The Hunger Games and Horror

Hi everyone-

I know I just started and already I’ve gotten really slow about putting up posts (and believe me, it hasn’t been because I haven’t been reading!).  The news with me is that I got a job a few weeks ago, and I’ve been really tired every evening, so, no blog posts.  I would really like to know any of your thoughts about The Hunger Games, though, because I think it’s a really important series about the human psyche.  Because I read these books about a month and a half ago, I am just put up some thoughts about what stuck with me.  Let me know what you think – I know some of you have read them, so chime in!

-Sara

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a young adult series that has made me think as much as Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” series. It’s Harry Potter in a world in which Good and Evil aren’t so well defined and Ender’s Game if the Battle School forced students to kill rather than stun each other in the practice battles.  It’s gruesome, but more than that, it’s horrifying– the atmosphere of almost absolute oppression is one that cannot be escaped or forgotten.

The most pervasive aspect of this series, is The Hunger Games itself, the arena in which children are forced to hunt and kill one another.  The horror of the arena, though, extends far beyond the individual children involved.  It’s a revulsion towards how the arena affects the humanity of the people who live in that world.

The short synopsis is this: It’s the future.  The Capitol controls North America, now a country called Panem.  The other people are divided into 12 Districts.  The districts (there used to be 13), once rebelled and District 13 was destroyed in the war.  The Capitol won, and, in the terms of the peace treaty, every year, one boy and one girl from each district ages 12-18 are chosen by lottery, called the “reaping,” to compete to the death in an arena.  Each child is entered with one more lot every year, but in order to get food for their families, a ration called a tessara, children can enter extra times, increasing the chances that they will be sent to the arena.

For the children chosen in the reaping, the most powerful aspect of the Games is the possibility of “winning.”  If all the children were simply condemned to die, they could band together in rebellion, but because all the others must die for any individual to survive, true trust is impossible.  This is what affected me the most, what gave me that feeling of horror and revulsion.  For me, the two most basic drives people have are survival and cooperation, but when cooperation is in direct conflict with survival, survival tends to win.  To force a child to act contrary to his or her sense of empathy, to push those human inclinations towards cooperation away, is to undermine what is good about people.  Each child who kills in the arena loses part of himself, not because he or she kills another human being, but because he or she has so little choice in the matter.  It is always the Games that win when a child kills another child.  On the other hand, a child who sacrifices him or herself in the arena also loses, because ultimately, dying in the arena is still a win for the Capitol.  The child who wins is always alone, alive because the other children are dead.

Similarly, adults must choose between sacrificing their genetic survival (by not having children) or caving to the power of the Capitol by producing children that must exist under the power of the Capitol and the Games.  Most basically, The Hunger Games keep the people of the District in line by taking away parents’ ability to protect their children.  By forcing them to either not have children or give their children into the power of the Capitol, the Capitol paralyzes them and takes away any illusion of self-determination.

****SPOILER ALERT BELOW

This, then, is the true rebellion of Katniss and Petra in The Hunger Games, as well as the other revolutionaries in the arena in Catching Fire.  The refusal to choose between cooperation and survival reaffirms the empathetic aspect of human nature, the ingenuity that comes from human collaboration, and the creativity that springs from human relationships built on trust.  This too is why it is so heartbreaking when the revolutionaries betray Katniss in Mockingjay by using the same scare tactics and violent strategies that the Capitol used on them.  District 13 stops being creative when its leaders lazily choose survival over cooperation and empathy.  Katniss holds herself and the revolutionaries to a higher standard, one that breaks the rules rather than choosing between sacrifice and survival.

***SPOILER ALERT ENDED

What these books then ask the reader is this: How often do we surrender part of our humanity because we don’t take the time or energy to find a new way, a way that doesn’t compromise any part of ourselves?  Do we rationalize our choices by claiming that their is no other way?  Am I wrong that we need a world in which we don’t need to choose between empathy and survival?  How does one do this in a not-hypocritical, not-one-dimensional way?

