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Chris

Idle Book Club Episode 7: By Blood

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But the narrator is supposed to be a 50 or 60, right?

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(The above post was presumably in response to the Zodiac picture I posted; a fact now made much less obvious by an edit. Sorry - it was starting to creep me out!)

 

Yeah, I pictured a substantially older, more conservative-looking, less unhinged version of that illustration.  In other words, an almost entirely different face, now I'm actually looking at it in detail.  But he definitely had glasses!

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Interesting, I pictured him as Peter Fonda from the  "On Golden Pond" years.

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All in all, I thought the intriguing elements of the book, and it's relevance to human interaction through code (like a programming language), really outweighed the book's frustrating elements, such as the length and required suspension of disbelief.

 

Ullman is actually a programmer, in addition to being a writer. She wrote about her career as a programmer in http://www.amazon.com/Close-Machine-Technophilia-Its-Discontents/dp/1250002486 Based on a lot the reviews I read of By Blood, most people seem to prefer Ullman's non-fiction to her fiction. 

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I actually entertained the idea that he was the Zodiac killer the first time he mentioned that element of the story. I went online and did some really quick research on the Zodiac killer, and noticed the similarities, namely the connection to a California university (Riverside). When I saw the composite sketch, I started using that image in my head for the main character, hoping all the while that it'd never actually be a main plot development. Thankfully my fears were abated.

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Due to an Amazon mixup I only just managed to get my hands on this book and read it, and haven't had the opportunity to listen to the cast yet. I'll just leave my thoughts on the book itself here and come back if anything in the cast triggers further thoughts/remarks.

 

Overall, I wasn't very impressed. The WW2 stuff is a weaker version of Sophie's Choice, the seventies San Francisco has no interest to me (what does it matter that there's a gay bar district or that the economic/historical situation is in flux?) and the greatest subject of novelty/interest, ie. the mentally unbalanced narrator, is left as a cipher.

 

The weirdest and most ludicrous scene has to be his visit to the lesbian bar where they play "the music that he knows is called disco" and he gets his feet stepped on before being ejected by a bulldyke.

 

I don't know much about the author but it reads to me like the person who is ultimately receiving therapy is herself, via several layers of proxy. The beloved patient finds a great degree of closure. the person narrating his listening-in appears to at least improve his ability to keep his demons at bay, and one presumes the author at least was able to frame the issue of identity/belonging a bit more clearly for herself. This theme is also the part of the book that worked best to me.

 

Finally, this book recalled Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union to me in its dealing with the problem of Israel's existence. It is good to be reminded of the incredible pressure that country and its people are under (without necessarily getting political).

 

I'd definitely say the book was worth the time to read it, and it was gripping while I was going through it but definitely my least favourite of the cast books so far.

 

Oh, perhaps of general interest: the spelling/nomenclature of both Polish names featured are misspelled or at least weird according to my wife.

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I guess I'm wading a bit into the unpopular field of authorial intent, but I was really engaged by the the idea of obsession/compulsion, and I wasn't quite bothered by the convenience of his recall (more on this later).

 

I feel there is some ambiguity to how much of the narration is literal, and what parts are obsessive thoughts on the narrator's part. He frequently ascribes whole lives and intent to people he just looks at. He gives shifting appearances to the patient/doctor. Even the too abrupt ending, The doctor patient say "we have no choice. No choice." When he winds up in the gay bar I don't think it's fully accidental. (edit: I skimmed a lot of the posts so I could blurt my thoughts, and now should add that I agree with Argobot's reading, who said it first, and wasn't overlooking it!) 

 

The biological urge/predestination runs throughout. Aryan,  Jewish, Gay, things inherited from parents. He has a moment of clarity where he sees his house falling into total disarray because of his obsession, triggered by the trauma of his work trouble. Also, in reference to the drama of the landlord, for OCD sufferers, a foreign disruption of "home" is another major trigger. 

