It’s our very first guest of 2019! This episode, the Jennys welcome the fabulous Charlotte Geater to the podcast to chat about experimental, epistolary, and other unconventional narrative formats. Then we review Gina Apostol’s strange and wonderful new novel Insurrecto, which at least one of us already feels confident is going to be one of our best books of 2019. You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!
Here are the time signatures if you want to skip around.
1:21 – What we’re reading
5:18 – What we’re anticipating
8:37 – Nontraditional narrative formats
35:01 – Insurrecto, by Gina Apostol
50:09 – What we’re reading next time
What we talked about:
Evvie Drake Starts Over, Linda Holmes
Sylvia Townsend Warner letters
A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars, Nicholas Rankin
This Is What It Feels Like, Rebecca Barrow
A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
Josh Ritter’s new album, Fever Breaks
Three Identical Strangers (movie)
The Jolly Postman, Janet and Allan Ahlberg
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg
Bad Kitty, Michelle Jaffe
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
The Spellman Files, Lisa Lutz
The Unfortunates, B. S. Johnson
Tripticks, Ann Quin
HHhH, Laurent Binet
Ulysses, James Joyce
White Is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi
Censoring an Iranian Love Story, Shahriar Mandanipour
Mr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi
interview with Sofia Samatar in Big Echo
Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
The Lodger, Louisa Treger
S, Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (this edition is the one I am indignant about)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick
The Marvels, Brian Selznick
Dennis Severs’ House
Insurrecto, Gina Apostol
Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).
Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry
Transcript is available below the jump.
THEME SONG: You don’t judge a book by its cover. Page one’s not a much better view. And shortly you’re gonna discover the middle won’t mollify you. So whether whiskey’s your go-to or you’re like my gin-drinking friend, no matter what you are imbibing, you’ll be better off in the end reading the end.
GIN JENNY: Welcome to the Reading the End bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny.
WHISKEY JENNY: And I’m Whiskey Jenny.
GIN JENNY: And we are here again to talk about books and literary happenings. On today’s podcast we’re going to talk about what we’re reading and what we’re anticipating, and then we’re going to chat about non-traditional narrative formats in books. And then we are going to review Gina Apostol’s novel Insurrecto. But before we get into all that, we have a very special guest here today, Charlotte. Welcome, Charlotte!
CHARLOTTE: Hello.
GIN JENNY: Thank you so much for coming on.
CHARLOTTE: Thank you for having me.
GIN JENNY: Charlotte is a longtime friend of the podcast and Twitter pal, and this is her first time coming on. And we are doing a transatlantic podcast. So exciting.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, all the way across the ocean, pond, whatever.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well Charlotte, tell us what you’re reading right now.
CHARLOTTE: I just finished reading Linda Holmes’s debut novel.
JENNYS: [GASP]
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. I got sent an advance reading copy of the UK edition, although I don’t think it’s any different, apart from the beautiful cover. Yeah, it’s called Evvie Drake Starts Over. And it is Evvie, rather than Evie. This is made plain in the novel.
GIN JENNY: OK.
CHARLOTTE: And it’s not out till June, but it’s pretty good. I read it in a day. So now I’m just reading some Sylvia Townsend Warner letters, just kind of trying to decide what to read next.
GIN JENNY: So the book is good? Because I’m excited to read it, so I’m happy to hear it’s good.
CHARLOTTE: It’s really great. I was thinking it was going to be more of a rom com in the Rainbow Rowell vein.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
CHARLOTTE: And it kind of is, but it’s a bit darker and deeper than that. It deals with some emotional abuse stuff, without going into too much spoilery detail. But I think it’s handled really well and it deals with mental health and stuff. Yeah, I just really loved it. It’s kind of like a very warm cuddle, even though it deals with those things. By the end of it I felt very affirmed. I was like, oh yes, life can be good.
GIN JENNY: Well, that’s really nice. Well, I’m glad you warned me, ‘cause I was also picturing it being very rom commy, so it’s good to know what to expect.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, but I think we were both really looking forward to that one, so I’m excited to hear it’s good.
CHARLOTTE: It’s so good.
GIN JENNY: We should read it for—
WHISKEY JENNY: Gin Jenny, I’m surprised—we should, but I wasn’t ever going to pick it, because I think there’s a lot of honkbal in it. There’s a lot of baseball in it.
GIN JENNY: Oh, there is? OK. All right, no, that’s OK. I can power through it. I can power through it.
WHISKEY JENNY: I mean, Charlotte can tell us exactly how much there is.
CHARLOTTE: Well, I mean, there’s baseball in it, but—as you can hear, I am not from the US, and I know nothing about baseball. I played rounders in primary school, which is like softball for English people.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Oh.
CHARLOTTE: And yeah, I know nothing about it, and it’s fine. I would say there are a lot of podcast jokes and references in the book, because Linda Holmes does Pop Culture Happy Hour for NPR. And so there’ll be a bit where one of the characters is like, yeah, I listen to a podcast about design, I listen to a podcast about whatever. I’m like, I know which podcast this character is listening to. [LAUGHTER] And I found it very enjoyable. And I was like, these podcast references are aimed squarely at me. This very much in my wheelhouse.
And honestly, there was about as much about that as there was about actual baseball. The book explains all you need to know. It’s not really about the game; it’s more about what happens when you can’t play it anymore.
GIN JENNY: OK. That sounds doable. Whiskey Jenny, what are you reading?
WHISKEY JENNY: I am reading a nonfiction book.
GIN JENNY: [GASP]
WHISKEY JENNY: In an exciting twist.
[LAUGHTER]It’s called A Genius for Deception, How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars, by Nicholas Rankin.
GIN JENNY: Oh, is that the book you have two copies of accidentally?
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, I accidentally bought a second copy of it, and I figured that was a sign that I should read it.
CHARLOTTE: Wow.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this book about trickery tricked me.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: You think it conned you into buying it a second time?
WHISKEY JENNY: I do. I think it’s the book.
[LAUGHTER]CHARLOTTE: Wow.
GIN JENNY: Man, I live for the day when you start reading nonfiction on the regular, Whiskey Jenny.
WHISKEY JENNY: Uh, who knows? Who can say when that day will be?
GIN JENNY: How are you finding it so far?
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s very enjoyable so far, but I’m still pretty early on in the beginning.
