Kelley,
I suppose everyone starts with “I just finished your book.” Naturally, I want to be, if not unique, at least myself. However, with life’s distractions pulling at all corners, the only time to share the ‘virtual pint’ is in the heat of the moment after just finishing your book.
Delightfully, it is one of those rare volumes I could not bear to sit down once I started. You have created a world at once easy to enter, yet rich enough to keep my attention and with characters I wanted to know.
Does this story seem particularly strong to those of us who have experienced being alone and loneliness? Or is this just me? I suppose all “feeling” people have experienced this state at one time or another.
It was quite depressing for a while when Ko turned against Jackal and she ended up in VC. But I had faith that you would not leave her to waste her brilliant mind and personal drive. Thanks for rewarding my faith :o)
You captured enough of the essence of solitary confinement and her mental progression to make it real without making it so painful the reader would either quit reading or skip over it (I only scanned a few paragraphs, before she kicked through the wall.) I bet there was lots of head scratching over what to put in and take out of that section of the book!
It was such a relief to finally find “ourselves” in Solitaire. Hooray for fiction! Too bad we can’t just wander down a cul-de-sac in our town and find such an appropriate place for ourselves.
I suppose some might have criticized that things work out so neatly at the end – if not happily ever after, at least happily working toward such. Personally, life is harsh enough and fiction should give us the chance to escape to a world where things do work out – where Good at least wins a victory.
I didn’t read too many of the other posts on your site, but I was glad to see that you are not planning a sequel to Solitaire. Oh, sure, I wasn’t ready to leave the world you created; yes, I want to share more of Jackal, Snow and Scully’s adventures. Rarely though can an author pick-up where she left off (years later, I suppose, when the pressures to do so begin) and continue the story to the satisfaction of those wanting a sequel. I’d rather imagine what happens next, than be disappointed in a following book that does not have the same impact as the original.
***
I don’t want to promulgate stereotypes, but I’ll plead guilty to generalizations. Nonetheless, I’ve found great reading satisfaction in the works of women writers in science fiction. This has been true for the last 15 or 20 years, I’d guess, but seems especially the case in the last 5 or 10. This “new generation” has embraced the “science” without resorting to the “fantasy” that was the popular realm of women writers in earlier days. The genre, admittedly, lends itself to the male gadget mentality (as long as I am stereotyping), but what a delight to experience the rich tapestry of characterization that seems so much more vital and interesting when painted from a woman’s pen.
As I wrote the above and thought back over some of the great contributions of female authors, I remembered with a laugh that the first book I remember having read that was classified as “science fiction” was Andre Norton. I don’t remember the title, but there were smart cats in it! I suspect if I found the book again, there would be plenty of fantasy in it, judging by many of her later works. Not that there is anything wrong with fantasy, just not my taste.
***
Well, enough of this drivel. Guess I just wanted to say thanks for such a fine novel, for giving us a view of the corporate future that is not too grim, and for the chance to imagine a happy ending.
Bill Groll
It’s a compliment that finishing the book would fire you up enough to write me, and I appreciate it. And all my readers are unique people of exceptional character and taste (grin).
I, too, assume that we all share some experience of being alone, as well as lonely. It seems to me to be an adult skill to understand that they aren’t the same and don’t necessarily have to pal around, and to learn to navigate them separately or together. This is important to me, and one of the building blocks of Solitaire. I empathize with people who are just setting off into these territories, as well as with those who find it too frightening to go there; but I connect with people who have mapped some of the landscape, who have found some ease with the ambivalent spaces.
I often resist notions of gender, but I’ve come to believe that many women do write differently in some essential way from men. I don’t think it has as much to do with chromosomes as it does with cultural perspective. My American Sign Language curriculum requires students to examine the dynamics of dominant and non-dominant cultures, and our assumptions about our own culture. This isn’t entirely new for me, given my parents’ involvement in civil rights in the 60’s, and my mother’s participation in the women’s movement in the 70’s (my first protest experience was standing on a median strip on a weltering day in Tampa, Florida, holding up signs supporting the Equal Rights Amendment).
One of the lessons I learned from those times is that members of the non-dominant culture know a lot more about the dominant folks than the other way around. This is true everywhere – in the particular domains of home or business, and in general society. It’s partly because the dominant culture assumes its worldview is some kind of absolute truth, and that everyone would share it if they had the intelligence, desire, or opportunity: so the dominant culture may practice cultural appropriation when something looks interesting, but there’s not necessarily a lot of understanding going on.