Tags: Catching Fire, dystopia, fiction, Hunger Games, Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

Perusing Pynchon

Hi everyone!  Thank you so much for all the wonderful support of the blog.  I was pretty nervous when I first put the link on Facebook– it’s scary having other people read my writing, and I don’t want the blog to fall flat on its face.  It was a wonderful birthday gift to hear from so many of you.  Please keep coming back and sending me your comments and insights (even if they aren’t all positive!).  I want Post-Bac Booklist to stay interesting and fun for you to read.

As you can see above, I recently read Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon.  Now, since I graduated, I’ve been wary of authors whose names can easily attach “scholar” to them.  As in “Shakespeare Scholar,” “Faulkner Scholar,” or “Dostoevsky Scholar.”  So I was a little suspicious when this book was suggested as one that the three people I went on vacation with and I would read while in Turks & Caicos, because my friend Ariel had an honors examiner at Swarthmore who was a “Pynchon Scholar.”  Once I was told that a “pynchon” was not a kind of snake with really sharp teeth, I learned that Pynchon was a notoriously convoluted writer, who, while brilliant, was rather difficult to follow.

As my friend informed me, however, Inherent Vice is not a normal Pynchon book.  Instead, it’s Pynchon’s experiment in writing a noir-esque private-eye novel.  Doc, the main character, is a stoner in in the very early 1970s, hanging onto the lifestyle of the ’60s by the beach in California.  He’s also a private detective who gets pulled into a dark world with kidnapped millionaires, international drug dealing, and covers that cover cover-stories.  While I can’t say that I grasped the meaning of the novel as a whole, I would like to make three major points about the book that I think illuminate interesting things about it:

1. It can be read on two levels, a “go with the flow” story level, or a “metaphoric introspective” level.
2. It has a huge number of hilarious one-liners sprinkled throughout.
3. It feels like an episode of an ongoing television show.

1. It can be read on two levels, a “go with the flow” story level, or a “metaphoric introspective” level.

One of the things I have no intention of ignoring in this blog is the impact of a reader’s expectations  on an impression of a book.  I’m not an English professor, and I have no intention of writing as if I exist in a bubble.  I’m not even in academia anymore!  So I think it’s particularly notable for Inherent Vice that the book is described on the back as “Part noir, part psychedelic romp.”  While it is apparently still “all Thomas Pynchon,”  I think that there’s more than one way of reading this particular Pynchon.

First, you can read it like a noir.  My film major self would like to remind you that “noir” is primarily a cinematic term, as in “film noir” (According to Wikipedia, “noir fiction” is another way of referring to “hardboiled crime fiction.”  Despite this, I think people think of film when they hear “noir,” so I don’t care).  Noir is a style of film (not a genre), and I think it’s one that is particularly interesting here, in written-word form.  Being a style rather than a genre means, according to Paul Schrader, that the designation is mostly about visual decisions as well as mood and tone rather than by conventions of  plot points.  In a book, I think that this means that it is more about the atmosphere, as evoked by dialogue and description, rather than the particulars of the story.  Reading in the noir style doesn’t even require reading in order; I’m doing it right now, and almost any page I turn to has a passage that evokes the feeling of a meditation on life, giving you the feeling that the plot points are just excuses for sentences like this:

“Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did.” (314)

Yup, you don’t need to have read the book for that to be a powerful sentence (insightful or contrived, depending on how cynical you’re feeling at the moment).  In fact, this is the kind of sentence that makes you think, “wow, this book is about a lot more than fun, silly intrigue and drugs.”

On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable to read this book as about fun, silly intrigue and drugs.  There were times on the beach that I admit were not spent mulling over the status of men’s souls and the existence of some sort of “inherent vice” within them.  Nope, I was just reading to find out what would happen.  Would Doc and Shasta get back together? Would Bigfoot turn out to be the sad and lonely man he seemed to be hiding? What about Penny?  What if she ran into Shasta?

