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Jul. 17th, 2012 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWhen my dad was recuperating from his kidney surgery, he had plans to read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I was home last weekend, and I asked him if he'd gotten around to it, and instead he held up Andrew Miller's Pure and said "I think instead I'm going to read this first!"
This is really funny to me becauseschiarire is my Hilary Mantel buddy, and a few months back she sent me a surprise copy of Pure with the note that it read a lot like Hilary Mantel's French revolution novel and she thought I should read it.
. . . I guess this is not all that funny, but it still entertains me.
Anyway. I did read Pure! I haven't written it up yet because it's one of those books that I am still halfway ambivalent about. On the one hand, it is an incredibly accomplished book. It takes place in France in 1785, right before the revolution; the protagonist has been charged with digging up the old cemetery of les Innocents, which is so overcrowded with old bones that it's started to poison the entire neighborhood around it. (This is a historical thing that happened and the bones ended up in the famous catacombs of Paris.)
It's a deeply symbolic book -- the removal of the cemetery symbolizes change for all of France, the necessity of it and the extremely stiff cost of it -- and Miller does an incredible job with the suffocating, poisonous atmosphere of les Innocents. It suffuses the whole book and it's exactly as subtly horrific as it should be.
That said, the book is so atmospheric, and so symbolic, that I had a hard time caring particularly about any of the characters, even or perhaps especially the protagonist. This was the biggest drawback (and the biggest difference from Mantel, who makes me care about her characters even when they're all horrible people.) So in the end, despite incredible descriptions and set pieces, I don't know how long the book will stay with me; at heart, I'm a character sort of reader.
(Also there is an incident of rape of a side character as drama/angst for the protagonist, which is a plot device that makes me go :\ on general principle.)
This is really funny to me because
schiarire is my Hilary Mantel buddy, and a few months back she sent me a surprise copy of Pure with the note that it read a lot like Hilary Mantel's French revolution novel and she thought I should read it. . . . I guess this is not all that funny, but it still entertains me.
Anyway. I did read Pure! I haven't written it up yet because it's one of those books that I am still halfway ambivalent about. On the one hand, it is an incredibly accomplished book. It takes place in France in 1785, right before the revolution; the protagonist has been charged with digging up the old cemetery of les Innocents, which is so overcrowded with old bones that it's started to poison the entire neighborhood around it. (This is a historical thing that happened and the bones ended up in the famous catacombs of Paris.)
It's a deeply symbolic book -- the removal of the cemetery symbolizes change for all of France, the necessity of it and the extremely stiff cost of it -- and Miller does an incredible job with the suffocating, poisonous atmosphere of les Innocents. It suffuses the whole book and it's exactly as subtly horrific as it should be.
That said, the book is so atmospheric, and so symbolic, that I had a hard time caring particularly about any of the characters, even or perhaps especially the protagonist. This was the biggest drawback (and the biggest difference from Mantel, who makes me care about her characters even when they're all horrible people.) So in the end, despite incredible descriptions and set pieces, I don't know how long the book will stay with me; at heart, I'm a character sort of reader.
(Also there is an incident of rape of a side character as drama/angst for the protagonist, which is a plot device that makes me go :\ on general principle.)
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Date: 2012-07-20 12:24 pm (UTC)It also does a good job of making trends/types of people following different trends feel contemporary, as if (I know this word is not to be found in the novel) it were a thing to be a Voltairenik or Encyclopédienik and you totally know where to meet those people, who are always Voltaireing and Encyclopédieing, like, ugh! But also not ugh, and then EVERYTHING CHANGES when the Voltaireniks attack. D:
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Date: 2012-07-22 05:04 am (UTC)Yes, this is exactly it. It's well-written! It's thematically interesting, it's atmospheric, it does what it sets out to do! And yet -- maybe it's just because the protagonist is kind of just drifting feverishly through it, and so you sort of have to just drift with him. It's hard to feel grounded in it.
EVERYTHING CHANGES WHEN THE VOLTAIRENIKS ATTACK is my new favorite way of thinking about revolutionary France.
PS: did I say thank you for sending it, by the way? THANK YOU FOR SENDING IT. :D