-exactly life-changing realizations about stuff.  Realizations do not make for riveting manga.  Characters who don't take action are considered the bane of novel and short story writers' existences.  It is a very rare author who can make people having a conversation interesting enough to be a single story, even rarer for people coming to mental conclusions or being subtly influenced by things they read.  Think of trying to do it lots of times as part of a series.  Yeah.  Difficult.

I suspect Kingyo's purpose is not pedantic, not, "You should read manga because it will change your life." 

It can change you, sure.  What we read can influence us and probably does in a lot of subtle, unconscious ways.  I remember when a friend of mine finally read books from my favorite series.  He said he saw a lot of similarities between me and the main character.  I never consciously tried to be like that main character (who is in the military, crippled, living in the future, and slightly psychotic), but the fact that I've read the books about him more than a dozen times has left a mark on who I am that someone else who knew me could connect and see.  Again, not the stuff of short-story length drama.

We've probably all read books that have influenced our behaviors and personalities and even changed us, and when I read Kingyo, that's what gives me the warm fuzzies.  People can make connections through books (to themselves, to others), and sometimes it's something they read (on top of all the other things that have been going on in their lives for years that we can't see) that allows them to change or shows them their need for change in a way that they can't exactly articulate, a way that's often quite sideways from what actually literally happened in the book.

The literalness in Kingyo may seen ham-handed, but it lets us get access to the information about obscure manga and see that people still believe in the power of books to change people literally and figuratively even in a different culture.  Kingyo may not change your life, but it might add to your reading list and your store of knowledge, something every bibliophile can appreciate.

Also, in that series of reviews was this awesome quote:  "I’m normally immune to whimsy."  Wouldn't Normally Immune to Whimsy be a great name for a rock band?

Crushed by (crushing on?) not simple

I recently finished that quietly devastating work of literary fiction by Natsume Ono called not simple.

Things that impressed me included the following:

• Reverse chronology as necessity
• Tightly polished artistry
• Distancing techniques to prevent brutality from becoming melodrama
• Beautiful intersection of form and content
• Trust in readers to follow story and understand
• Title and its relationship to form and content

USE OF REVERSE CHRONOLOGY
Knowing how a story ends chronologically does not have to kill the narrative tension.  not simple tells bits of the story mostly going backwards as the book advances toward the end (and not quite the beginning). 

TIGHTLY POLISHED ARTISTRY
Every conversation, every line of dialogue accomplishes multiple purposes.  The story you thought you knew because you knew the ending keeps needing revision in the reader's mind.  I had to stop reading to ponder each new, horrific revelation and how it affected the future I had previously read about and what I had seen of the past, etc.  The reread value for this one will be quite high with all the revelations, nuance, subtext, and other well-done stuff.

DISTANCING TECHNIQUES
This story could so easily be a melodrama.  One way the author avoided this slide was the use of emotionally stunted characters under-responding (not just to keep things from being hysterical but because that's who they are and how they would respond).  No histrionics here, folks, just tragic people trapped in fractured relationships (reflected in the short, choppy, fragmented scenes and non-linear progression of the story) dealing with blow after blow until they reach an end you already know from the beginning.  Scenes that could have been shown but would have pushed things over the edge were related as conversations, often relayed second-hand.  We learn about characters by what is unsaid and by their actions.  The balance between show and tell feels organic and pitch-perfect.

I was reminded of Fumi Yoshinaga's adult works while I was admiring the use of distancing techniques.  Sometimes Ono drops the most heinous, distasteful information in a similarly casual manner.  It's out there; it happened, no use getting all hysterical.  (Ono does not seem to share Yoshinaga's sometimes gleeful use of shocking, frank, and R-rated dialogue, another interesting distancing technique.)

This work also made me think of the adult works of est em.  That choppy style of cutting from scene to scene without warning reminded me of Red Blinds the Foolish and the jumpy chronology made me think of Age Called Blue.  There is also a shared non-standard (in legal English language manga) sketchy art style and a penchant for very literary, experimental storytelling

BEAUTIFUL INTERSECTION OF FORM AND CONTENT
This story has to be told as a graphic novel.  There is not enough inner monologue for it to work as a prose story.  As a story made of text alone, it would be too bleak and too talky while also being too image-driven.  Pictures make this story work (you know the cliche about how much a picture is worth).  At the same time, I don't think this would make a good film.  The chronological jumping around and all the fragmented, short scenes would make my head hurt, and the emotional deadness would be hard for living actors to portray, I think, without trending towards the outrageous melodrama.

TRUST IN READERS
There are a lot of times where Ono doesn't spell things out, but careful readers will feel the craters left by the implications of specific lines.  No way, so that's why . . .   Yes, that's why, dear reader, but the author doesn't bludgeon you with it and never intrudes as a narrator.  It's up to you to find the heartbeats of the story.

TITLE
The phrase not simple is used by people to describe the protagonist's life and life story.  It could be used of just about every piece of the work itself.  The characters are complex, and you could sum up their situations in a trivial way, sometimes, but it's more complicated than it seems.  Not artificially complicated, just organically complex.  Could the story have been told just as engaginly in straight chronological order?  Yeah, probably.  But it wasn't told with the mixed chronology as a gimmick.  I get the sense that the author told it that way, so she could end it with the heartbreaking hopeful tone she does.  Does it have a happy ending?  Well, yes and no and more no but also kind of a bafflingly uplifting yes.  It's just not that simple to explain. 

You should probably read it to find out.