GIN JENNY: Well, I am reading a YA novel called This Is What It Feels Like, by Rebecca Barrow. I’m almost done. It’s about these three girls who used to be in a band together, but then one of them started drinking more and more and the band broke up as a result. And now it’s a year or two later. The girl, Hannah, has gotten sober, but she hasn’t rekindled her friendship with her former bandmates. And there is a music competition in town that they want to enter, so they have to actually get the actual band back together.
And I’m really enjoying it. They’re all teenagers, and one of them is a mom, and it was great to see a book about a teenage mother where that’s not the main point of the book. So yeah, I’m really enjoying it.
WHISKEY JENNY: Great.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. So for this podcast, our Patreon voters selected for us to talk about what we’re anticipating, which is an amazing thing to get to do. So Charlotte, what are you anticipating right now?
CHARLOTTE: Is this books, or is it anything?
GIN JENNY: Anything.
CHARLOTTE: OK, so I’m going to say a book. I don’t know why I asked if it was books or anything. [LAUGHTER] So I’m really, really looking forward to this book that’s coming out from—I want to say Tor; one of the big sci-fi publishers. And it’s by Arkady Martine, and it is called A Memory Called Empire. So I’ve been following Arkady Martine for a while because she works as a city planner and talks about city planning, and writing. And I really like city planning and thinking about the built world, because I’m that kind of nerd, like architecture and stuff. And this has got a really beautiful cover. And it’s a space opera that’s about political machinations. It’s got lots of made up words I don’t know how to pronounce in the summary.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Intimidating.
CHARLOTTE: Well, yeah. I was really worried it was going to be super dry. And then there was an excerpt from it somewhere, and I read it and I was like, OK, these characters are fun. These characters are funny and sharp. It’s about someone who is an ambassador to some kind of other space empire, and things happen.
GIN JENNY: I’ve heard such good things about that book. Everyone I’ve seen who’s read it has just been blown away by it. So I’m excited to read it.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, same.
GIN JENNY: Whiskey Jenny, what about you? What are you anticipating?
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, this is kind of far away, so I have a long ways to go before it happens.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: OK.
WHISKEY JENNY: But one of my favorite musicians just released a new song from an album coming out in April and is coming to New York in September. And I just got tickets to go see him live. So I’m very excited, but it’s not until September!
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well, that just means you’ll have months and months to anticipate it.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s true. It’s Josh Ritter, in case I did not mention that.
GIN JENNY: You didn’t. I was like, ooh, Whiskey Jenny’s so cagey.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: It’s Josh Ritter, sorry. The album was produced by someone else I really like, Jason Isbell. And someone else that I like, who is also Jason Isbell’s wife, Amanda Shires, is going to be at the concert that I’m going to. And it is just a whole big conflagration of things that I like.
GIN JENNY: Oh, wonderful.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. What are you anticipating?
GIN JENNY: OK, so I’m anticipating a documentary that is coming to, I believe, Hulu at the end of February. It’s called Three Identical Strangers, and it’s about triplets, three brothers who were given up for adoption and adopted out into three different families and never knew that they were triplets until they were adults. And they discovered each other as adults. And I do want to mention for listeners, one of the brothers did die by suicide in the ‘90s after they had reunited. So just be careful if you’re not in a place to take on a story like that.
But so the documentary is about these brothers trying to find out why they were separated at birth. And it’s one of these stories about the years before they had institutional review boards where you will just be staggered by the lack of ethics everybody displayed. So it sounds really interesting and really sad, and just bonkers. Like, ape language studies bonkers. And I’m really, really excited to watch it, even though I never, ever watch movies.
WHISKEY JENNY: It sounds up your alley, though.
GIN JENNY: Right?
WHISKEY JENNY: It does.
GIN JENNY: I never watch movies, and I especially never watch documentaries. So this is big for me.
OK, so on today’s podcast we want to talk about non-traditional narrative forms and experimental narrative formats. So before we get deeply into it, I would like just a quick straw poll on what each of us thinks of that kind of thing. Because I’m strongly pro.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, I love it.
WHISKEY JENNY: I would say I love it, but I don’t have much experience with it personally.
GIN JENNY: Interesting, interesting.
WHISKEY JENNY: I always enjoy it, but I shy away from them.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I think this is like our views on—Is it adaptations of books that you’re always excited about?
WHISKEY JENNY: I do. They always suck me in. I’m like, this time it’ll be good!
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: That’s me with experimental novels. I’m always assuming they’re going to be amazing, and I’m frequently disappointed. Well, Charlotte, what draws you to this kind of book?
CHARLOTTE: It depends. I don’t have a taxonomy, but I was like thinking about it earlier.
GIN JENNY: I tried so hard to think of a taxonomy, and I couldn’t.
CHARLOTTE: I feel like there are experimental novels where they’re really difficult, and where the experimentation makes it really difficult follow you spend ages working on it. And I can enjoy that. That can be really rewarding if there’s a point to that. Or it can be an epistolary novel, or found documents or something, where it’s just really fun. And you’re like, I’m reading someone else’s post. And it’s—[LAUGHTER] it’s weirdly—I mean, voyeuristic is a strong term for it.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Unnecessarily negative.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. And I don’t mean in that way. But I dunno, there’s something really pleasurable about it. And you get the sense of finding out what people’s written voices are like, which is kind of different from their spoken voices, if it’s done right. So yeah, I find that really fun. I’ve always got on really well with books where it’s told through email, where it includes emails and texts and stuff.
GIN JENNY: Oh my gosh, me too. My love of epistolary fiction is—I mean, A of all, that situation is ongoing as hell. But B of all, it’s been the case since I was like four, reading The Jolly Postman.
CHARLOTTE: Yes!
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I really think I can date it back to The Jolly Postman and The Jolly Postman Christmas.
CHARLOTTE: I think so, too. And I was recently trying to explain this to some friends—some English friends—and they were like, oh no, I haven’t heard of that.
GIN JENNY: What?
CHARLOTTE: And I was just like—I know! It’s by—Allan—
GIN JENNY: Ahlberg or something.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, by the Ahlbergs. It’s an absolute classic. Yes, thank you.
GIN JENNY: Wow. I’m shocked. I’m shocked and horrified. I notice Whiskey Jenny is being suspiciously silent
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of it. [LAUGHTER] But it sounds delightful.
GIN JENNY: It’s so great, Whiskey Jenny. It’s about a postman who has letters to bring to all these fairy tale creatures. And you get to take them out of the envelope.
WHISKEY JENNY: Ooh!
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I bet you did love that book, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]CHARLOTTE: And they’re all handwritten and illustrated. They are perfect.
