subscribeFrench, my frenemy.
Wednesday April 29, 2009
Foreign languages and I are long-time frenemies. By “foreign languages” I mean languages other than my native of English; by “frenemies” I mean friendly enemies. I claim to speak both French and German, but this is mostly French I am talking about. French and I get on from time to time, sometimes so smoothly as to seem siblings. But most of the time, as much as I want to say I am fluent in any language, really, I’m not. Plain and simple, languages usually hate me. My battle with French was a long one, and it’s one I’m still unwilling to judge. French easily walloped me, but by how large a margin, I’m not sure. Certainly I don’t know French half as well as I’d like, but I have been and can still be a successful tourist in France — thus, did I really get what I needed to out of my language learning? I’m not sure. I’ll never read and wholly understand L’Etranger in its original form, but I can sure as heck dig through it and get quite a bit out of it. When a random French word pops up in everyday use in America, in New York, 9 out of 10 times I know it, and am richer for knowing it. I can pronounce French accurately enough not to embarrass myself. I’m a perfectionist so I always tend to look more on the side of what I cannot do, rather than on the side of all that I have accomplished, but when I try to look on that side I know I’ve accomplished a lot. But is it enough to make me happy?
I was declared “Proficient” in the French language in 8th grade, when I was thirteen. By fifteen, New York State’s Board of Regents declared me almost perfect on their exam with a score of 98 out of 100. So by high school academic standards, I was pretty good at listening, speaking, reading, and writing French. One of the best experiences I’d had in high school French was the speaking part of the Regents Exam. The teacher read a card with a scenario/question and I had to respond and have a mini conversation. The scenario was, in French, that aliens had landed on Earth and I had to go back to the Important People and describe the aliens to them, to answer their questions regarding the aliens — the descriptions of which I had to pull out of my head. Creatively describe aliens in French? It was an awesome exam question and I was utterly thrilled with myself afterward.
Yes, I got excited regarding an exam. Yes, I have been and am a very large nerd.
College French class, however, was a kick to the teeth. I realized then any sort of fluency I’d pretended to was really my own bloated ego’s desire to be seen as having accomplished such a thing as “fluency”, but it was far from the reality. Fluency means you can carry on a conversation. French sputtered and died on my tongue. Fluency means you can write sentences… without halting every two words and skimming through the grayed recesses of dusty memories for that verb tense or that noun. Really, I was barely fluent.
But the difference, by the end of that semester of intermediate — yes, intermediate — French was astounding… when it came to two things: reading comprehension and writing. I am a grammar whiz, and foreign language grammar is no different. Teach me a rule, its corresponding logic in English, and I’ve got the rule down. Teach me a word, however, and I’ll forget it within a day unless it’s repeated with driven intensity into my skull through a song or repeated phrase. (“Un, deux, trios, pretty mama… quatre, cinq, six, I miss you!” or so sings Bryan on occasion; I’ve no idea where it’s from, but it sticks, even to him, the boy to whom no languages stick.)
Reading comprehension was little different from grammar for me; I’d make a lot of educated assumptions based on context and verbs and grammar rules and, provided some key vocabulary was not above my ability, I’d generally get the idea enough to turn around and argue it in an essay. We read Tocqueville and I read Tocqueville and understood it. I thought I’d finally accomplished something with language learning.
Speaking, however, was and is a different matter.
Forget for a moment that I have bouts of anxiety-driven “stage fright.” (I shook with anxiety through every speech I’ve ever given.) Speaking French was hard for me mainly because I am a visual learner and there is nothing visual in my brain about speaking. Call me crazy but I need to see a word spelled out on the page before I can comprehend it if it’s a new word or a homonym or attempted homonyms.The problem with listening and speaking French is that half the entire language, it seems, can be silent at one point or another, or sound like something completely different than what it is. Les pommes rouges, les jeunes filles — you don’t hear the plural except for the pronunciation of “les” (“lay”) thus without catching the signifying article, you can easily mistake a plural for a singular. That was the absolute least of my issues, but it was a big enough one that when I took the AP Exam in French, I knew it was a doomed endeavor. (Before I was sitting in the room I’d managed to convince myself it wasn’t doomed. Let alone the fact that our teacher for it was more or less a buffoon who toyed around with yahoo.fr instead of actually teaching us…)
So any gains I’d made with my French were always hopelessly torn asunder, in my mind, by my inability to be a well-rounded student. Forever doomed to reading and writing it — and what good, I kept thinking, would that do in France?
