sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote in [personal profile] rushthatspeaks 2014-10-03 08:27 am (UTC)

Yellow, now, yellow is great, and red is damn good, and orange is a stone-cold masterpiece because it's not only good on its own but is as it should be a thematic mashup of the red and yellow books.

Hey. I love you. Thank you for bolstering the vague suspicions of my first college re-read: trying to figure out why the Roman motif repeated in green-and-purple The Book of the Beast, my only explanation was that it was incorporating in both parts the blue "Empires of Azure." And indeed as I think about it, the green chapters are more metaphysically concerned while the purple chapters are driven directly by a gem-linked contagious sexual haunting (although the gender themes of The Book of the Damned are vividly absent, because this is another book). Awesome.

Also, of course his wife instantly dies-- she wasn't ever real, because Pam, well, her ideal of the perfect life wasn't actually based around being married to Lucas, so her principal reflection skipped town and did something else (to be specific, she turned herself into the Gnostic Sophia and is pretty much running the cosmos).

That is one of the specific plot things that makes me love the book, as opposed to the structural brilliance or the language (I think it is his best-written novel to date) or the fact that it causes the reader to question the existence of Patrick Leigh Fermor slightly, because you want to know who invented him in order to be able to talk about Byzantium.

So, if I do try ASoiaF again, which is a definite maybe, I'm going to try to deliberately and consciously read it as visually as I can.

I think it may be necessary to read A Song of Ice and Fire non-structurally, because I think whatever structure Martin started out writing to has collapsed by now—he's been very frank that the number of books has exploded beyond his expectations and he's had to split them and reshuffle their chapters and convert storylines from one volume to the next, so I suspect its glass shape of looking like a sneeze in the middle of free-blowing. Possibly the first three have more armature than just the storylines, but I do not remember it being perceptible when I read them

(I think I got through the fourth book and then somehow did not care enough when the fifth came out, despite its having dragons in the title. The series has a major strike against it for me in that I do not like the style Martin adopted for it at all. It differs perceptibly from his earlier science fiction work; it's a lot plainer in its vocabulary, a lot less syntactically complicated, and a lot duller, meant literally in that it doesn't ring for me. There are not as many resonances in the language as there should be. Words are there to convey one-dimensional qualities: color, texture, temperature, speed. The effect it gives me is a lot of distinct primary colors and a curious flatness, a kind of shallowness that is not the same as being cheaply written; there are other writers with whom I have this or similar problems, but it's really marked with Martin because I have read stories of his where it's not in effect. It feels kind of like he tossed a coin to determine whether he was going to focus on his cast-of-thousands plot or the way he told the story and, to my frustration, language lost hands-down.)

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