GIN JENNY: They’re so great. And he gets nervous because he has to deliver a letter to the Big Bad Wolf, but it’s actually fine.
WHISKEY JENNY: Aw.
GIN JENNY: It’s really sweet.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think I was too narrowly defining non-traditional narrative, and epistolary never even occurred to me. So I’m doing some quick revision of [LAUGHTER] my brain really quickly. But do we think that interlinking short stories is a non-traditional narrative format?
GIN JENNY: Ooh. Yes, but I didn’t think of it.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, I think so. Like A Visit from the Goon Squad.
WHISKEY JENNY: Exactly. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of. I always really enjoy those because I feel like sort of a detective when you get glimpses of main characters from other stories as background characters in a different story. I get really excited.
CHARLOTTE: No, it’s so much fun. I think that’s also part of the joy of when you get a book where part of the story is told in footnotes.
GIN JENNY: Ooh, yes. Yes.
CHARLOTTE: You’re like, oh, I’m finding out something secret that someone else added later.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Gosh I do love a fictional footnote. Man.
GIN JENNY: Me, too. Charlotte, can you think of books that tell a lot of stories by footnotes? I can only think of Confessions of the Fox right now.
CHARLOTTE: Oh, yeah. So there’s Bad Kitty, by Michele Jaffe, which is a YA novel from like a decade ago. And there’s a sequel. And it’s about a teenage girl detective, and she and her friends will have conversations as asides from the main story in footnotes. It’s not necessarily like they’re annotating it. It’s kind of like—I don’t know. It’s really hard to describe, but it’s really fun.
GIN JENNY: It sounds amazing. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of that.
CHARLOTTE: There’s a sequel, I think, but I don’t think there are any more, so I assume the series wasn’t that successful. Which is just wild, because it is the most fun.
GIN JENNY: Theodora Goss has two books, and I wasn’t ultimately that fond of them, but I enjoyed the format. It’s about the daughters of famous figures from Gothic Victorian books—Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and like that. But while the story is going on, the various girls are commenting on the storytelling. And yeah, like I said, the books weren’t my favorite, but I really did enjoy that format a lot.
CHARLOTTE: I’m trying to think of the term. Sometimes it doesn’t actually make the book feel particularly anti-tradition. Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has footnotes, and it’s my fave. But it’s very much in the mode of a 19th century long novel, which have footnotes sometimes, so. But yeah, I love that.
GIN JENNY: Oh god, yeah, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is so, so amazing.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think there’s a mystery series that I’ve mentioned on here before, The Spellman Files. Sometimes the book will refer to documents in the appendices, and then it’ll give you those documents in the appendices, and it’ll be almost like a court file or a detective file. It makes sense because it’s a detective story. But sometimes they’ll be for silly things, because they’re also comedy novels. And going to your point, it doesn’t make it feel like a non-traditional book. It seamlessly weaves in with the rest of the story, but it is a really fun bonus at the end, or if you flip back as they’re referencing it, it’s a funny little joke.
But yeah, I think that’s interesting, the difference between does it take you out of the narrative on purpose, or is it mimicking something else?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, it can be more immersive. So there’s this writer I like called Ann Quin, and another writer called B.S. Johnson, and they were both working class experimental English novelists in the midcentury. And they wrote quite very odd novels. And so there’s one by B.S. Johnson called The Unfortunates, which comes in a box.
GIN JENNY: [GASP]
CHARLOTTE: And it’s lots of unbound folios of various different lengths. So you might have eight pages bound together, or a single page, and you’re meant to shuffle it. And so there’s a first section and a last section, but the rest of it you can basically read in whatever order you take them out of the box.
GIN JENNY: That sounds amazing.
CHARLOTTE: I have to say, this is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever read. [LAUGHTER] It was impossible to get hold of at one point—or not impossible, but expensive when I was an undergrad—so I ordered it up from the library at my university, and I just read it all in one sitting and then just sat there sobbing in the Bodleian.
GIN JENNY: Oh, God!
[LAUGHTER]CHARLOTTE: So—but no, it’s really great. But Ann Quin has got a few different novels, but there’s one called Tripticks which is in part illustrated in a way that I find incredibly hard to describe. But yeah, it’s almost like it’s got little mini comics panels in between the text.
GIN JENNY: Ooh.
CHARLOTTE: And also the way it’s written, you don’t have—well I mean, I don’t have any idea what the hell was going on. I find it quite nice to kind of dip in and out, but I haven’t properly sat down and managed to make it all the way from beginning to end yet.
GIN JENNY: Well this is something I wanted to ask y’all. Because Whiskey Jenny and I have talked about before that I have more tolerance for not knowing what’s going on than she does. [LAUGHTER] So I was wondering if we could each talk a little bit about how we feel about not knowing what’s going on.
Because I think my tipping point is just farther along than Whiskey Jenny’s. [LAUGHTER] Where at some point I’m like, well this is nonsense! I quit! But I think that I’m willing to be a little more in the dark for longer.
CHARLOTTE: I think I’m quite willing to be in the dark. But I mean, I come from a poetry background. And I feel like one of the ways that I think is the secret to enjoying poetry is to really not care whether you know what’s happening or not. I often have to read a poem many more times than you would think someone who spends a lot of time reading poetry would have to read a poem over before I have any idea what is going on an incredibly basic level. Because I’m just like, oh yeah, these are some really beautiful words. And then someone will make a comment about the poem in a very obvious way, like this is what it means on a sense level. And I’ll be like, oh yeah, OK. Yeah, that’s right. I literally just had not thought of that.
So if there’s an experimental novel that I can read a bit like poetry, then I can just go along. But then mostly I start to feel like I’m a fraud. I’m like, oh no, should I be able to follow this? Is someone going to think that I am a terrible reader? If I’m really into the language, then I can just kind of keep going.
GIN JENNY: I think that’s how I feel, too. And even though I’m not necessarily the most excited about beautiful language compared to some others—[LAUGHTER] But actually, it’s such a relief to hear you say that you don’t understand what’s going on in poetry on a sense level. Because I super don’t either. Which is fine; it’s not a catastrophe. But I’m glad to hear that an official poetry person feels this way.
[LAUGHTER]CHARLOTTE: There are no official poetry people.
GIN JENNY: Well.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Well, if there are, I’m definitely not one of them. So I agree, it’s very helpful. I’m going to try this advice when reading poetry.