A lot, let me tell you.
Traveling to France made me feel a lot better and prouder of my ability with French because I realized that being able to read signs, maps, menus, instructions, and the like is half the tourist battle. The other half is having the gumption to follow through, meaning once you read the menu and understand what’s on it, you have to have the courage to attempt to order it from the waiter. Which naturally does involve some speaking and listening, but hey, it’s contextual after that. Thus I spent a few days in Paris alone, learning at least as much as I had in a year of high school French just by reading everything constantly. Even today, I navigated to Yahoo.fr (which apparently comes http://fr.yahoo.com) and I could read and understand the stories on the main page. If not every single word, enough from context, grammar, and photo to get the article. (Thank goodness, too, for cognates, words that look enough like their English counterparts as to help with vocab — like “célèbre”, “musique”, etc.) Heck, one of the headlines on the entertainment French Yahoo page was “La dé-li-rante parodie de “Twilight”… avec un cheeseburger dans le rôle de Bella ! Regardez !!!” Naturally my interest was piqued and I found this video, which was well worth the time spent browsing. Oh, how I enjoy especially the article, which says,
Avec un gros zeste d’humour, un soupçon de moyens et un plaisir sans borne, l’histoire d’amour entre le vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) et l’humaine Bella (Kristen Stewart) se transforme en une folle attirance entre un jeune homme gourmand montant aux arbres et un délicieux… cheeseburger !
Which is so much more enjoyable in French than it would be in English. If you can’t read French, it doesn’t matter — the only important part of that whole paragraph is the last bit, how the satire is the story of a young gourmand who climbs trees and “un délicieux… cheeseburger!” Yes, Bella as a delicious cheeseburger. (Twilight now makes sense! Bella was a cheeseburger all along! Who could resist sitting next to that in biology without having a visceral reaction?!)
So in essence, I can’t speak French, but I can read and certainly enjoy it. A victory? Perhaps. Am I fluent? I still wouldn’t claim to be but I suppose I can be satisfied.
The argument: Bella is no Buffy, to her detriment.
Friday December 5, 2008
I found this article yesterday on an author’s blog and I absolutely agree with the article (and the author’s sentiment, though I won’t link back out of courtesy to the author’s post’s request). The article’s author makes a terrific, and alarming, point about the potentially dangerous and potent message of the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. (I emphasize potentially. Not every reader will read them this way, nor should they, but the message is there, to be seen.) [A warning, dear readers: spoilers for the Twilight series will abound.]
As the article states:
If only Meyer had taken Buffy as her template. If only she had used that groundbreaking series as her foundation and built on it. If only there was a Whedonesque intelligence and modern, feminist sensibility informing Twilight and its successors. If only.
What you have instead in Meyer’s work is a depressingly retrograde, deeply anti-feminist, borderline misogynistic novel that drains its heroine of life and vitality as surely as if a vampire had sunk his teeth into her and leaves her a bloodless cipher while the story happens around her. Edward tells her she is “so interesting … fascinating”, but the reader looks in vain for his evidence.
(A disclaimer: I absolutely love Buffy and Joss Whedon; go rent Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Go. Now.)
After reading that, my first thought was, Oh, thank God someone just came out and said it in a respectable newspaper. We passionate, obscure bloggers can only do so much.
