Book Tamers| book reviews

When people around you hear you’re reading a horror novel and that actually you’re captivated by the whole bunch of pages, they immediately request full actual data, the author, the title, they express their fright when it comes to the number of pages, but due to a shiny cover, a perfect drawing, a clever foreword, they easily get curious and they all have the same desire: to read it. Well, according to Michel Faber, they partially become reading vodsels.

But what are vodsels? I will not reveal the subject of the book more than the fourth cover does…and I actually don’t know what’s stopping me. A very young and well-adjusted woman picks up every day one hitchhiker so that the people in her underground world to process him as our meat factories do and to serve him as file to the rich subterranean people. These creatures have a different morphology than ours, they walk on four legs, but they have a fox mouth, long ears, tail and they have discovered a way of transforming one of them, named Isserley, in a vodsel female, that is a hot sexy biped.

The novel includes in its narrative space both places where Isserley looks for her victims, that is Highway 9, and the farm where the latter are fattened and carved. As a matter of fact, I thought that every scary novel should have a dark spot, with barbaric, rude and butcher-like creatures.

The perspective of the book is given from the point of view of the bait woman, of this being who has to pretend she is fragile, breathing sexuality, but who actually can barely wait for the moment when she pushes a button that will paralyze the victim. Isserley is the flower of the underworld, morphologically modified in order to have the vodsels’ appearance, but bearing the nostalgia of the lost organs. Nonetheless, her sexual attractiveness is given by her breasts and her hair, the woman is actually scaring some of the hitchhikers, she has a skin full of scars, and her unearthly eyes are masked with the help of some glasses with very thick lenses. She has a strange appearance, a rare understanding capacity; something weird comes out of her. Most of the hitchhikers think it is sexual desire, but the finest psychologists would have a lot of questions to ask this woman driver.

Now, why have I read this novel? Well, first of all because of a statement on the fourth cover that says it could be considered a new „1984”, respectively the description of a phase our society goes through or will go through. We could thus understand that there is or it is about to exist an underground world that appreciates from a culinary point of view the human meat and that there are evidently drivers that seek for lone hitchhikers in order to transform them in soup and steak.

As for the narrative accomplishments of the book, one can see that the action is represented by a monotonous series of murders on the same recipe, that the human society remains indifferent facing the number of the victims that is increasing considering that Isserley takes care of that every single day. I also take notice of the fact that beyond action, it is about the description of some people, who not being able to predict their future death, tell her about their daily routines, their indecision, misunderstandings, the way society treats them. Isserley waits from each and single hitchhiker the confession that no one will ever be interested in them and once she hears that, she pushes the paralyzing button. Some manage to get away, the popular ones, those who are loved or the physically weak. This diabolic machine is a kind of a psychiatric office where the patients, under the aphrodisiac effect of the enormous breasts of the driver, easily confess, they don’t get she’s pushy, that their ego is spoiled so that they could reveal themselves better.

I should also remind the persuasive techniques– Isserley follows some compulsory stages: finding the passenger’s destination, if he is in a hurry or not to reach a certain destination, if he’s expected by someone, and then she offers her breasts in many provocative positions, to stir the clients and to make them think about their own sexual relationships, the way they get along with their women, and she finds out many of them are divorced, they live alone, they’re misunderstood. Isserley becomes a confessor like the hookers who patiently listen all kinds of melodramatic stories from the men who seek to motivate and eventually to justify themselves that they are in their company. The one that got divorced are stung, the travelers as well, and so does the unemployed, the loners and the isolated. As Isserley says to herself, she has the impression society itself sends her the right victims, the hitchhikers are socially conflicted, inconstant and abusive … Isserley gets the impression she resembles a lion that takes care of the human herd purifying it by exterminating the undesired elements, pushed to the edges of society. It is here an allegory of euthanasia or in another plan a parable of the law of the jungle.

What this novel lacks is ideas, a certain consistency. This kind of things can show up only after the reader’s analysis, which is actually let to see what he wants and in the end he is totally lost because of the ambiguous ending. What is to be a hitchhiker, why some people hang around highways, why are they some kind of fishermen of what the street has to offer, how people who pick up hitchhikers think and why they do it, the relationship between driving and loneliness, these are the real questions here.

Plato and his two worlds can’t be forgotten especially when it comes about novels that suppose the presence of us and them, and beings in Isserley’s world look like those in the allegorical cave of the Greek philosopher. Moreover, I thought that Isserley, even though she has the chance of rejoicing the beauties of this world, which are unbelievable for those of her kind, still hangs on to the same initial habits and misunderstandings. She is from this point of view, a psychically inferior being, only the first in the series of butchers in the vodsels’ world. The one that makes the discrepancy between the two worlds, their fundamental differences and the pettiness of his kind is Amlis Vess, a visitor from the underground Dark Worlds, a very rich being who does not have to carry on the dirty chores of his poor fellow creatures. He admires the beauties of the Upper World, he thinks the sky is amazing, the sea is large, the leaves- a phenomenon that makes him think for hours, and sheep are mistaken for clever creatures. Isserley admires the Lower World, and this motivates her to kill, she is nostalgic about her genetically non-modified body, she likes vodsel meat and she often sees in the people down the road just some delicious hunks, but she also presents the image of the underground world and the superior capacity that her fellow creatures would rejoice.