CHARLOTTE: I feel like a lot of people are like, oh yeah, I really need to reconcile this. And I’m just like, no, just go with it. If you really want to sit down and work at a poem for half an hour or an hour and work out exactly what it’s saying, fine, but you don’t have to do that.
GIN JENNY: I look at it like nonrepresentational art, where I just try to—you know, if it makes me feel something, hooray, and if not, then not. I can move on. But that’s kind of how I approach it.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, yeah, that’s basically how I think about it as well.
GIN JENNY: Whiskey Jenny?
WHISKEY JENNY: Well as you know, I really don’t enjoy being in the dark. And this applies to all things. I am notorious when watching TV or movies with other people, for requesting pauses and demanding things be explained to me. [LAUGHTER]
When we watched The Vampire Diaries, we had a drinking rule in place that I only had a certain number of pauses I could request.
GIN JENNY: No, that wasn’t the rule! The rule was that every five we would take a drink. It wasn’t a rule about how often you could pause.
WHISKEY JENNY: Sure. There were consequences, though. [LAUGHTER]
But so no, I constantly—I am the reader that Gina Apostol was yelling at, who constantly wants things to be explained to her and to make sense. And I was trying to—when I know that I am reading a book where that’s not going to happen, I do try to sort of let go and go along with the wave. And we have read some other things for podcast, too. Like we read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which I think was very postmodern—
GIN JENNY: Yes.
WHISKEY JENNY: —in its construct. And sort of similar to this book, is aware that it’s a book, I guess. Is that meta? Is that what that word is?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s very meta, as well. So I can hold onto meta as my entrance into this world, and just try to remember, OK, it’s reminding me that it’s a book. That’s OK. I can do this. [LAUGHTER] But no, generally I like to know all the characters’ names and their family bloodlines and where they live in the village. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: I feel like the most common thing that I edit out of this podcast is Whiskey Jenny asking me a really specific question about the book we’ve read and me not knowing the answer.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: When I was making my notes for this book, I allowed myself only one specific question. But I do have one.
GIN JENNY: Let me tell you, it is 75% certain that I will not know the answer. [LAUGHTER] I think overall what makes books like this fun for me is the feeling that I am participating in it more than in other books. It’s sort of like driving stick shift versus driving automatic. One’s not better. They’ll get you where you’re going. But I like that feeling of involvement and participation.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, me too. I made a lot of underlining. And I started sticking Post-it note flags in, and now there are a lot of Post-it note flags. And I also started writing little essays in the margins, which my boyfriend kind of wants to read it because I was going on about it to him. And I’m a bit like, oh, you’re going to read my notes and think, what a loser. [LAUGHTER] But yeah, because every time I made a connection, I was like, oh! Oh my god! I’ve spotted a thing!
GIN JENNY: Yeah! Right. And it also feels like the book is drawing me in more. I was thinking about HHhH, by Laurent Binet, which I know I probably talk about way too much. But that one feels like it’s less like a book you’re reading about these events, and it’s much more like you have a really nice, really delightful friend who’s telling you the story of these events. And it just makes me feel really cared for and involved.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s so interesting. See, I feel like it’s as if a friend is telling me but I can’t stop them and be like, wait, hold on, I’m really confused. [LAUGHTER] Can you go back a little bit? [LAUGHTER] It’s a friend who doesn’t care.
GIN JENNY: Oh, man. You know, I saw this tweet a while ago where Gene Demby was saying he had an ex. They would be watching a movie, both of them for the first time, and she would pause and ask questions. And he’d be like, we’re watching the same movie. You have all the information you have.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s me! [LAUGHTER] That’s so totally me.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: And he said he found it annoying, and I was like, that’s the most endearing thing about Whiskey Jenny.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, thank you. I’m glad it’s not annoying to you.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: The constant assumption that I have somehow gleaned more. Which is ridiculous, because you’re a far more careful reader and viewer than I am. I’m extremely slapdash.
CHARLOTTE: I had to read Ulysses for—
GIN JENNY: Oh, God.
CHARLOTTE: —my undergrad degree in English. It was a complete hell week in my second term at Oxford, where we had to do an essay on Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist and Virginia Woolf. And I think the same week—I think the same day, I had an essay on Old English due, and an essay on literary theory. [LAUGHTER] And I read Ulysses over Christmas. And so I have read Ulysses, and I literally could not tell you anything about Ulysses. And to be fair, it is now 10 years later. However, at the time, I could tell you nothing about Ulysses. [LAUGHTER] Because you really need to actually spend time with it.
So I did my thing of reading through and being like, oh, this is some pretty language. Oh, he’s having a wank on a beach or whatever. And other than that and the bit at the end, I was like, I literally do not have time to spend with this book and work it out, so I’m just going to have to power on through it. And yeah, not a high point. But I guess my point is that it can really take it out of you, and it can make it a really grueling experience, or it can just completely go over my head.
GIN JENNY: Oh sure. That happens to me a lot.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. There’s a sweet spot and I don’t often hit it. But when I do, it’s like, ah. Which I think it will happen with me and Insurrecto. I was just like, oh my god!
GIN JENNY: Oh God, yeah. I mean, we’ll get to it, but me, too. I think one big factor for me is the feeling that the book wants me there. Because I started reading Ulysses and I was like, this book does not want my presence at all. Whereas other books—like HHhH or White Is for Witching is another one—it just feels like such a good fit for me as a reader. Or, oh god, Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour. All those books just felt like they were speaking to me, so that immediacy actually connects with me. But when it doesn’t and it feels like they’re speaking to someone totally different than me, then it’s very hard to keep plowing on.
CHARLOTTE: I think for me, one of the books I got this feeling from of immediate involvement and where the book felt like it’d been written almost to me was a different Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, gosh, yes.
CHARLOTTE: Which is like made up of all these different interlocking and weird stories, and it has letters in. And just every part of it I would be like, I can’t believe I’m reading this. And so—I think it was an interview that I read with my favorite writer, Sofia Samatar, where—who writes a lot of experimental short stories. I read an interview with her in the past few days over at—I think Big Echo, which is a sci-fi website, where she talks about how one of the things that she likes is she often feels really relieved when a book will skip the boring bits and just take you directly to the heart of the matter. You know, where it won’t feel like, oh, we’ve had this plot point, now we’ve got to trudge on to the next plot point. [LAUGHTER] There’s no, like, this person walked out of the room and thought about this for a while. It’s very much like, this thing happened, and then this thing happened.
And I think that’s often why I get on really well with novels that are told in fragments and really short chapters. I find it less stressful. I don’t know why. I get stressed out by a lot of things.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Oh, girl, me too.