To stumble-upon-ers: I am a writer and lover of books about kick-ass girls who do things, who save their worlds, who break stereotypes and shatter tradition. I wrote a whole thesis on this. I am fervently critical and passionate about this. When I read a book in the genre I love that praises the passive female protagonist — or rather, praises her for being special when she is not — I get mad. Had the books been written from Edward’s perspective, or in third person, one could probably argue that poor Bella is not so much the protagonist — the one who makes the action happen… because she’s not — but rather the Female Love Interest, or Designated Love Interest to the more vibrant Edward. It’s so much his story. She reacts to him. In New Moon, when Bella is mostly on her own for the book with Edward’s decision to take a break, she isn’t alone. No. She finds a new male on to whom she can latch — Jacob. It’s not so much her story as the story of the dependent relationships she forms.
It’s Bella who is our narrator, Bella who is our guide into this fantasy world. But rather than guide is in and stake out her own space within it, she gets subsumed within it and dissolved by it, replaced with a character who is only a shadow of a strong, independent female; a shadow of the woman Edward keeps insisting she is. Meyer tells us how wonderful Bella is. She never shows us. Poor Bella loses herself in her relationship with Edward.
Granted, Bella has moments. Those moments are what kept me clawingly optimistic throughout my reading of the series. Whenever the plot pulled my hopes down, I clawed out of that hollow of despair and said, “No. Bella will eventually Kick Ass. She has to prove she’s Awesome. After all, why else would both Jacob and Edward love her so much? She has to be Awesome.” But that moment never came — not really. When it kind of did — in a subversive, (passive) way in Breaking Dawn (Bella’s shield) — I was disappointed. Bella doesn’t determine her own destiny, like some fantasy protagonists. She isn’t faced with a destiny she didn’t chose and proves she can brave it and make the best of it, like others. She’s not a fantasy hero or even a heroine. She’s a tragic gothic stereotype of a heroine who, rather than dying spectacularly, just keeps on living.
Here’s another disclaimer: I am engaged to be married. I will be married in March to my soulmate, a man for whom I would do anything and who would do anything for me. I am not some crazy feminist writer/blogger who loves Women Who Do Things and say that women can’t do things with men hanging attached to them. Of course women can do things while in love, while in relationships — any kind of relationship with any one, for that matter. Women can be independent and be committed at the same time. Isn’t that the trait the media most praises in a successful career mother? The woman who is able to balance kids, husband, job, personal life? She is the ideal to which we women in western society are supposed to ascribe, to shoot for. (Which, in itself, is still sad; that women are still seen to have “complete” lives only when surrounded by that nuclear stereotype, regardless of her personal sense of completeness or fulfillment with her own life, whatever or whomever it may entail.)
And then there’s Bella. When she finally finds the balance, she’s not Bella at all, she’s some thirtysomething analogue whom we don’t recognize from the “normal” teenage girl she once was. One could argue Bella changes and grows throughout the series. I argue, rather, that she inconsistently fluxes between melodramatic anxiety and passivity until she transforms into someone who is most certainly not an organic incarnation of a grown-up Bella but rather a forced shell of who we’re told she is based on roles she is given — wife, mother, vampire… non-human being.
What’s interesting, in the context of me speaking about this on this blog, is the thought that’s occurred to me that criticizing books on this blog while being an author myself is a little… well, iffy? But I suppose the other way to look at it is this: If I met Stephenie Meyer in real life, and she asked me, “What is your honest opinion of my books?” I would, frankly, be honest. I immediately and superficially enjoyed her books — I did — but they left me unsettled. The more reflecting and discussing I’ve done, the more unsettled I’ve become. I am still unsettled, even more so after letting Breaking Dawn sink in. (My enthusiasm was so short-lived.) I won’t be able to re-read them. I know that. Having read them as a happily-in-a-relationship twentysomething, not a depressed 17-year-old bemoaning her lack of love life — oh, how those years changed me — I have a completely different view. Reading those books as a mother, I’d feel different yet again. I suppose the ultimate beauty of a blog is that you don’t have to read it or agree with what I say, but hopefully my point of view might have given you a new view from which to consider while forming your own.
But, strangely enough, I am glad these books exist. I am glad I read them.
I am sad about their ridiculous popularity, but I am a firm believer in the idea that dialogue is that which expands our minds and enables us to grow as human beings. Without two (or more) sides to any view or argument, where would the growth be? Without different opinions, what kind of people would we be?