But for the folks on the downside of the equation, knowing everything possible about the dominant culture is often a matter of survival (mental, emotional, social, literal). People of color have to pay close attention to white people. Women have to watch men very carefully. Queer people understand a lot about heterosexual dynamics and often participate in them, for a variety of reasons that mostly come back to wanting to be safe. Et cetera. So it seems to me, although I hope I’m not over-intellectualizing, that sometimes the perspectives and characterizations of these writers are interesting or perceptive because in fact they’ve been spending a lot of energy noticing how things and people work.
Fantasy has been a safe place for women to present their understanding of the world, because it’s seen as a “women’s” genre. But some of it’s been very interesting and subversive. Some science fiction, as well. And I’m not suggesting that women are intrinsically Deep Character Writers and men aren’t. Not at all. However, I think that men who write with emphasis on character are more likely to have some experience of being the Other in their own lives.
To be clear, I don’t think you’re promulgating stereotypes, Bill. I think you are noticing that women writers sometimes notice different things.
There’s a book you might enjoy if you are at all interested in the intersection of gender and writing. It’s How To Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ. It’s short and to the point, and is applicable to any dominant/oppressed cultural dynamic, and it’s no chore to read.
I’m glad you found Solitaire and its people accessible; it’s certainly one of the things I look for in a book. It seems right now that almost anything leads me back to the consideration of what makes a work of fiction ‘literary.’ So many people seem to think that quality prose must be difficult, and difficult prose must be quality. Another notion I resist. There’s an essay I adore, called A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers, first published here in The Atlantic. Not everyone is as taken with Myers as I am (oh, the howls from the literary establishment!), but he makes a passionate case that words have specific meaning which must not be sacrificed to style, and that reading shouldn’t be a hardship. I went to look at the essay again because I remembered this bit:
At the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter’s sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison’s reply was “That, my dear, is called reading.” Sorry, my dear Toni, but it’s actually called bad writing. Great prose isn’t always easy, but it’s always lucid; no one of Oprah’s intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.
— from A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers
Amen, brothers and sisters, amen. If you found Solitaire accessible, lucid, and true in some ways, and are willing to forgive its awkwardness in others, then I’ve done my job and can go have a beer.
I read A Reader’s Manifesto and must say I only agree with it partially.
I’m with Myers in that I can’t stomach most of Annie Proulx’s prose. I’ve tried and tried to read her work, but just can’t. I’m ambivalent re: Cormac McCarthy. I did enjoy The Road immensely. I also found it more terrifying than most of the horror I’ve recently read.
While I’m a genre junkie who aspires to be shelved one day as Science Fiction or Fantasy or whatever, I’m also Latin American. My native literature is well known for its experimentation with form, and I can’t deny I enjoy many of those exercises.
I’m constantly defending Stephen King and J.K.Rowling, even though I haven’t read enough of their work. Just the fact that they’ve gotten so many people reading—including members of my family who avoid anything that isn’t strictly technical or scientific—is very commendable. I believe great literature starts great conversations and that is what King and Rowling have done. Same goes for most of the luminaries found in genre fiction.
But to read only “the kinds of books that Cormac McCarthy doesn’t understand” feels to me as obtuse as declaring one only reads literary works (whatever that means). Okay, Myers’ recommendations are great and not just genre, but classics. Yet, his definition of “accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose” will exclude most of the world’s literature. Which is quite unfortunate. As if readers in the US weren’t already closed to the literary conversation taking place around the world. And I’m not the one who said it, it was Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the organization that awards the Nobel Prize: âThe U.S. is too isolated, too insular,â Mr. Engdahl said in an interview with The Associated Press. âThey donât translate enough and donât really participate in the big dialogue of literature.â
English is a very right-brained, action-driven language. The first thing my high school English teacher told us was that we couldn’t have sentences that were one page long, the way we do in Spanish. There is no equivalent phrase for “run-on sentence” in my native tongue because the sole notion of it is not something we pay attention to. The fact that our verbs can be conjugated in arguably fourteen tenses, most of them to denote a wish or a wish we wished we had made, or a wish we wished we had thought of, etc. is testimony to the way our brain works. That difference in perception and its expression is reflected in the way we tell our stories as much as in the way we live our lives.