CHARLOTTE: If I’m reading something where the pace is quite slow I’m like, oh, something’s going to happen, but I know I’m going to have to read this long buildup to it, then it can be really stressful. Whereas if you’re reading a book that’s told in fragments, even if those fragments are slow, it feels somehow easier to me.
GIN JENNY: I really, really agree with that. Although I’m thinking of—so there’s a book called Hopscotch by an Argentinean writer, Julio Cortázar. And the way it’s told is that you can either read it straight through from chapter one to chapter the end. Or there’s a recommended other sequence of chapters that you can read it in, where you’re kind of skipping around in the book, almost as if it were a Choose Your Own Adventure. You get to the end of one chapter and it’s like, now go to chapter 56, or whatever.
CHARLOTTE: Ooh.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. So the idea I really love, and I think for the reason you say. I don’t have to worry about the connective tissue as much. It’s just jumping from one thing to the next. But it was a stream of consciousness novel. Again, I didn’t make a taxonomy, but if I had, stream of consciousness would be like the number one thing that I absolutely cannot stand ever.
CHARLOTTE: I’m trying to think of other examples. What other books are there that you think of as—
GIN JENNY: Oh, gosh. A lot of Beloved was like this, I would say. Whiskey Jenny, can you think of them? I’m just suddenly blanking, of course.
WHISKEY JENNY: No, I am too. Sorry. I’m racking my brain.
CHARLOTTE: So I have a PhD in contemporary fiction and can’t really define stream of consciousness. So even though I definitely have to teach this kind of stuff at some point.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: If someone tells me a book is stream of consciousness then I immediately avoid it, because I just can’t bear it. I find it just so wanky and so self-indulgent, I cannot deal with it at all.
CHARLOTTE: So there’s a book by an author called Dorothy Richardson who wrote—it’s 14 volumes, an unfinished cycle of novels called Pilgrimage.
GIN JENNY: Oh, god.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, well. So I bought the first volume of it a few years ago. I’m staring at it right now. It’s a reissue from Virago. And I really loved it, and I got about halfway through the first book and I was like, eh, just because it was quite slow, and because it was very much that thing of following her along every step of her life. But I really want to actually read it at some point. But as I say, there are like a million volumes of this.
GIN JENNY: Oh, god that sounds—Proust! That’s who does this.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Well, Pilgrimage, I think, came out about the same time as Proust, but everyone talks about Proust but nobody talks about Dorothy Richardson.
GIN JENNY: Oh, I wonder why.
CHARLOTTE: Which I think is a travesty. But recently I was reading about Dorothy Richardson, as I do, and I found out that she lived in a boarding house and was lower middle class than a lot of other writers of the time. And she had a Russian scientist neighbor who fell in love with her and she didn’t want to marry him. And then she had an affair with this other woman, and then the woman that she’d had the affair with got married to the scientist.
WHISKEY JENNY: What?
GIN JENNY: Whoa!
CHARLOTTE: And then they were both just kind of pining for her, and she was like oh, whatever.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I want to read a novelization of her life.
CHARLOTTE: That’s what this is, right? So I know that later in the book series, it’s going to have this. But having said that, Louisa Treger wrote a novel about her called The Lodger that is one volume and might have some of that stuff in. But yeah, anyway, just my fun Dorothy Richardson fact.
GIN JENNY: That is a fun Dorothy Richardson anecdote! [LAUGHTER]
CHARLOTTE: But yeah, I’m going to have to trudge through this book series at some point.
GIN JENNY: Man, rather you than me.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Going back to what you were saying earlier about the fragmented stories. I think I feel the same way about explanations of phenomenons in science fiction and fantasy. I would much prefer the handwavey, very vague setup. Because if you get too much into the details, then I start worrying about whether or not it makes sense. But if you just do a very, and here’s the world that we’re in.
GIN JENNY: There’s a wormhole. People can time travel.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. The end. And that this is a story that I want to tell in relation to that, then I am perfectly fine to just let go and go along with the premise. But the problem comes if you try and delve too deeply in the premise, then I start asking questions. [LAUGHTER] You don’t want me asking questions.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I know what you mean. I think the less the author expects me to understand the book, the more comfortable I feel not understanding it.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, I felt weirdly freed by this book being a bit like, you don’t need to understand everything.
GIN JENNY: Me too. [LAUGHTER] I just have one last thing I wanted to say about what I like about nontraditional narrative formats, which is that—and Whiskey Jenny kind of touched on this—but the feeling that the manner of telling a story is part of the story it’s something that I really enjoy.
And obviously that’s true of all books. The way that the author chooses to tell the story is part of the story experience. But I really like it when a book draws attention to that. I think that’s really fun, and I really love that kind of metafiction.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, definitely. Me too. I’ve definitely bought books before on the promise of that, and then there hasn’t been much else going for them other than that. But then I’ve really stuck with it.
GIN JENNY: Yes! This is the problem!
CHARLOTTE: This was the problem with S.
GIN JENNY: I was just—that is literally my next example. Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is that the J.J. Abrams book?
GIN JENNY: It’s J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. And it’s in a box, and there’s stuff in the pages and there’s annotations in the margins.
CHARLOTTE: It was perfectly fine. The writing was perfectly passable. But I was kind of like—I haven’t actually finished it. I got halfway through it and I, again, just was like, eh. To be fair, that’s how I am with most of the books.
[LAUGHTER]But yeah, the idea of it was so cool. And I’m really hoping that someone else will get to do it and will do it with a much more interesting story.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I do think that happens a lot. The author has a really cool concept and lets the actual storytelling fall by the wayside. And I think that’s a terrible mistake. Because S, you’re right. The only thing that it had going for it was that you got to take things out of the book and look at the annotations. And that was really fun, but the book itself wasn’t that exciting.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. I mean, any kind of metafiction really is going to draw me in. I still haven’t read Pale Fire, even though I know I’m going to like Pale Fire.
GIN JENNY: Oh, I read that. I liked it. Someone released a really cool edition of it where the—because it’s a book about an author, and it puts in the author’s note cards. He keeps his notes on all these little index cards. So it includes the text of the index cards, and then it has commentary on the content of the index cards. And some publisher released an edition of Pale Fire that actually had physical index cards—
CHARLOTTE: [GASP]
GIN JENNY: —which I thought—I know! I know. And I was so excited, and I would have bought it, except they didn’t also include the text of the commentary. So you couldn’t actually read it—
CHARLOTTE: Oh.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
CHARLOTTE: What’s the point in that?