I suppose, ultimately, what I’m hoping for is for more novels and stories (for children and young adults, especially) from the Kick Ass Woman (or strong, assertive young woman or girl) point of view. I want more books that show women doing anything and everything men can do — and have done — in both real life and in existing literature of every genre. I want female characters in fantasy that display the same depth, complexity, assertiveness, and power of many male protagonists in fantasy.
Some authors have and are succeeding at this in certain subgenres of fantasy (Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, Garth Nix, Shannon Hale, Patricia Briggs, Jeaniene Frost); some have partial yet luadable success (Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials). Some books featuring male protagonists have casts of female characters with terrific complexity and depth (Jim Butcher, Sherwood Smith, Robin Hobb, George R. R. Martin) and some with female protagonists have surprised and pleased me with the journeys of those protagonists (Trudi Canavan). We have to keep going, though. That’s why I write, that’s why I’ve always wanted to write.
As I’ve said, this also means novels featuring male main characters/ protagonists/ heroes with co- and supporting female characters who are equal to their male counterparts in complexity, emotion, and range of possibility. This is starting to happen more and more frequently; however the waif/weak/incompetent female love interest still exists, though, as supposed counterpart to her brave, heroic, and intelligent male protagonist. Why does this happen in fantasy? Think of the successful marriages you know: those couples are not fractionally as imbalanced and mis-matched as quite a few fantasy couples tend to be. Fantasy characters deserve to be as real as any real person, as any good, realistic character in any other genre.
Parents should get involved and responsible in this discussion, as well, for the sake of their young readers (in terms of children’s and YA literature). They should recognize which books contain which messages and be able to respond intelligently and with good information to the questions curious kids and teens will inevitably ask in response to books that provoke such thought. Regardless of the book, its characters, or its message, if it provokes serious intellectual conversation, I think that’s a terrific and laudable thing.
The low-brow and high-brow of fantasy books… and movies.
Wednesday October 22, 2008
I just discovered Limyaael’s rants, thanks to a friend’s suggestion, and I’ve read through a ton of them today. I’m so much more random than she is in my blog posts and rants (and exponentially more prone to tangents), but it’s absolutely refreshing to read someone well-read, thoughtful, and full of really well-substantiated complaints, rather than just a rant for the sake of a rant. It’s so rare to meet someone as obsessed with fantasy who also works or has worked within the confines of the typical university English department. So many English students at the undergrad and grad level are utterly disdainful of fantasy literature. Probably fewer now than a decade or two ago (and certainly exponentially more than a generation ago) but still. Thinking fantasy fiction isn’t valuable in any literary sense is still too widely held an opinion for me to be happy… but that’s tangential to my point here.
Anyway this post got me thinking more and more about Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind. I’ve both bashed and defended them on this blog, pretty recently, too, and her utter evisceration of them led me to two interesting revelations about my own opinions of them and fantasy in general: I am really haughty and elitist (or really, really contemplative?) about fantasy literature, what I like about it, what I hate, and what I write — but I do so enjoy the B-movie (or C-movie) novel or series every now and again. The part of me that in a very hick, low-brow manner really, really enjoys a movie the high-brow folks tell me I should disdain, or enjoy a fantasy book that the academic nerd part of me wants to beat remorselessly until it’s beyond dead. I’m that way with movies, too.
The first time (and subsequent second two times) I read Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World (the first book in his Wheel of Time series), I loved it. I still, deeply, do enjoy it. I read it when I was 15; I was in 10th grade social studies class when the kid behind me said, “You like fantasy books, right? You’d probably like this book.” And pointed it out to me. I went, bought it, finished it, and bought the second… and third… up to the eighth, which was all that existed in paperback at the time. The ninth was coming out soon in hardcover, but I was cheap. Anyway I devoured them during the spring of my 10th grade year, amid jeers of my high school softball team compatriots who thought I was a complete and total nerd for reading 800-page books. (Some thought I was insane, others were incredulous, others nodded and said really complimentary things that embarrassed me and my loath-to-brag-about-my-high-grades attitude; I was rather the reluctant good student in 10th grade as opposed to the bitter elitist I became as a senior in high school.) At the point I was at in my life, those books really made a difference to me. They were, now that I think of it, the first major epic fantasy series I read. (I read Tolkien for the first time almost eighteen months later.)