Unfortunately, Michel Faber doesn’t explain the things that truly define an underground creature and the words he invented are actually barbaric and don’t cover any actual reality.
I found here the same trick as in the SF novels. When they should explain what is warp speed or what are the beauties of the underworld in the future, on Planet XP 223, then there is no magical explanation and the bridge to the psychological part is made. Maybe this is why SF novels or their fantastical tricks were successful only after the emphasis moved from action to psychology and from motivation to introspection.

In the end- I am a little bit confused. Did I like the novel or not? It is a new 1984! I think the verdict on the cover can’t be justified, Michel Faber’s writing is dated, and it belongs to those books that once read they just go away with no regrets. I should however praise the storytelling technique of this British author and especially his capacity of joggling multiple meanings, to maintain the story on the distinct and thin line between sexuality, meanness and knowledge.

Written by: Gabriel

Peter Beagle is commonly associated by Fantasy literature readers with the novel The Last Unicorn- considered to be one of the ten best Fantasy novels ever written. I haven’t read that one though, this being my first encounter with the author, so you will have to take their word for it.

A Fine and Private Place is his first novel and the fact that it rapidly became a classic of the genre is indeed to be appreciated, as Peter Beagle was only nineteen when he wrote the book.

The story begins with an evil-toadied raven which brings food to Mr. Rebeck, a chemist who has been living in a cemetery for twenty years. The reason for which he is there is his fear of the living people. His company is only represented (besides the talkative raven) by the spirits of the dead, before they vanish forever, once having forgotten how it felt to be alive. Two of them are the ghosts of Laura and Michael who meet in Mr. Rebeck’s cemetery in order to do something they couldn’t do during their lifetime.

Then there is also Ms Klapper, the widow who runs into Mr. Rebeck on her way to her former husband’s grave. Her apparition will turn Mr. Rebeck’s calm and hidden world upside-down.

The two pairs are seen in an antithetic manner: Mr. Rebeck hides away from life while Ms Klapper is afraid of dying. Michael and Laura, although they both shared a tragic end, look upon afterlife in different ways: Michael desperately tries not to forget the past, while Laura wants to leave the cemetery as soon as possible. However, their conversations about life, the exterior world and about love will reveal to them that their past, hopes and ambitions make them quite similar.

Peter Beagle does a great job in shaping his characters. The narrative begins slowly, with news about the exterior world brought by the raven and continues with its influences on Mr. Rebeck’s life. Even though at times sad, the story leads to a happy ending for both of the worlds. The love story is very original, taking in consideration other existing ones. The dialogues, although sometimes slightly artificial, sustain some interesting ideas about symbols connected to life and inter-human relationships. And the raven (whose black humor reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s style) is more than a bridge between the world represented by the cemetery and the one outside it. It is a bridge between the world of the living and the one of the dead, between the story and the reader, as the whole action seems to be seen through its dark eyes.

Written by Alin

Some teenage friends saw me reading this particular book and they smiled at me with that ironic sprinkle in their eyes. „We have read that when we were young. Why wasting time on this”?  How could I explain them that a beautiful book never wastes one’s time. Or that this reader quality takes you out of the body’s traps and the flat reality dimension.
These friends have become grown-ups mentally. They have reached a point where they valued things on their price and dimension. Grown-ups love other type of books, the wrestling-type: The big Prince, Gorgon-eyed. The Oil Prince, the Wall Street King, the lord of the dance.

But there are things outside size. There is a place that allows our existence, the others’ existence, without self-proclaimed earthly kingdoms, without pride in the battle flag. A place where we can place Socrates, the philosopher who never wrote a book back in the Antiquity, and also Saint-Exupery. It’s not the size, but the nature of things that seem to have a real price. Why are they like that and what do they mean? That’s what Socrates searched for in the Athens’ agora many centuries ago. That’s what Saint Exupery is looking for in this parable of the little prince. The sound of things. The melody of beings. Their mystery. The beauty.

Socrates went to a merchant without caring if he was the greatest. For he was not a merchant or he rarely was one, he understood the one in front of him as a bearer of the merchant idea. But don’t we buy and sell all our lives? Don’t we try to embellish, sometimes artificially, our own things? Isn’t there any competition? Isn’t the merchant the one that can give us an image of the way these kind of relationships work in their natural habitat- the economical one- for us to understand their intrusion in our soul? And especially, asked Socrates, what is to be a merchant, king of Wall Street? How does it compete with life’s most important things, like the good, the beauty, the truth?
Facing cynical answers like the one that a merchant is beyond morality, he would shrug his shoulders and keep looking for somebody else to talk to. He was looking for that particular merchant who understood that talking about the nature of things is not a simple babbling, but a way of exploring one’s deepest abyss. It was a way of knowing oneself.