GIN JENNY: I know! Thank you! [LAUGHTER] I remember I was in McNally Jackson, which is my favorite independent bookstore in New York, and I had this book and I was just storming around being like, why is this not the thing I want it to be?
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s so baffling. They got so close.
GIN JENNY: They got so close! I would’ve bought it twice.
CHARLOTTE: I’m trying to think of other books that I’ve enjoyed that use that kind of thing. But I’m drawing a bit of a blank, even though I know there are some.
GIN JENNY: Well another one I would mention is the Griffin and Sabine books by Nick Bantock, which, again, don’t really have much going for them other than the taking letters—it’s like The Jolly Postman for adults. And there’s not much story, but the letters are really beautiful. Nick Bantock is an artist, a collage artist. The objects are really beautiful, so it’s beautiful to look at. But again, there’s not a whole lot of story there.
CHARLOTTE: Have either of you read any of the Brain Selznick books?
GIN JENNY: Yes, I read the first one, I think.
CHARLOTTE: Yes. He has a book called The Marvels, which doesn’t have things that you can take out of it. But he’s an illustrator, and so The Marvels, the first part is all told through an illustrated story with no text on the page. And then there’s a written story, and then there’s a little bit more at the end. Without spoiling it, that has an explanation within the prose story for the early illustrated story, and it’s kind of like the whole thing of layers of story, like story in a story. And yeah, it’s incredibly emotionally affecting and wonderful.
GIN JENNY: Oh, OK. Good to know, because I read his first—I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and I thought it was just OK. I, again, thought that the beautifulness of the physical object was the main thing that the book had going for it. And that’s not to undersell how beautiful the book was, because it was. The illustrations were really gorgeous and detailed.
CHARLOTTE: The Brian Selznick book is another book where I feel like it was squarely aimed at me. So the first section is about a theater family in London in the 18th and 19th century, through to the early 20th century. And then the later section is about a boy who has run away from boarding school after his best friend also ran away from boarding school because they were being bullied. And the two boys may or may not be romantically involved. He runs to London in the ‘90s and lives with his estranged uncle in his estranged uncle’s house, which is based on this amazing, odd museum in London called Dennis Severs’s House, which is this museum made by an artist that’s made to look like an 18th, 19th century family of Huguenots have just walked out off the room.
GIN JENNY: Ooh, that’s so cool.
CHARLOTTE: It’s amazing. They make up food and stuff, so you’ll be walking through the house and there’ll be half-drunk glasses of weird old red wine or these horrible old jellies, or these disgusting-looking 18th century-style jellied pineapples.
GIN JENNY: Oh my god, that sounds amazing. It sounds like Sleep No More without the dancing.
CHARLOTTE: It’s that kind of immersive thing, but you don’t have to deal with other people. [LAUGHTER] And you’re not allowed to talk, so it’s really quiet and chill.
GIN JENNY: Oh my god, that sounds amazing. Next time I’m in London I’ll have to do that.
CHARLOTTE: Yes, I can take you if you want.
GIN JENNY: OK, yes. I would love that. That sounds wonderful.
CHARLOTTE: Any excuse to go, to be honest. But no, I would love to take you. It is so good. And if you go on Christmas, they do you a Christmas themed thing. And they pipe in the sound of carols singing from down the road.
GIN JENNY: Oh my god. That’s amazing. I love Christmas and I love museums, so.
CHARLOTTE: It’s so good. But anyway, this book is part based on that in ways I would spoil if I went into more detail. But no, it’s incredibly beautiful and quite sad. It’s a kids’ book about queer family.
GIN JENNY: Aw.
CHARLOTTE: It really gets me because I’m like, yes! This is important.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, that sounds wonderful. Well, do you guys want to get into Insurrecto?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: Let’s do it.
GIN JENNY: So real quick, Insurrecto, by Gina Apostol is, the premise is that there’s an Italian filmmaker named Chiara Brasi who wants to make a movie about the Balangiga Massacre in the Philippines, which happened during the Philippine-American War. And she hires a Filipino woman called Magsalin to take her around and translate for her and support her research. So you’re jumping around in their timeline, and you’re also getting segments from the point of view of the main characters in Chiara Brasi’s film about this massacre, but also Magsalin’s film about the massacre, which is a separate script. I loved this book. What did you guys think?
CHARLOTTE: I really, really loved it. I think I went around screaming about it afterwards. I was like, this is the best book of the decade! Why have I never read anything else by her? So, yeah.
GIN JENNY: I know! How have I not heard of her? This book blew me away.
WHISKEY JENNY: I also loved it. I thought it was amazing. I think I probably had maybe the most problems with it, in that I kept trying to let go and then kept forgetting that I was supposed to be letting go, and then I would try and let go. Just in general, I thought it was brilliant and a staggering work of heartbreaking genius.
CHARLOTTE: I had to keep flipping back and forth. There’s a cast of characters, where the characters are listed under which film they’re in. So sometimes they would have characters with the same names, but in different scripts with different roles. So I kept flipping back and forth. I’d be like, wait, which Francis is this?
WHISKEY JENNY: Right.
GIN JENNY: Yes.
CHARLOTTE: That kind of thing. I did enjoy that, I think, because I love the rest of it so much. Because the way it kind of slipped around between the different stories.
GIN JENNY: Yes.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, I loved the echoes between the different stories. Like the names, or people even having similar lines or similar descriptions. But I would just like to point out—yeah, that cast of characters that you mentioned at the beginning. [LAUGHTER] I almost gave up right then, because it’s six pages long!
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: But it’s funny. It’s joke six pages.
WHISKEY JENNY: So I didn’t know that. And then I started it and realized, yeah, anyone who ever even gets mentioned gets on the cast of characters list. And I was like, OK, I see what’s happening here. But I didn’t know it was a joke to begin with. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: One of the cast of characters is, “Misay, a cat.”
CHARLOTTE: I didn’t actually read the cast characters before I started, because I hate casts of characters.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I liked “Hollywood types in the Catskills” as an entry on the cast of characters.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I did as well. I think one problem that I had while reading this book—one reason I will need to read it again soon—is that I was reading an ebook copy. I do not recommend this. I think it’s really important to be able to flip back and forth in a physical book.
CHARLOTTE: Yes.
WHISKEY JENNY: Interesting.
GIN JENNY: Do you not agree, Whiskey Jenny?