Goodkind was more of an accident. I stumbled upon Wizard’s First Rule in the bookstore (or was it on Amazon.com?) in the desperation of one looking to move their addiction from one drug to another. I stand by what I said a few weeks ago — I did enjoy Wizard’s First Rule. I devoured it and the subsequent five or six books — with a bit more pain and reluctance, each time. In fact, Wizard’s First Rule was the book that helped bring Bryan and I together — I saw it sitting on the desk in his room at college and pointed it out, saying I’d read it and enjoyed it, and we bonded over it. (Long story short, he never actually ended up reading beyond the third book, I think.) However, in re-reading it years later, in the fall of 2006, I stopped after a few chapters. I cringed. I’d been fully immersed in English literature and Creative Writing classes at college by then, and I’d also read a lot more fantasy. A lot. Not only fantasy but other genres as well; I’d discovered the 18th century, too, a century I’d somehow mysteriously skipped in my education in high school and college up until the fall of 2005.
I now, in 2008, have come to agree with Limyaael’s assessment, that the books are more or less full of excess, badly disguised tropes, and annoying, annoying things. (I’ve always been a hater of the Sisters of the Light, but I didn’t start disliking the Aes Sedai until later.) I think a lot of Jordan fans (speaking from experience as a former active member of a Robert Jordan fan site) idealize the books far beyond their merit, and in addition a lot of them take the framework of the books (which is more or less fun) and use it to imagine their own worlds, characters, and doings, all of which are a lot more interesting than what Jordan came up with. Also, there are a few particular characters (all female) that had me gnashing my teeth, probably Faile in Jordan’s chief among them. Oh, Faile and Perrin. Shoot me in the foot. Not to mention Rand and the three ladies, which me, the mostly liberated woman, found irritating for its sheer implausibility based on a bad characterization substantiation rather than its concievability as a basic concept. I’m all for well-written open marriages or polygamy, or what have you, but it has to be well-substantiated and based in concrete characters. When your characters are flimsy, which Elayne (sorry) mostly is (Aviendha was always a favorite until she started being all cuddly with Elayne in a manner that was so blatantly not the Aviendha we all know and love)… oh, on and on.
But I still think of them fondly, for all of that! I find I’m embarrassed. I too am embarrassed somewhat by how inordinately excited I am by the upcoming Legend of the Seeker series based on the Sword of Truth books. (There was a half hour preview on TV this past Saturday; I was all geeky about it. Gosh, I am really geeky.) I’m also excited about the movie Twilight, even given how much I’ve criticized the books on this blog. Why? Maybe it’s that I find I have a personal stake in the genre, and I am really emotionally connected to how well those series/movies portray their source material as well as how well they do financially.
(I always find myself wondering what I’d do if someone options my stuff. Depending on the contract I’ll probably have little say or choice but still… I just hope it doesn’t turn into a Seeker: The Dark is Rising atrocity. ATROCITY. They ruined Susan Cooper’s book! Not that the twelve year olds ever heard of the Newbery Honor-winning book The Dark is Rising before that film, but…)
True Blood, HBO’s series based on Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books, is terrifically true to the books (as far as Sookie’s plot is concerned), but it also takes its own liberties in creating interesting, new subplots (Tara and her mother, Tara and Sam, Jason and his addiction) that aren’t in the books at all — but the show does it well, while still staying loyal to the source material. I’m also fascinated by the adaptation process (and Hollywood versus independent means (Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog) versus television, both cable and network). Twilight is likely to be either decent or bad (it can’t be better than the book unless it halves the angst and quarters the melodrama, which from the trailer I can’t imagine it doing), and Legend of the Seeker looks, well, good. I doubt it’ll be amazing (even Sci Fi’s excellent take of the Dune novels wasn’t amazing, though I do own it on DVD, teehee). I don’t watch a lot of amazing television, but I do watch a lot of decently good television — more than I did in college, anyway. Fringe, Pushing Daisies — they’re not perfect or out-of-the-heavens wonderful (they’re not the pure, unadulterated nerdgasm that is 30 Rock, for instance), but I do enjoy them. And what, may I ask, is wrong with that? Nothing, I hope.
