civil war perversity ~ gee, i know how to pick 'em

[lookingland]

no. 16 on my 50bookchallenge is jack dann's The Silent. this is a book i bought years ago, started, then put down and hadn't gone back to. when i moved, i almost gave it away, but i kept it at the last minute thinking i'd get around to reading it.

last night i got around to reading it. i stuck with it, though i remembered why i had stopped reading it in the first place. it's got a first person narrator who's allegedly writing the book as instructed by a doctor for "therapuetic" reasons (yeah, it's already stretching my believability ~ and then it reads like no 14 year-old boy would ever write, with both profanities and eloquence that just make you shake your head in wonder).

you get over that and into the story and it gets even more tedious. like a catalog of checked-off war horrors. decapitated head (check), bloated body (check), amputated leg (check). worse yet, it felt as though jack dann sat around thinking: what disgusting, horrible thing can i do to this character next? between the rape and murder of his mother, the protagonist's own rape by a yankee malingerer (huh? this moment is so random!), gratuitous masturbation, his run-in with a pedophile colonel (geh! stop!), and then the buckets of blood and entrails and maggots (oh the maggots!), i was pretty bored and tired of it rather quick. i never knew horror could be so dull.

and ask anyone: i'm the last person to defend stonewall jackson, but dann's insinuation that jackson was a closet drunk is just ludicrous.

sadly, some of the writing is very good (some phrases, some descriptions are wonderful!), but the effect overall is repetitious and ham-fisted (and how many times do we have to repeat about the guy shot in the head with the maggots oozing out of the wound?)--(not to mention those are the fastest maggots in the world the way they spontaneously generate after a battle. maggots take 24 hours to hatch and up to three days to mature).

other weirdness in the book include how the temperature was hot and then cold and then snowing, but not really. and there were characters who were there, but not, and had died but were alive. i think part of this is supposed to be the state of trauma of the character, but it was very confusing and the symbol of the "spirit dog" that follows the boy was utterly pointless and wasted.

i found the following review on amazon and pretty much agree with it:

Jack Dann's "The Silent" features a mix of overheated spiritualism, glaringly anarchronistic dialogue, and an embarrassingly voyeuristic approach to sex that left me chuckling inwardly at the same time I reproached myself for wasting my time on this bit of historical deconstructionism. Interestingly, one scene in a field hospital and another describing preparations for battle were so vivid and truthful that I was even more astounded by Dann's novelistic chicanery. Lump this in with "Cold Mountain" as one of the more wayward and self-indulgent misuses of American history in a novel.

(bold emphasis mine). a big disappointment, to say the least. and after i'd held on to it for so many years!

: o p

i guess the good thing to come out of this is that i'm reminded to ease up on the clutch when it comes to the sex and gore in my own writing. i could very easily fall into the same trap given some of the plot elements of my own work. i might reread Stewart O'Nan's Prayer for the Dying to be reminded that real horror isn't what the writer shows you, it's what you piece together from what's not being said.

Comments

[mrspadfoot.livejournal.com]

MAN I ranted in my lj a while back aboiut the Cold Mountain movie. I rented it because the cover showed a big Civil War battle and I took it home and was just ticked to see that it was a stupid love story and the only cool Civil War bits were the first 7 minutes and it was sucky Cold Harbor. Poor Ulysses! I took it back more angry and upset. For real, why put a Civil War battle on the front if it's not about the Civil War battles at all. That's like putting a train on the cover of the Titanic.

I'm ticked just thinking about it.

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

hahahahahahahaha ~ that about sums up my reaction to Cold Mountain as well. i was so excited when the previews came out that i ran out and watched it at the theatre. i was so irritated at how fascile and lame the story was. blargh! then i tried reading the book hoping maybe the movie had just ruined a good book. after three chapters i gave up. there's only so much waxing poetic about killing a chicken that i think human beings ought to be forced to tolerate.

: o p

[bachsoprano.livejournal.com]

An Ode, On Killing a Chicken....

Small thing, clucking in my hands,
Why dost thou struggle so?

Okay...I'll stop there.....hee!

[bachsoprano.livejournal.com]

If he had only told the story from the maggots' POV, maybe he would have had something...

Glad I didn't read it though...icky foo!

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

between the cliches, the anachronism, and the gratuities, i don't think even the viewpoint of a maggot could have helped this one ~

~ hahahahaha

: D

his other book about da vinci (The Memory Cathedral) got rave reviews. but i don't think i'll read it.

: o p

[bachsoprano.livejournal.com]

Ugh....well...without talking maggots, I don't think I'd read either one! :)

[utter-scoundrel.livejournal.com]

"other weirdness in the book include how the temperature was hot and then cold and then snowing, but not really. and there were characters who were there, but not, and had died but were alive. "

Just like a David Lynch movie...

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

...only not nearly as interesting.

: o p