WHISKEY JENNY: I was also reading an ebook, and I was flipping back to the cast of characters sometimes to confirm things, but I didn’t ever really flip back within the book.
GIN JENNY: Oh man, I wanted to so often.
WHISKEY JENNY: So I’m wondering if, maybe I just didn’t have the option and didn’t let myself.
GIN JENNY: Well, I was confused, but I also, as I was reading and feeling confused, I kept thinking, I am so lucky that this amazing book exists and I can soon reread it, and then I will understand. It feels like I’ll understand more things about it the more often I reread it. And I enjoy it so much that I’ll really, really want to reread it.
WHISKEY JENNY: I am very much looking forward to a reread, because it seems it’s crying, it’s begging for you to go back to it. Because it also took me a second to realize that the dueling scripts come along pretty early on. Because in the cast of characters it’s like, part 1 and part 2. And that’s how the book is broken up, too, but actually the scripts have been sort of sneaking in all along, and it took me a second to pick up on that. So I think having that awareness the second time around will add whole new depths of meanings.
Because there’s just—I’m so amazed at this accomplishment. There’s so much going on here, there’s no possible way I’m smart enough to pick up on all of it. So each time is going to be even more and more astounding.
GIN JENNY: And I don’t think you’re supposed to. I don’t think you’re supposed to understand every single thing the first time. Right?
WHISKEY JENNY: I don’t mean understand everything, but I just mean notice all of the very smart decisions that the writer has made. Like all the overlappings and echoes and things.
CHARLOTTE: There’s definitely a lot of stuff that will be easier to pick up on the second time through. And I will say, as someone who did have a paper copy, I found it really useful being able to flip back and forth. And I picked up on only one instance where an earlier section is kind of repeated verbatim with added stuff. But I feel like when I read it again I might find other echoes like that. There are two different sections on Cassandra Chase’s pictures, and it uses some of the same text, but with more in the second one. It’s a really interesting echo and expansion. And so I was flipping back and forth, drawing loads of lines underneath it in pencil and being like, look!
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. There was another moment that I really loved. Once they’ve decided that they don’t actually need to go to the town that they were doing this journey on, and they backtrack back to Manila. And the sentence describing that journey actually includes a lot of the previous chapter titles that they have—
GIN JENNY: Oh, I didn’t notice that!
WHISKEY JENNY: —gone through along the road.
GIN JENNY: That’s amazing.
WHISKEY JENNY: It was amazing. It blew my mind.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I think one of the things that I loved so much about this book is, like we’ve said, it’s a really rich, weird, twisty text, but it felt immensely approachable and friendly. It just gave me this feeling that we’re all in this together. The world is really confusing, and we’re all just trying to figure out our place in it. It felt really, really welcoming to me.
WHISKEY JENNY: I felt that for 99.9% of the book, except for one point where Magsalin is yelling at people who want to understand things. Which, to be honest I felt like maybe my feelings are hurt because I can’t take it objectively. But it felt more like a little bit editorializing than something that character would actually say. Like, I don’t think she got away with using the character as a mouthpiece in that case. I was like, no, that’s just you talking. And it pulled me out of the story and did not feel welcoming. [LAUGHTER] But otherwise I agree. I think it was almost comforting, in a way, that it’s not supposed to make sense.
GIN JENNY: I felt like—I don’t really know how to say this—but the walls between the fiction of the book and the fictions in the book—so the story of Chiara and Magsalin and the two scripts. Because the walls between those things are so, so thin—like, Chiara is a character in one of the film scripts—I also felt like the walls between me and the book were very thin. And it was a really engaging, exhilarating way to feel as I was reading. It sometimes almost felt like the characters were looking up the page at me.
WHISKEY JENNY: Even in the parts where it’s supposed to be the filmmaker Chiara and the translator Magsalin, even those chapters, they’ll talk about making plot decisions, and like Magsalin is writing things that happened to Chiara. And that level, I found so much fun. Because in Mr. Fox, I really enjoyed that twist of the telling of the story affects the narrative, I guess? So yeah, that craziness happens even in the part that is, quote unquote the real part.
GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: So I loved that.
CHARLOTTE: So before reading, when I’d seen it contained dueling scripts, I was kind of expecting it to be in script format, both sections.
GIN JENNY: Oh, yeah, actual scripts.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. So I thought it was going to be screenplays. And I was really interested when that wasn’t the case, and now I’m so, so pleased that it wasn’t. Because her prose is just astonishing. It’s just so good.
GIN JENNY: Oh my god.
CHARLOTTE: It was really—I think exhilarating is the word. It was really exciting and strange to see the way it continually slipped from one layer of narrative to another layer of narrative. And there’s actually a website, which is listed at the end of the cast of characters, called Praxino.org, where she’s got a thing calling it a Wikipedia novel. And she has a list of the numerical order of the chapters.
GIN JENNY: Ooh.
CHARLOTTE: And those a selected bibliography. And so without having properly looked among it, I think there is a certain amount of factual stuff about the history in here. Which I think also helps with that sense that you were talking about, of there being a slim line between reality that we live in and the reality of the characters in the novel.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. And speaking about the scope of the book, I think, returning to our conversation about non-traditional narrative formats and experimental novels, I think one of the things that draws me in general and definitely with this book is, I’m such a sucker for a grand attempt. And I think with this book, she attempted to do so much, and she really, really brought it home as far as I’m concerned. It felt like everything just worked really well. And like you said, the prose is amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever bookmarked as many lines as I did in this book.
CHARLOTTE: I was underlining—there were points where I was like, if I’m just underlining the majority of every page in the book, what’s the point? [LAUGHTER] But yeah, her writing is just so, so beautiful. And I feel like she in particular writes about objects and materiality and material things or experiences in a really stunning way, where it’s quite evocative. It’s never really sentimental. And I think that as a choice of things she’s going to focus on actually ties in really well with a lot of the anti-colonialist message of the book, because so much of it’s about colonialism from the US. And so much of the stuff she writes about is detritus or ephemera from the US that’s made its way to this—it’s kind of a former colonized nation—in this way. And so I found that really interesting.
And I think an awful lot of the choices of what she focuses on and of how she structures it has similar effects or similar intentions, in the sense that I feel like it helps with the—not really message, but the political work of the book. So I think the fact that it can be hard to grasp what’s going on really fits with this kind of subject matter, where the subject matter is incredibly hard to grasp and take in, the magnitude of it.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, the subject matter itself is difficult. And then the layer of who tells the story of that subject matter, I think she successfully made the point of, well, who has the power of the narrative and who gets to retell that drastically affects the outcomes years and years later. So I agree, I think it was incredibly successful, the choices that she made to write this hard to understand story, because it services a larger point that she’s making and is not just a stylistic choice.