Thus, in the middle of the XX-th century, Saint-Exupery, the aviator, presents the Little Prince as a Socratic parable. He has the same curiosity when he looks for significations and symbols both in humans and in things. He tells us that each human being has a planet of his own, and that this planet embellishes or it is disfigured by the person’s behavior and nature. He also tells us that we live in a major illusion that makes us incredibly static. One imagines he’s a king but he has no servants. Another one is ready to lethally bite any other living being. One thinks that the meaning of people on Earth is to admire him. Some are slaves - like the Little Prince - of a beauty’s vanities.

That’s why sometimes, a journey is important for shaking the shackles’ rustiness from the realistic monotony of a “grown-up”. That’s why the two characters, the aviator and the Little Prince, are in their own way travelers that fell together in the same desert for a few days. The aviator is terrified by the perspective of his imminent death, his plane crashed in an isolated place, and the Little Prince is sad because his planet is full of baobabs and tyrannized by flowers. The things on his planet are not in the right order, and that’s why he visits other planets - to see something different, maybe something better.

Before I go any further, I should explain my own reaction. I could have joined my friends in irony if I had seen the book in somebody else’s hands. The beginning of the book gave me the impression of a fairytale in which a man in need creates himself an illusion to help him survive in the desert. But fiction will acquire during the deployment of the plot many other sentimental colors than an adult couldn’t possibly see, and the disappearance or the death of the Little Prince has a tragic, apotheosis tone. However, he didn’t even exist. But still, he exists beyond reality, there, on his planet and somewhere on everybody’s planet. It’s an intensity moment from childhood. From our eternal childhood.
What is childhood anyway? We ask this as Socrates does a child. No, not the greatest child, the king child. No. Just a regular kid. And we may receive the answer that in childhood we must remember about dreams and games. But does what we imagined start to make room into reality? And what are games but a repeated try to solve society’s puzzles?
That’s childhood in the Little Prince. He plays with curiosity and learns something from every encounter. It is everything he can take back to his planet, it’s everything that the aviator gets from him. Mirrors of the human abyss.

Here’s what a fox teaches him: that people need rituals and that they appreciate realities that can be tamed, like being cared for, raised and helped by the people around him. A snake shows him that among people one can feel alone, and a geographer reveals to him that beautiful things needn’t be on a map for they are ephemeral.

Why were those young people sarcastic with me? How many topics, similar to this story, could they have discussed? I feel for the first time the need to go back to this book and read it again because I was so touched by the little prince’s disappearance. But this time, in French, where I will definitely find delicacies that can’t be translate.

I would like to add something about Saint Exupery’s technique. It is close to Jacques Prevert’s simple attitude, it has a clear modern manner, it uses cinematographic procedures like moving away and foreground, it has no real background but who cares, really? I can’t really wait for the aviator’ engine to break down again. The Little Prince will show up asking for a sheep to be drawn and will drift away all my anxieties with his starry smile.

Written by Gabriel

Time traveler’s wife is an atypical love story between a librarian (Henry), who suffers from a genetic disorder that makes him travel through time and his wife (Clare), constrained to get used to his sudden leaves and long absences. Henry can’t control the moment of his leaving and has no idea when he will be back. Thus, in order to keep his calm, he runs.

Clare waiting for Henry - Henry waiting for time

When travelling, Henry can’t take anything with him. Thus, he awakes bare naked and starving as he finds himself in the need of learning various tricks in order to get food and clothes. He learns all these tricks from his elder self. Clare is a catholic artist who practically has known Henry all her life although they met in reality only at an adult age. The relationship between the two can seem in the beginning rather crazy, almost like a joke. Henry’s departures are in no way a warranty of the marital lastingness. Waiting is one of the central ideas of this novel. Both characters wait for something to happen: Clare, like a modern Penelope, spends her time dreaming of her time-travelling husband, while Henry craves for a treatment, a confirmation that his disease has a cure. The latter’s wish to live like a normal human being makes him able to support a family from which he is absent most of the time.

Unlimited love

A series of misfortunate accidents arises from Clare’s need to love somebody who would stay by her side, a glimpse from Henry that he would not desert her, an insurance in case of fire, of flooding or divine will.
Told from both points of view, the story reveals the effects of time travelling on unconditional love between the two and on their marriage. The characters do not reveal themselves gradually because there is no proper chronology of the events. Also, the discussions between teenage Clare and an older Henry are almost improbable. Moreover, the love feeling is said rather than being suggested and facts are depicted mechanically. The indisputable charm of the novel is given by the characters’ faith that they are meant for each other, that love is above any kind of limitations and even above death.

Written by Ioana