(no subject)
Dec. 18th, 2012 04:04 pmA friend of mine lent me A Discovery of Witches a few weeks ago. "It'll be great!" he said. "It's got libraries and academia in!"
This is perfectly true! Our heroine is a witch who does not want to be a witch, she just wants to enjoy her tenure and keep on presenting papers at major faculty conferences. This is an ambition with which I totally sympathize. The entire plot is kicked off when she accidentally summons a magical book to use in one of her papers, and is like "WHOOPS, this is of no academic use to me whatever!" and sends it straight back to the stacks.
What my friend did not tell me is that it is also VAMPIRE ROMANCE starring the MOST HIPSTER VAMPIRE EVER -- well, actually, probably more of a yuppie. A yipster!
So in the first few hundred pages, Vampire Matthew Clairmont:
- takes Diana to a little cafe that she's probably never heard of
- sweeps Diana away to the special supernatural yoga class he hosts in his castle
- when pressed on how long he has been practicing yoga, explains loftily that he took it up three hundred years ago, but the practitioners these days are so much less spiritual than the ones he used to hang out with
- faux-pologizes for the gauche Tudor chimneys on his antique castle -- the architect worked for Wolsey at Hampton Court, you know, and just wouldn't take no for an answer
- name-drops his connections with pretty much every famous poet and scientist of the Renaissance -- but it's no big deal, honestly, he just knew them before they were cool
The plus side of this is that, when Matthew and Diana are sitting around having fancy dinners of raw-cooked food and sipping locally sourced five-hundred-year-old wine and talking about academic politics, I fully believe that they are a compatible couple who enjoy each other's company! I mean, not a couple I would ever want to have a dinner party with, because it would be really boring. But they're having fun, in their own pretentious yipster way.
The downside is that in addition to his pretentious yipster tendencies, Matthew ALSO has all the bad vampire skulking in windows and creepy protectiveness and abruptly announcing that BY VAMPIRE CUSTOMS, THEY ARE NOW MARRIED, HELLO WIFE, and so on that tend to distinguish the latest run of paranormal romances. The narrative thinks this is cute. I mean, you can tell the narrative is firmly on Matthew's side when Matthew confesses to his Best Gay Friend that he accidentally murdered the last two Great Loves of His Life, and his Best Gay Friend is all "Matthew, man, it's cool, you gotta stop beating yourself up over these things and get out there again! There are other fishes in the sea!"
I don't know, man, I found it kind of hard to root for those crazy kids after that. Go back to writing papers and hanging out with your lesbian aunts and wacky ghostly Salem family, Diana! Those were elements of the story I all deeply enjoyed.
But I think the part that weirded me out the most was when
( spoilers )
This is perfectly true! Our heroine is a witch who does not want to be a witch, she just wants to enjoy her tenure and keep on presenting papers at major faculty conferences. This is an ambition with which I totally sympathize. The entire plot is kicked off when she accidentally summons a magical book to use in one of her papers, and is like "WHOOPS, this is of no academic use to me whatever!" and sends it straight back to the stacks.
What my friend did not tell me is that it is also VAMPIRE ROMANCE starring the MOST HIPSTER VAMPIRE EVER -- well, actually, probably more of a yuppie. A yipster!
So in the first few hundred pages, Vampire Matthew Clairmont:
- takes Diana to a little cafe that she's probably never heard of
- sweeps Diana away to the special supernatural yoga class he hosts in his castle
- when pressed on how long he has been practicing yoga, explains loftily that he took it up three hundred years ago, but the practitioners these days are so much less spiritual than the ones he used to hang out with
- faux-pologizes for the gauche Tudor chimneys on his antique castle -- the architect worked for Wolsey at Hampton Court, you know, and just wouldn't take no for an answer
- name-drops his connections with pretty much every famous poet and scientist of the Renaissance -- but it's no big deal, honestly, he just knew them before they were cool
The plus side of this is that, when Matthew and Diana are sitting around having fancy dinners of raw-cooked food and sipping locally sourced five-hundred-year-old wine and talking about academic politics, I fully believe that they are a compatible couple who enjoy each other's company! I mean, not a couple I would ever want to have a dinner party with, because it would be really boring. But they're having fun, in their own pretentious yipster way.
The downside is that in addition to his pretentious yipster tendencies, Matthew ALSO has all the bad vampire skulking in windows and creepy protectiveness and abruptly announcing that BY VAMPIRE CUSTOMS, THEY ARE NOW MARRIED, HELLO WIFE, and so on that tend to distinguish the latest run of paranormal romances. The narrative thinks this is cute. I mean, you can tell the narrative is firmly on Matthew's side when Matthew confesses to his Best Gay Friend that he accidentally murdered the last two Great Loves of His Life, and his Best Gay Friend is all "Matthew, man, it's cool, you gotta stop beating yourself up over these things and get out there again! There are other fishes in the sea!"
I don't know, man, I found it kind of hard to root for those crazy kids after that. Go back to writing papers and hanging out with your lesbian aunts and wacky ghostly Salem family, Diana! Those were elements of the story I all deeply enjoyed.
But I think the part that weirded me out the most was when