GIN JENNY: Definitely. God, yeah.
CHARLOTTE: The way she talks about it as a labyrinth—which is something I think quite a lot when thinking about structuring fiction, actually, the idea of circling around, but not statically, circling but going deeper—really fits with what’s happening. And also, not just circling, but kind of going through all these labyrinthine steps, not really knowing where you’re going. But I was just really happy to be led.
GIN JENNY: Oh god, me too. Yeah. And it also really made me want to—because you know I’m doing my African reading history project. And my plan after I finish with Africa is to do the same for Latin America. But this made me really want to jump the Philippines up the queue and learn a lot more about Philippine history.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, I didn’t know that much about Asian history, or particularly this region of Southeast Asia.
GIN JENNY: I know what I learned in history class, which wasn’t a ton. I knew that we had had the war there, America had had the war there and had colonized the Philippines and killed a really phenomenal number of people. That’s the vague outline that I’m aware of.
CHARLOTTE: History in my schooling—and I didn’t go to a particularly good school—basically consists of early modern English history and the First World War, and the Second World War and the history of medicine.
GIN JENNY: Huh. OK.
CHARLOTTE: So we didn’t—actually we did do some 20th century stuff, but weirdly, it was all American history. And so part of that was actually Vietnam War, but obviously that’s not the same conflict, even though part of this book is looking at the ways in which a film made about the Vietnam War was shot in the Philippines.
GIN JENNY: Yes.
CHARLOTTE: The war in the Philippines as kind of this historical mirror to the war in Vietnam, even though a whole lot of people have forgotten the war in the Philippines.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, it almost serves as a palimpsest for the war in Vietnam.
WHISKEY JENNY: A word that gets used in this book! [LAUGHTER] There were a lot of words that I had to look up.
GIN JENNY: Actually, Whiskey Jenny, I was interested that this book ended up sharing a lot of themes and ideas with the play that we read last time.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, yeah. I’m not going to say the title. You can’t make me.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: But yeah, it had the same idea of kind of papering over one thing with your own ideas of something close, similar, but not that. I feel like Insurrecto did that a lot, as well.
WHISKEY JENNY: Absolutely. And I think another way in which her writing worked so well is how cinematic it is. And she’s able to convey both. Like you’re picturing this movie and what it’s papering over at the same time, and she’s able to convey the both of those things at the same time, and also is very successful, I found, at visualizing the film that these scripts are describing. But still, being able to do that and juggle all these layers, I think, is such a feat.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. I really, really liked this. Very successful, as far as I’m concerned.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, great pick.
GIN JENNY: Thank you!
WHISKEY JENNY: OK, can I ask my question?
GIN JENNY: Oh, yes, ask your question.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s not actually plot. There were just some translator words that I did not understand.
GIN JENNY: OK, it is near 100% certain I will not know the answer, but go ahead.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well so she’s talking about—she uses the word inversions, obversions, diversions, and reversions. Did you all understand what she was talking about?
CHARLOTTE: Well, with poetry translations, versions are when you write a translation that is more like your own take on a poem. I’m trying to think of an example.
So if you’re translating a contemporary French poet, you’re likely to do a relatively close to the original text take on it, especially if that person’s never been translated before. But say you’re translating, like, Baudelaire. Then often people will kind of go further from the original. They might modernize it. And then they might call it their version. So that’s what I was thinking of. And then I was thinking of the others as playful forms of translation. But I don’t actually know, even though I have translated a book.
GIN JENNY: I feel much more enlightened now, personally.
CHARLOTTE: But the politics of literary translation—I’m sure it will shock you to hear—it’s a fraught area. And there’s a lot of stuff about the politics of who translates, and what gets translated, and what languages get more stuff translated from them into English, and so on.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s why I really wanted to understand this, because I feel like it would be fascinating if I could understand it. Because she’s talking about it at the same time that she’s mentioning that the Ewoks speak Tagalog, which I did not know, but is an astounding fact to know, that idea of the politics of translation and language. If Gina Apostol wanted to read a whole book on that, I would read it.
GIN JENNY: Oh, gosh, me too. Oh, that would be so interesting.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes. I would definitely read that. But I need her to define these words first. [LAUGHTER] And she did define them—she does define them, and that’s the problem is I was like, what? Wait, what? [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: Well, Whiskey Jenny, what are we reading for next time?
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, are we there already? Oh my goodness. We had such lovely company and a great book. But next time we are reading An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma. It is set in Nigeria and is a retelling of The Odyssey, basically.
GIN JENNY: Cool.
WHISKEY JENNY: The narrator is a guardian spirit, and there’s a lot of mythology and folklore and a quest, obviously. And I’m very much looking forward to it.
GIN JENNY: Cool. Sounds excellent. Well, Charlotte, before we head out, just thank you so much again for joining us. This has been a delight.
CHARLOTTE: Thank you for having me again.
GIN JENNY: Where can the people find you online?
CHARLOTTE: I’m @tambourine on Twitter—with a U, because I’m English. [LAUGHTER] And then I have a Dreamwidth, which is alwaysalready.dreamwidth.org, where I post the odd book review and the odd too-long episode review of the TV show Due South.
GIN JENNY: Well, perfect. We were really, really thrilled to have you on.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes, thank you so much. It’s been lovely. Well, this has been the Reading the End bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys and special guest Charlotte. You can visit the blog at readingtheend.com. You can follow Gin Jenny on Twitter @readingtheend. We’re both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny. And you can email us—please do, we love hearing from you—at readingtheend@gmail.com. If you like what we do, you can become a podcast patron at patreon.com/readingtheend. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review.
And until next time, a hilarious quote from Insurrecto, because I feel like we didn’t cover how funny this book is.
GIN JENNY: God, so funny! Yeah!
WHISKEY JENNY: But, “In a mystery, clowns are always significant.”
[LAUGHTER]CHARLOTTE: I loved the clowns.
GIN JENNY: I love the clowns. Oh, god, this book was so good.
[GLASSES CLINK]THEME SONG: You don’t judge a book by its cover. Page one’s not a much better view. And shortly you’re gonna discover the middle won’t mollify you. So whether whiskey’s your go-to or you’re like my gin-drinking friend, no matter what you are imbibing, you’ll be better off in the end reading the end.