Anyway, I think that this is the ultimate triumph of the book: it’s ability to exist in both the philosophical and easily follow-able realms. It’s a book you can read once for fun and many times after to get the little details and big pictures. Which brings me to…

2. It has a huge number of hilarious one-liners sprinkled throughout.

This book is funny.  Take for example the episode in which Doc meets his lawyer, Sauncho.  Sauncho is described as a “novice doper” who is about to buy a flour sifter to cleanse his weed, but gets paranoid about buying it, thinking people will be suspicious.  Doc meets him in the store and agrees to help him get more groceries to make it less obvious, but what they end up with is:

“half a dozen obligatory boxes of cake mix, a gallon of guacamole and several giant sacks of tortilla chips, a case of store-brand boysenberry soda, most of what was in the Sara Lee frozen-dessert case, lightbulb and laundry detergent for straight-world cred, and after what seemed like hours in the International Section, a a variety of shrink-wrapped Japanese pickles that looked cool.” (27)

By no means is this section integral to the plot or its philosophical musings.  The lighbulb doesn’t come back to haunt them, and they don’t use guacamole to take down a murderer in the 3rd act.  It’s just funny to envisage that grocery cart.  And as far as I’m concerned, its the details that give Pynchon his atmosphere, and, transitively, the charming heart of the novel.

3. It feels like an episode of an ongoing television show.

This was the overwhelming feeling I got while reading this book, strangely enough.  I kept feeling like I should have met the characters already, that they had been introduced in an earlier episode, and that I was just late to the party.  I think that this is related to the previous two points in that it refers to the depth of the storytelling.  In a television series (a good one at least), even secondary characters are developed because there is time to develop personalities and sprinkle in details that add richness to the story. I think also of J.K. Rowling’s characters in the Harry Potter series.  She planned out their lives to the minutest detail so that they would never be inconsistant, even if the details were never actually mentioned in the books.

It seems that Pynchon at least suggests that he has done the same. Details are dropped in, and it seems as though there is a lot more to them than what we find out, what is important to Doc and the present plot.  It seems as though there could be many parallel books, showing different characters’ twisting paths through the same time period.  For example. two formerly unrelated secondary characters (who shall remain nameless, in case you’re worried about spoilers), are found having sex in Doc’s office.  Now, there’s definitely a story there.  Yet, we only get a part of it, and we know it.  Pynchon doesn’t try to explain everything away in a three sentence exposition.  Instead, we, the readers are left to wonder and imagine.  And I think that that’s pretty cool.

Tags: fiction, Inherent Vice, noir, Pynchon

Regaining my footing

After four years of Deleuze, Agamben, and Benjamin, I wasn’t sure I would want to read ANYTHING right away after graduation.  I could have left Swarthmore an anti-intellectual, intent on watching only television for the rest of my life, rotting my brain in a perpetual collapse after my final semester.

Thankfully, my friends from the class of ’09 knew better, and got me a book, appropriately named The Book Thief, for graduation, knowing that it would put me back on the path to nerdom.  Once I started that, I was off and running, finishing it in a couple of days and moving right on to the next book.

I’m not going to get too into these first few titles, because I read them a while ago and so don’t trust myself to say anything particularly interesting about them.  The Book Thief was particularly memorable for the fact that it is a Holocaust story narrated by Death.  I think that the enormity of the Holocaust makes this a powerful choice by author Markus Zusak, because it allows for a way to be respectful of the enormity of the tragedy as well as for a specific focus that makes a narrative of a particular young girl possible.  (If I’m going to get a little college-y about it, it reminds me of my study of love and religion, in which I learned that the particularity of the experience of love of God has allowed many mystics to have a more powerful experience of the divine.  Similarly, I think that one of the powers of historical fiction is the ability to put oneself in the shoes of a specific character, despite the hugeness of the historical events in which the story takes place.  This particularity brings the history closer and keeps one from becoming detached from the fact that there were real people experiencing the events of the past.)

The other appealing and appropriate aspect of The Book Thief is that it was about a girl who loves books, so I was immediately drawn in.  Not so with Friday Night Lights (H.G. Bissinger, the journalistic basis of the movie and television show of the same name.  As a huge fan of the tv show, I bought this book over a year ago and have been meaning to read it since then.  I finally got the chance in June at my family reunion in Capon Springs, WV.  The book surprised me by being extremely interesting on an economic and cultural basis, diving into the structures and histories that have created a city, Odessa, TX, in which an obsession with high school football can flourish.  I saw aspects of my own high school experience reflected in the book, but I went to a school that was only mildly obsessed with football.  Regardless, I think there are messages in the book about growing up, making ones way, and the development of priorities and morality that are more interesting than the specific study of a specific time and place.