 

Some of it hits a bit close for me, as one of my closest friends has a severely crippling OCD disorder, which manifests in guilt about dishonesty. I get fairly regular phone calls where he needs to apologize for mis-truths, frequently years ago. Literally: "4 years ago, we were driving to Brad's and I said Lenny Briscoe's last season on Law & Order was was the 15th, but it was really the 14th."

 

Also, I couldn't help but picture the narrator as the adult Jimmy Corrigan from the Chris Ware comics. 

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To answer the podcast question: I'm happy enough to read non-awesome books on the 'casts recommendation because more often than not it will lead to more interesting discussion, and I welcome any avenue into reading books that aren't lauded as classics/must-reads by everyone but are still interesting.

 

Also if I'd known physically mailing you books would do the trick, I'm very close to sending you guys Kapuscinski's Imperium or maybe Another day of life because I am very sure you'll get a kick out of his work. Maybe once the queue gets shorter.

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Oh. Finally read this and listened to the cast. Good book, interesting but unsatisfying. 

 

I thought for sure he was going to abduct her at some point, or at least murder someone...become unhinged completely. There are certainly enough hints that he is much worse than we really know. He calls himself a monster, pretending to be human. He said he has "blacked out" on 5 significant occasions. There are other signs. Maybe we're even supposed to infer some violent end just after the events of the novel.

 

After all, he said more than once that the one thing keeping him from going to her house was that he had the sessions to look forward to. 

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With other people talking about how they pictured the narrator, I think it's relevant to point out here that this is the book that finally made me realize that I don't form mental images of characters in my head (at least not physical ones) while reading. The fact that we never know for sure what the patient or therapist look like did not bother me in the least, and I then started to reflect on if that made them any different from other characters who we had descriptions of. It did not at all. I then went back to think about other characters who had been well described in one way or another and started to realize that I never really make a picture in my head of a character even when provided with all of this information. When reading, for whatever reasons, characters are always just kind of amorphous collaborations of their traits without much physical presence. I noticed this a bit with Telegraph Avenue as well, though in that case it was more because I had to be reminded that characters had races and weren't just bundles of traits. In that book, I was always trying to force myself to maintain a mental image of the characters in order to make certain parts of the story relevant. In this one, it was more the realization that a lack of physical description made absolutely no difference to me. Weird. Anyone else have a moment like this?

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I also have no mental pictures of characters. I'd even forget Mario in Infinite Jest was deformed, despite his lovingly-described handicaps.

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Here I am again, finishing a book months after the podcasts was released. (Only Wolf Hall and Evidence of Things Unseen left! The two longest. Uh ho. (EDIT: And, er, Cosmicomics. Forgot about that one. It's short! Yay!))

 

I'll just once again also again copy my goodreads "review". (I am liking using Goodreads as a bucket for my random just-finished-a-book thoughts.)

 

 

This book was a strange ride...


The first 200 pages kind of flew by. The narrator - the professor - discovers that his newly-rented office, which he's acquired after moving to San Francisco on the eve of some sort of scandal at his university... His new office neighbors a therapist's office. He first flies into a panic over the unavoidable distraction, but quickly falls into the voyeuristic trap of curiosity.

And the first half of those 200 pages? Weird. Would I be able to avoid being such a blatant voyeur, like the narrator? I would like to think so! But, on the other hand, I read so quickly precisely BECAUSE I was so curious! I stuck around for the same reason the narrator stuck around. So there's that.

The OTHER thing I loved about the book at first was how hilariously dismissive the narrator was about the therapist's skills because of his past poor experiences with his own various therapists. I laughed, more than once! Having come into the book knowing literally nothing, I honestly thought the book was intended to be sort of a morbid voyeuristic comedy, for a time.

Then the book gets dark. The patient (who was adopted!) discovers (through the professor's anonymous assistance!) her birth mother. We learn the circumstances (the Holocaust!) under which the patient's mother surrendered the patient for adoption. And as the patient's story gets darker, the bits from the narrator that I previously would have laughed at became sad. Clear indications of mental unwellness...

Okay, so I can't particularly blame the author for my ignorance regarding the actual subject matter of the book, but man I did not see this stuff coming. I definitely came away positive! I definitely came away surprised. I definitely came away wondering why the book was so long...

