Textbooks and Heaven only are Ideal
Jan. 28th, 2009 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleMost of the friends I rely on for book recommendations hated _Rabbit, Run_. Some read the whole thing and regarded it with detailed contempt. Some read a chapter or two and wanted to throw it against the wall. (*raises hand*) I felt that way about _The Witches of Eastwick_, too.
Yet I honor Updike for "The Dance of the Solids." It was the first crack I saw in the pernicious influence of CP Snow's model of two hostile cultures (which I now recognize as being hopelessly tangled in cold war influence. And deep in the background of Cyteen! But I digress.) It had a solidity and respectability to it, that touched me like nothing I saw until I found Primo Levi's short stories. I've seen more poetry about real science since then, but there's still something special about the memory of discovering it was possible.
I liked _The Centaur_ when I was 12. There aren't many books I carried through all my moves, but that was one of them. (There are more that stayed in my parents' house for many years until I boxed them up and moved them.) I didn't reread it often, but I read it enough to maintain a sentimental attachment to it. I won't disagree with Wordweaver Lynn's comment about the youthful pretension of untransliterated Greek...but I forgave Dunnett worse pretension. _The Centaur_ doesn't really speak to the person I am now, it doesn't speak to being a woman at all, and it's freakishly out of sympathy with being a middle-aged man. Yet it spoke to the person I was at 12, the b^H person I wanted to be at 15.
I read a bit of _The Centaur_ again last night, after seeing Updike's obituary. I realized that if I want that kind of vivid imagery, with a landscape so real I can smell it, and unsavory characters turning sexual frustration in really unpleasant directions, Michael Swanwick handles it much better. (The main advantage of Updike seems to be that he can make a complicated and unpleasant scene smell real and vivid without making it smell *disgusting*.) Swanwick has a larger range, of course, but _Dragons of Babel_ seems to take what _Centaur_ was trying to do, fix it, and then add three layers.
Yet I honor Updike for "The Dance of the Solids." It was the first crack I saw in the pernicious influence of CP Snow's model of two hostile cultures (which I now recognize as being hopelessly tangled in cold war influence. And deep in the background of Cyteen! But I digress.) It had a solidity and respectability to it, that touched me like nothing I saw until I found Primo Levi's short stories. I've seen more poetry about real science since then, but there's still something special about the memory of discovering it was possible.
I liked _The Centaur_ when I was 12. There aren't many books I carried through all my moves, but that was one of them. (There are more that stayed in my parents' house for many years until I boxed them up and moved them.) I didn't reread it often, but I read it enough to maintain a sentimental attachment to it. I won't disagree with Wordweaver Lynn's comment about the youthful pretension of untransliterated Greek...but I forgave Dunnett worse pretension. _The Centaur_ doesn't really speak to the person I am now, it doesn't speak to being a woman at all, and it's freakishly out of sympathy with being a middle-aged man. Yet it spoke to the person I was at 12, the b^H person I wanted to be at 15.
I read a bit of _The Centaur_ again last night, after seeing Updike's obituary. I realized that if I want that kind of vivid imagery, with a landscape so real I can smell it, and unsavory characters turning sexual frustration in really unpleasant directions, Michael Swanwick handles it much better. (The main advantage of Updike seems to be that he can make a complicated and unpleasant scene smell real and vivid without making it smell *disgusting*.) Swanwick has a larger range, of course, but _Dragons of Babel_ seems to take what _Centaur_ was trying to do, fix it, and then add three layers.