While I enjoyed these first books, the first book that really got me excited this summer was The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.  It’s a dystopian/cyberpunk novel set in Thailand after biotechnology companies have taken over control of food.  It’s more complicated than that, an epic set across a world in which companies have entirely taken over control and plagues constantly threaten the health, and even existence, of human beings.  The philosophical edge to the book, I think, is most powerful in the character of Emiko, the “windup girl.”  Windups, in this world, are bioengineered super-humans, created in the days of conspicuous consumption and reviled as threats to “real” humanity at the time and place of the story.  From her inner dialogue, however, the reader knows that Emiko is human, relatable, complex, and struggling to assert herself in a world that does not value her existence because she reminds them of their weaknesses.

What, then, does this book assert is the basis of humanity?  The ability to assert ones individuality?  The ability to love and to have hopes and dreams?  Or, is Emiko not really human and the story wants us to consider whether “humanity” as such should really be the primary metric by which we judge who we are.  As I read, I considered how the future Bacigalupi imagines does not seems so far away when we consider the power of industrial farming and the edge of safety and independence that could be easily tipped by one strong strain of swine flu or a mutation of some kind of insect that could decimate grain crops in the Midwest.

Perhaps it was inevitable that whatever I read after The Windup Girl would be disappointing.  Family Album, by Penelope Lively, wasn’t quite what I hoped it would be.  This family epic shows how different members of families remember their experiences differently, that no one has the full story and that there are enough misunderstandings and blame to go around.  I think that my problem here was probably that I am too young for this story.  Youth is still too close for me to consider these kinds of resentments that build and burn and morph over time.  I am also not from a family like the huge one described in this book.  While my sister and I certainly argued and fought, in a family of four, there was a lot of attention to go around for both of us.

What does it mean, though, that I couldn’t truly immerse myself in a story because my life was too different from those in the story?  I kind of think that none of the characters was able to be fully developed because the narration was split between all the members of the family.  I just think that by the end, pretty much nobody came off sympathetically.  And if I don’t care about the characters, what’s the point?  Should any book be relatable to a 21-year old intern in D.C.?

Okay, so despite the brain fatigue that came with honors, I’m definitely, at heart, a bookworm, and this blog is a way for me to share my love of reading and keep track of everything I go through.  I’m not sure I’m going to answer any questions in this blog, but I’m certainly going to be doing a lot of reflecting.  Tomorrow is my 22nd birthday, which makes me feel simultaneously old and young, a real, full-fledged adult, but still a confused and lost, unemployed member of the millennial generation.  How does this fit in with the books I’m reading?  I’m not sure, but I hope you’ll check back to find out how it’s going.

Tags: Bacigalupi, Bissinger, Book Thief, Family Album, fiction, Friday Night Lights, Lively, nonfiction, Windup Girl, Zusak

Why this blog? Why now?

Welcome to Post-Bac Booklist.  A lot of you are probably my friends, family, or curious acquaintances.  I wish I could tell you exactly what the mission of this blog will be, but I can’t because I don’t know.  Just like the rest of my life.  What I do know is this:

Ever since I learned to read, I haven’t been able to stop.  I read the public library’s whole collection of the Babysitter’s Club series and read 120 books in 4 months when I was a youth member of a book selection committee for the Nutmeg Book Award.  My suitcase was always stuffed with books on vacation, and, even so, I would usually run out a few days in.

Then came college.  Suddenly, the last thing I wanted to do was to read more before I went to sleep.  I’d read over the summers, but I’d head back to sleep and my in-progress novels would end up on the bookshelf gathering dust.

I graduated this past May, and one of the things I’ve been most excited about is reclaiming my love of books.  And since a big part of what I loved about college was writing, I thought I’d merge these two aspects of my life and write about my reading in this blog.  What I would really love, though, is for this to be a conversation, so please, post your thoughts in the comments.

This blog isn’t about reviewing books; it’s about celebrating stories, words, and about chronicling my post-baccalaureate journey through my relationship with reading.  And if you’d like to offer me a job, that’d be great too!

Welcome to my blog.  I’d love to read your thoughts and comments.  Recommend a book and I’ll probably read it.  Send it to me and I’ll definitely read it.

-Sara