Side note: Dang, I'm willing to accept unrealistic levels of recollection in books, but it was insane how deep it went sometime! Narrator recalling patient recalling sister recalling mother? WORD. FOR. WORD. (Okay maybe not WORD FOR WORD, but it was amazingly detailed, in this instance, for the sister only presumably having heard the story once. On the other hand, it's a pretty intense, important story, so it makes sense that it stuck with her so strongly.)

Huh.

 

Now to listen to the 'cast. (And the thread, I guess!)

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This book was a weird one, but I personally really enjoyed it. Ullman is such a fascinating person, it's hard for me to fault her writing too much. Shortly after reading this, I picked up her first novel: The Bug. It's all about a computer bug that slowly drives the main character insane, and from what I understand, all of the programming references Ullman makes are accurate. 

 

Her writing -- especially in By Blood -- has this very hazy, vaguely threatening undercurrent. I kept expecting something truly horrible to happen while reading this book, and that tension of never being able to completely grasp has was going on is what I loved so much about the novel.

 

It's so cool to see someone read through all the selections in such a short period of time! Good luck with Wolf Hall.

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A computer bug that drives the main character insane! Hah, that sounds interesting. I've definitely wanted to throw things at my computer and my computer at things when trying to solve a particular bug. 

 

I actually didn't feel that the book was going to go anywhere dark with the circumstances of the main characters. I did expect more of a confrontation between therapist and narrator, as expressed on the 'cast. (I fully expected patient to stay out of this confrontation, given the first page of the book.) But outside that confrontation, it always felt to me like the characters were all perfectly safe. Despite the Zodiac killer, despite the patient going off to Tel Aviv, despite the narrator's inherent creepiness, it all just felt... safe. I dunno.

 

Also, I want to address all the Holocaust stuff, because I didn't, really, except in an off-the-cuff manner.

 

Jesus, every single time I am reminded of the Holocaust, I start feeling sick. How could this even happen in what many would consider a perfectly civilized world? I can't imagine that's an uncommon reaction. I also can't imagine ever feeling that much hate for an individual who had wronged me in some way, let alone an entire race of people just for being different from me or having been more successful than me or any other reason. I want to believe that something like this would never happen again on such a large scale, but I don't know... A couple generations down the line, when WWII is just a memory, could a new Hitler come along and find himself with a similar amount of power? I should fucking hope not, but I just don't know. And the specifics of Michal's experiences, her whole story. That was, sickeningly, the most believable part of the entire book for me. Reality has a way of slapping me in the face every now and then, and this book was the glove on reality's hand.

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As far as the danger:

 

I just had a real sense of dread while reading this book. It bordered on supernatural at points: the references to the Zodiac; the gargoyle statues that are in the narrator's building; the narrator's mysterious background. It's not that I necessarily expected anyone to die, but it did make me hyper aware of some kind of looming darkness around the edges of the story. Which is such a great contrast to the actual Holocaust horrors that Ullman describes. It's a play between the horror our brains naturally fill in when we're presented with an unknown, slightly off situation and the actual horrors that humans have visited on one another -- the imagination versus reality.

 

And yes, The Bug is great. Especially if you have any knowledge of computer programming, or so I've heard.

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As far as the danger:

 

I just had a real sense of dread while reading this book. It bordered on supernatural at points: the references to the Zodiac; the gargoyle statues that are in the narrator's building; the narrator's mysterious background. It's not that I necessarily expected anyone to die, but it did make me hyper aware of some kind of looming darkness around the edges of the story. Which is such a great contrast to the actual Holocaust horrors that Ullman describes. It's a play between the horror our brains naturally fill in when we're presented with an unknown, slightly off situation and the actual horrors that humans have visited on one another -- the imagination versus reality.

 

And yes, The Bug is great. Especially if you have any knowledge of computer programming, or so I've heard.

 

Yeah, I understand what you're saying. I guess, for me, most of that stuff just kind of stemmed from the narrator's own psychosis, rather than feeding into some greater foreboding. 

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