I was thinking earlier that this has to be one of the reasons I’ve always been compelled to be a writer. I’m a nit-picker, a perfectionist, one who constantly enjoys picking out things that don’t jive with me and explaining what would work for me and why. But rather than stop there (or merely point out what doesn’t work for me and bemoan the state of the world), I write. When I saw Disney’s Pocahontas as a 5th grader and was up-in-arms pissed and self-righteous about how utterly inaccurate it was, I knew I wasn’t like all the other kids. Or, even, some of the adults. (Yeah, I was over-dramatic from the cradle, ask my mother or my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Galdeau. They’ll tell you.) As a kid, I’d read a book about a male protagonist and the whiney female he saves and initially love it. The older I would get, the more I would question it. I’d wonder what if it’d be like this or what if that had happened instead. Eventually I’d get to the point where I’d get pissed and go write my answer to it. (Harry Potter evoked that in me. I was 13 and hopelessly annoyed at it after I was initially bubbling with giddy joy over it.)
As I’ve read more of the canon, as I’ve learned about writing, re-writing, hacking and slashing, editing, and all of the details, I find myself needing and demanding further complexity of myself, of my characters. I find my plots twisting in ways I’ve never seen in a book before, characters doing things I haven’t seen characters in books do before. I keep asking myself the questions. What if, what if. Why be confined to stereotypes or tropes? I’ve studied Campbell inside and out (and have the thesis to prove it) and knowing the formula I feel I’ve full license to break and bend it and find new ways to explore it based on the trends my characters take and the answers to the questions I find myself inescapably asking. Naturally someone’s done everything before in one way or another; I mean, there are only 36 basic plots and Shakespeare wrote most of them. I don’t know how much I really believe that. Our world is constantly changing. Our literature, our fantasies, should, too.
I write things that intrigue me — I don’t write to make myself happy. I’m not easily made happy. I enjoy challenges, being made to think, and yes, while I hate seeing myself mess up, I do it all the time. With enough hindsight, I look back on my mistakes, blunders, and unexpected happenings, and I learn from them. Or, ideally, I hope I do.
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
Tuesday September 16, 2008
Reading the day away hurts the brain.
I just finished Breaking Dawn. Gasp. I’m still on hold for it from the library… which I should go cancel. My friend lent me her friend’s copy — haha — and so I devoured that between last night and this morning (while managing, might I add, to get a full night’s sleep). I’ve got an awful lot to say on it but in the interests of spoilers, I won’t say it all here.
I suppose I liked it. Some parts of it I somewhat hated. Some I said “Finally!” about. Overall, I think I am “bleh” about it.
Actually I think I would have preferred Books 2 and 3 to be a heck of a lot shorter and sweeter and this book to be tidier, and then just, you know, have that. Or, well, maybe Book 1 shorter, too. I think they’re just awfully long and filled with lots of stuff that doesn’t need to be there. Efficiency of language and all of that. It would have been an excellent trilogy. If the POV had been different I would have liked it more, too. I grew to dislike the first person the longer the series went on as Meyer seemed to have more and more trouble keeping a rein on her writing style to keep it within the bounds of the perspective she chose… I mean, she even switches perspectives (at the end of 3 and a part of 4) and that’s just… not… well, I just didn’t like it. Write it in third person if you can’t contain it in one, I think. I’ve read some really, really successful first persons that play up on the inherent tunnel-vision-ness of the first person POV by which Meyer kept seeming stifled. Or be more consistent in the POV switches. I’ve read successful chapter-switching first person POV novels, and those are great if a bit complicated when done well. Oh, well.
