A Dance With Dragons - George R.R. Martin

The latest installment in the series, and in the interest of avoiding spoilers and redundancy, I'll not summarize or talk about the plot lines. But there is something about this book that irks me, although the irritation it inspires is different in kind than the one produced by its immediate precursor, A Feast for Crows, which was an overlong and overwrought chapter in the larger story. A Dance With Dragons is in fact of equivalent quality to the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, but it does not rise up to the excellence of the first and third books, A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords, respectively. And yet they all share the same fatal flaw, which, in the end might not be a flaw at all; namely, there is no end. It seems silly to view the series as a whole in critical terms until it's complete, and so you're left with mindless wondering about how the story will eventually unfold.

Although I can't help mindlessly speculate that the theme of the books will eventually be: Blood tells. Which is abhorrent, yet par for the course in the epic high fantasy genre, although I had hoped that Martin was trying to undermine this tired trope.

The Passion Artist - John Hawkes

Would it be necessary to pursue fleeing women into those ravished buildings? Would inmates and volunteers grapple with each other in dark rooms where ordinarily and under lock and key these same women slept during their endless and unnatural nights? In the midst of his fellows and standing inside the walls of La Violaine at last, suddenly he began to feel that he recognized the yard, the buildings, the catacombs and labyrinths of this world of women, as if he too were a prisoner in this very place and had always been so.
-pg 50 (Dalkey Archive ed)

The man referred to here is Konrad Vost, a widower who lives in a nameless city attached to a large women's prison called La Violaine. Vost lives an unremarkable life marked more by routine and habit than anything else, and aside from the demands of work and keeping his spare house in order for the sake of his daughter, he makes a daily visit to a cafe across from the prison, which is also called La Violaine, where the husbands and relatives of the incarcerated women all wait, each day, more as a ritual act of devotion than out of any expectation that their wives, daughters, or mothers will be freed. The woman for whom Vost waits is his mother, who is serving time for murdering Vost's father.

The only remarkable aspect of Vost's life is that it is defined by women, and not only by their mere absence or presence in his life, but also by their transgressions against him. His mother kills his father, his wife sleeps with another man, and, as the narrative unfolds, we find out that his daughter, far from being the perfect picture of a young student, has taken up prostitution. Later on, we come to find out that Vost's entire life has been one of suffered indignity at the hands of women, but in the story it is his daughter's turn toward prostitution that seems to jolt him into action. As soon as he finds out, he haplessly hires one of his daughter's schoolmates, who is a prostitute as well, and that marks the beginning of Vost's initial transformation into a man who is striving against the power that women seem to have had over his entire life.

After his tryst with the girl, the women in the prison riot, revolt and take control of the prison, forcing the men in the city to organize a response. Vost joins in and takes part in the battle for the prison, trading sex for violence in his struggle against women, and the violent and sex-filled narrative that follows is a peculiar odyssey of discovery and revelation, wherein Vost comes to understand and break free of the prison of his misogyny.

Thematically, the book runs the risk of being precious, or pat, but it is the way in which it is told that allows the book its modest success; Hawkes's nightmare-dread prose is operating at the same high caliber you would expect if you had read any of his other books. The physicality of the theme and the action matches well with his sensual style, and the horror intrinsic in his internal life is heightened by the dream-like quality of his writing. But, and there always seems to be a but for me when speaking of Hawkes, the book is not one of the best of his that I have read, and even the prose seems not to rise as high in its achievement as it does in, say, The Beetle Leg or The Lime Twig. Nevertheless, I know of no other book that treats the subject of misogyny so frighteningly, and Vost's strange cast of mind becomes, by the end, entirely familiar, even if its starting point of upended gender roles seems so alien at the beginning.

The God of Small Thing by Arundhati Roy

This is a book that I have begun many times but just recently pushed myself to finish! The story itself is wonderfully constructed; it has a gripping plot and the narrative is masterfully structured. In this story, Arundhati Roy unfolds the many layers of history belonging to a prominent Indian family in Ayemenem. The family has achieved its prominence through a pickling company founded by the grandmother. This factory becomes a central stronghold for the communist party, and even though the present owner of the factory, the son, is sympathetic to the worker’s needs, he is unable to meet their demands. This cleverly reveals the political climate of India while also tracing the family’s rise and fall.


The rise and fall of the family is also determined by the actions of the family members themselves. The narrative (3rd person) is structured in such a way so that the reader knows what will happen, but not quite how. Certain images from the story are woven in repeatedly before the event even takes place. In this sense the unfolding of the narrative is truly masterful, where the climax does not depend on the action itself because we are familiar with it, but at the exposure of the true personalities of the characters whence the events are properly described to us, some are hopeless, some helpless, but the most shocking character is cunningly and frighteningly evil.

Although the narrative is impressive, it must be said that the writing itself is abhorrently pretentious. The most concise example I can give is Roy’s use of similes. She uses them very liberally to the extent where two similes may be matched to one comparison. Automatically one way which Roy could improve her writing is by using only one simile per comparison. I have no idea why her editor did not think of that. Secondly, some similes were such far reaches and served no literary purpose. For example, she compares the permanence of something to government jobs. Being Greek, I know first-hand what that means, but it just didn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the novel. I understand that she is trying to emphasize the social and political climate of India, but she should save it for another novel rather than polluting this superbly structured story with useless words. I caught myself rolling my eyes many times while reading this novel.

If you can ignore the obnoxious similes and the other superfluous language that is pungent like perfume in the duty free stores of frantic and sleepless airports filled with bodies moving at different paces or like the intoxicating smell of diesel gas that somehow seeps into the car, even on cold days when the windows are rolled up tight to prevent the cold from biting, then I say read it because it is a meaningful story.