I understand where Myers is coming from because I’m a lame Mexican, a bastard case. I didn’t get the chance to appreciate the merits of my own literature until I was in my late teens. I grew up in a family of scientists and read mostly technical texts. The short stories and novels I got my hands on were translations of works by English or US authors. My first encounter with Latin American literature, oddly enough, didn’t happen until my last year of high school. And, oh, did I struggle with it. I remember that my first attempt to read El vampiro de la Colonia Roma by Luis Zapata left me with a headache for its utter lack of punctuation marks. But when I finally did get into it, I felt a surge of delight as my brain and my body recognized the structures in which a conversation in Spanish naturally unfolds.
The way I see it, not every formal quirk is necessarily a result of pretentious experimentation. Take the second-person narrative, for example. It is the way I hear all the stories in my head. You can find evidence of the love for this type of voice in every Romance language. It feels totally natural to us. Just ask any Latin American for directions on how to get from point A to point B and they’ll tell you a twenty-minute story in second-person—they’ll probably get you lost, too; most of the time we don’t know where the hell we’re sending people but we still enjoy telling them how to get there.
I wish both sides of this struggle would just have mad passionate sex with each other and produce many offspring. Kelley, I do believe you are one of those redeeming lovechilds. Every reader could benefit from having more such authors around.
Ugh, make that: “English is very left-brained”… see? My right-brained LatAm-persona is already sabotaging my language logic.
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Karina, your English teacher was dead wrong. And I blame Hemingway. Actually, I blame Gertrude Stein–from whom Hemingway learnt everything he knew.
Read Patrick O’Brian; he has some 17-line sentences. Read Hild when it comes out; I have some half-page sentences. Forget your teacher. English is a multi-faceted playground.
Okay, the quote didn’t come through: “The first thing my high school English teacher told us was that we couldnât have sentences that were one page long, the way we do in Spanish.”
🙂
Nicola, I can’t wait for winter break and my trip to Mexico so I can dive full-on into Master and Commander. I keep looking at it with greed and it’s hard to restrain myself. But I’m such a binge reader I’m sure I won’t even go to class if I give in even just a little. And about reading Hild, is there anything I can do to help you write faster? *wink*
Yes, English is beautiful and multifaceted. I love it. Recently, I’ve been finding myself annoyed with Spanish because it has a hard time accommodating some of the structures that English does almost effortlessly. I want to kill de and para and por and again de and many articles and prepositions and their friends. Those de‘s are driving me berserk. For example, something as simple as “John’s house” turns into “la casa de John.” Which is okay, because it’s simple. But they start piling up and it’s not pretty.
I’m also aware English has its own experimentalists. The one that comes to mind right now is Jeannette Winterson. I did enjoy Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body. I couldn’t finish Lighthousekeeping, but at least I tried. Which is, I guess, all I ask from from readers: that they try to at least be open to different voices and structures and diction. Sadly, I suspect I ask too much.
Oh, Hemingway is guilty on many counts. And he sucks at translating the Latin American spirit. I hate to find myself defending Cormac McCarthy because… well, I’m not comfortable liking him yet. But I couldn’t help it when I read Myers criticism of: “He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her.” I thought that it read exactly the way a Mexican would have expressed it. And I looked up The Crossing to find that, indeed, the characters are speaking one line of Spanish for every five in English in that scene. I believe that, considering the Border Trilogy is about the Latin American experience as much as it is about the U.S. one, it should be commendable rather than reproachable that McCarthy has captured and merged both essences so well. I also think McCarthy would be a fine Spanish-to-English translator. But maybe 98% of English native speakers would disagree with me because whatever he produced would come out with an “accent” and therefore be perceived as broken or improper English.
Gregory Rabassa says in his memoir, “Wishful thinking though it may be, I like to imagine that one can sense in some mysterious way the language from which a text has been translated without its being ruinous to the English version. A test I propose is the reading of a translation in English with an accent, the way it would sound if read by a native speaker, one whose English is not completely fluent soundwise. Petch Peden has caught the mexicanidad of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo so perfectly that if you heard it read by Alfonso Bedoya (‘I don’t need no stinkin’ batch’) you’d think you were listening to the original Spanish.”
Oh, I’m enjoying this conversation. Can you tell? I’ll go make me some coffee for my all-nighter and think about these things while I sip.
Ugh, I just remembered I quit coffee. I almost forgot long enough to finish making a pot. But I caught myself on time. So now I’m sipping tea instead.
Well, tea is better for you, especially when sipped from a lovely china cup and saucer. My friend bought me a delicious rich orange and gold cup for my birthday, which is perfect for these dark autumn days.
As for writing faster, ha, I’m working on so many things at once I think my skull is melting…