I’m going to go spoiler lite and speak in (annoying) generalities for the rest of this, but as a general warning, stop reading if you don’t want any surprises spoiled.
I liked Bella’s character a heck of a lot more in Book 4. But that’s also because she changed significantly (which I incidentally didn’t like; if Bella in Book 4 was the only Bella, it would have been great. But I’ll get into that later.) The change wasn’t a gradual thing, like it should have been. I didn’t like the sudden, sharp shift in personality. It made sense given what happened — I doubt Meyer could have done it differently and had it still be convincing without reworking some of the plot or timeline, at least — but I didn’t like how weak Bella’s personality was all along, leading to this. Book 2 Bella is a miserable nuisance. Book 3 is all… oy. Better but still not ideal. She’s more authentically teenagerish in Book 3, though. I get that she’s not a modern heroine, she’s a throwback to the nineteenth century’s gothic heroine period (has Meyer read any of those early nineteenth century gothic novels? Did she expect any of her teenaged readers to have read them?) and maybe a bit of Austen. (The man-must-save-me-from-my-circumstances Austen, not the strong-willed, self-determined woman Austen; I don’t believe Bella had Elizabeth’s Bennett’s fire. Maybe something of Anne Elliot’s moping. Actually, some of that, yes, I see that. But probably only because I’m throwing Anne onto a Book 2/3 Bella and seeing if it might stick. It might.) Anyway.
The whole plot of Book 4 was sort of, well, unsurprising. I guessed every leg of it a few hundred pages before it occurred, and when it did, I was still shocked that I was right, because when I’d made those predictions to myself, I said, “Wouldn’t that be hilariously ironic? Because that would make this book long! And look how long it is!” And it happened. And I was… bitter? Annoyed that I figured it all out? For one of the predictions I actually thought to myself, “Too bad it’s going to turn out in Way A, because Way B would totally make things crazy! If that were to happen, then this and this and this could happen… But Way A is totally going to happen so there’s no use in further speculation.” And guess what. Way B happened. My speculation was correct. I was shocked because I had never thought Meyer would… do that. I do personally love figuring out the plot of books but… but… there were no surprises. None. Even the swooping-in-at-the-last-minute moment at the end was unsurprising. I was sort of “Sigh.” I suppose not every author can pull a fast one on me. I love it when they do, though.
But really, was I expecting this book to be amazing? No. I was expecting it to be just on the wrong side of tolerable. I am surprised that it was better than tolerable. Enjoyable, diverting. Fun. Was it because Meyer finally embraced more fantasy than she had ever used? Probably. She took risks and ran with them, trusting we’d follow. I think in doing so she lost some readers, those who followed her books for the love story and not the fantasy. (Though if they survived the werewolf revelation, I am surprised to think that they wouldn’t be able to survive anything. Vampires are one thing; shape-shifting can be something else entirely, but what came in Book 4 is no more shocking, really, than anything else — fantasy-wise. It was shocking for other reasons, which I can get into at another time.) And I was surprised too that I was in the vampire camp so firmly from Book 1. I am so often in the werewolf/shifter camp that I was surprised when Book 3 came down to it, forcing me to ally with Edward or Jacob, that I was unhesitatingly Edward.
And so anti-Bella. Really, I was fed up with her by the end of Book 3. The choice, ugh. Maybe I was more irritated with the marketing? Maybe. I am glad she was redeemed in part in Book 4 but in doing so she really wasn’t Bella. I mean, I can’t name it precisely. I think I felt condescension toward Bella in Books 2 and 3. The vast majority of my female friends and acquaintances are stronger women, plain and simple, than Bella was. I’m talking strength of character, of purpose, of will. You can’t feel so “meh” about a character for so long and then immediately cheer with her and enjoy her without stopping and thinking, “Wait. This is not the same character.” The changes she went through were abrupt and rough and told to me (ugh, telling versus showing) and I don’t think Meyer convinced me of why Bella changed except for the excuse of the new balances of power. She spends so much time on really strange moments and details but not enough time, space on the page, on this change of Bella’s that is so unbelievably crucial to the plot. I mean, if my life with the man of my dreams shifted that abruptly for the same reason tomorrow, my personality would not change that much in a few days and I can say that with absolute certainty. I know my loyalties and heart would change and grow appropriately, but I would not suddenly become a different person. Change takes time that Meyers did not make me feel I was living through with Bella emotionally. Additionally Meyer made it seem like Bella’s character jumped from 18 to 35, from self-conscious to ferociously self-assured, and I’m supposed to believe that easily, just like that. I don’t think so. She changed Bella too falsely, too rapidly, given what had transpired so recently in book time, in Books 2 and 3. If the change had been gradual, from the start of the series to the end of it, I would have bought it. But Bella was so eighteen years old in Book 3. Devil’s Advocate: I realize the events of the first half of Breaking Dawn were so earth-shattering, so life-altering that Bella really does have to change. But Meyer failed to convince me of the emotion, of the grounded-in-reality-truth of that change from Character A to Character B.
Other writers have done it and blown me away. To use a few fantasy examples from other authors whose books could be classified as “coming of age” or “young adult”: Robin McKinley’s Deerskin does it shockingly well. Heart-breakingly well. Lissar changes completely while retaining her sense of self and I believe every moment of it because of how grounded in raw emotion and power her experiences are. McKinley’s Aerin in The Hero and the Crown has a similar forged-in-the-fires-of-hell life-changing experience, and she changes because of it, too. I mean, hell, one of the best character changes ever has to be Frodo’s in The Lord of the Rings. Harrowing experiences over approximately the same time frame as Bella’s (actually Bella’s is more, I believe) and he is irrevocably altered in a gut-wrenching, proud, and really profound way. (Robin Hobb’s Malta in her Liveship Traders Trilogy is another character who changes sharply and realistically, as is Fitz in the Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, though his change is over the course of years.) Bella’s change didn’t hit me like that at all. It didn’t feel real.
Getting more and more spoiler-ific here, I thought the events and moments in the series were certainly enough to have moved Bella to discover that sort of power of character on her own but Meyer made Bella’s humanity such a handicap, made being a vampire so perfect and desirable, it’s so hard to compare it. I don’t know how I feel about humanity being a handicap. How being painted as utterly frail and breakable and not… well, in any other way, is any way… relatable? I mean, we are breakable, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen humans painted that way in a fantasy series with supernatural characters. Humans are so much more than that. But then again, her vampires are so human — she doesn’t make them very different — I suppose I can see why she would malign humanity so much when her vampires are that unrealistically cool. In a way, that’s one thing I profoundly do not enjoy about the series. Bella cannot embrace herself as who she is, she has to become someone else — something not entirely human — to finally love herself. I don’t know how that settles with me. The analogy is imperfect, of course, to real life — as all fantasy should be imperfect, not one for one, analogies to real life — but even so. It’s discomfiting.
I sit uneasy with a message that in order to be able to love and be proud of yourself have to both find someone else to complete you and to fundamentally change (in essence, your genetics) in the process.
But of course, cynics will say that about any kind of all-consuming love, or that lots of life-changing events seriously alter the people they happen to. I’ve been asked to my face why I need Bryan to love, cherish, and marry me, when I have to sacrifice my single, individual self to become the us that comprises us? And it is a sacrifice to become an us. You are no longer your own entity in a couple. You are who you become together. You can change and grow and become wiser together. But… I’m also still irrevocably myself. Bumbling faults and all. Gah. It’s such a web of tangled thoughts, that. I could discuss that for a long time.
There are a lot of aspects of the book I’d want to discuss more but in the interests of remaining vague, I won’t. You can talk to me about it, if you like.
I suppose that’s how I think of the Twilight Saga. It’s good, it’s fun; it has its moments of utterly asinine melodrama that make me want to cry with frustration, and it has its moments of beautiful, really adorable romance. It also is pretty good with action and politics; its characters are varied, intriguing, and engrossing. I was without a doubt constantly engaged with the book. Will I buy the series and read it again and again like I do many others? No. It just wasn’t worth it. But I am glad I have read it.
the latest updates
