Reviews: Love's Labour's Lost & Richard II, Shakespeare; The Hidden Memory of Objects, Amato
Title: Love's Labour's Lost
Author: William Shakespeare
Published: 1598
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 252,600
Text Number: 813
Read Because: co-read with my mother
Review: Reading this play without easy cultural access to its allusions means that the only thing I consistently caught was the sex jokes—and there are so many, perhaps too many, although I imagine it strikes a better balance with, again, easy access to cultural context. The handling of gender reminds me of The Taming of the Shrew in the ways in both criticizes and reinforces misogyny; or, more specifically, masculine desire: its hypocrisy and foolishness, but also its essentialism and socialized deserving and therefore justification. It works well alongside the criticism of intellectualism; the doubling of foolish wisemen and wise fools parallels the doubled criticism/reinforcement of gender issues and, even without accessible cultural context, much of the wordplay is a delight, particularly the repetition in Holofernes's lines. But there is perhaps too much doubling, enough to grow redundant, especially in the number of characters running parallel plots; the dreamlike repetition of couples lining up in rows grows tedious. This is alleviated by the postponed happy ending, which is an engaging violation of genre convention. All told: interesting, inaccessible; I can see why this hasn't aged well and I concur.
Title: The Hidden Memory of Objects
Author: Danielle Mages Amato
Published: Balzer & Bray, 2017
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 335
Total Page Count: 252,935
Text Number: 814
Read Because: reviewed by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mrissa, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A bereaved teenage girl investigates her brother's death, uncovering secrets which change her perception of him and of herself. The plotting here is very neat, a preponderance of Chekhov's guns, some of them strained (the housekeys especially so). By contrast, the inspirations, themes, and speculative element are diverse and messy—grief and coming of age, but also activism and Lincoln's assassination, also art and something magical. I admire what it gets right—the premise of a collage artist who can sense the history of objects is a rich one, and the speculative element has a lot of weight given that this is ostensibly a contemporary novel. (I also appreciate that it sidesteps a love triangle—would that more YA did.) But as a finished work it's simultaneously too raw and too polished, and it's simply not good enough to recommend.
Title: Richard II
Author: William Shakespeare
Published: 1597
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 253,035
Text Number: 815
Read Because: co-read with my mother
Review: This is impossible to separate from Henry 4 & 5, plays I love, and yet I'd never read it; it fills in many gaps and, while it may not be as robust as those plays, I love it just as much. The issue of kingship and the king's body will be carried through and reexamined throughout the tetralogy; I love the way that it interacts with the theme of grief here. There are deaths, but they're more distant than in the other histories, less visceral than the action scenes in the Henry 6 plays, less guilty pleasure than in Richard III; much of the mourning is conceptual or, like the Queen's, preemptive: grief at the loss of life as defined by social and political role as much as blood and breath. Shakespeare's language here is superb, and of a different breed than the wit and wordplay which I've enjoyed watching evolve in other plays; it's more eloquent, providing an emotional depth and introspection which is necessary to the themes. I appreciate seeing the tetralogy as a whole, but what won me was just that refrain of grief, empathetic, thoughtful, but in many ways deserved, with vast personal and political reverberations.
(My mother and I had the same response to this one, that sense of "why did no one ever tell me?: we saw Henry IV parts 1 & 2 at OSF last year and they were phenomenal; Henry V is this year and has overlapping casting, of course, and we expect great things; I still have good memories of their production of Henry V in 2011/2012; I know those plays, and fairly well, and Henry V himself is a remarkable character and so I understand the emphasis on them and him. But it all begins here; it contributes so much to plays I thought I knew.
And also is amazing in its own right. I wrote more about it here on Tumblr, reposted below the cut.)
to be fair to myself: many of my twenty shadows are not so—'things have been legitimately shit lately in big and petty ways
but to be more fair to myself: the shadows are always real
I can't better articulate myself as both parts of this argument—the reminder to self that they are shadows; the reminder to self that there is some forefather grief—without a long personal essay which I have no desire to write just now
but I am hashtag called out by Shakespeare 2018 and
"grief boundeth where it falls / not with the empty hollowness but weight"'
(and let me be entirely clear: forefather grief does not need to have an identifiable external origin. my entire life with double depression? valid cause of shadows! valid 'so heavy sad'! but to witness one unfold into the other within myself—to see the thousand thousand shadows of this grief—is devastating me)
Author: William Shakespeare
Published: 1598
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 252,600
Text Number: 813
Read Because: co-read with my mother
Review: Reading this play without easy cultural access to its allusions means that the only thing I consistently caught was the sex jokes—and there are so many, perhaps too many, although I imagine it strikes a better balance with, again, easy access to cultural context. The handling of gender reminds me of The Taming of the Shrew in the ways in both criticizes and reinforces misogyny; or, more specifically, masculine desire: its hypocrisy and foolishness, but also its essentialism and socialized deserving and therefore justification. It works well alongside the criticism of intellectualism; the doubling of foolish wisemen and wise fools parallels the doubled criticism/reinforcement of gender issues and, even without accessible cultural context, much of the wordplay is a delight, particularly the repetition in Holofernes's lines. But there is perhaps too much doubling, enough to grow redundant, especially in the number of characters running parallel plots; the dreamlike repetition of couples lining up in rows grows tedious. This is alleviated by the postponed happy ending, which is an engaging violation of genre convention. All told: interesting, inaccessible; I can see why this hasn't aged well and I concur.
Title: The Hidden Memory of Objects
Author: Danielle Mages Amato
Published: Balzer & Bray, 2017
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 335
Total Page Count: 252,935
Text Number: 814
Read Because: reviewed by
mrissa, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: A bereaved teenage girl investigates her brother's death, uncovering secrets which change her perception of him and of herself. The plotting here is very neat, a preponderance of Chekhov's guns, some of them strained (the housekeys especially so). By contrast, the inspirations, themes, and speculative element are diverse and messy—grief and coming of age, but also activism and Lincoln's assassination, also art and something magical. I admire what it gets right—the premise of a collage artist who can sense the history of objects is a rich one, and the speculative element has a lot of weight given that this is ostensibly a contemporary novel. (I also appreciate that it sidesteps a love triangle—would that more YA did.) But as a finished work it's simultaneously too raw and too polished, and it's simply not good enough to recommend.
Title: Richard II
Author: William Shakespeare
Published: 1597
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 253,035
Text Number: 815
Read Because: co-read with my mother
Review: This is impossible to separate from Henry 4 & 5, plays I love, and yet I'd never read it; it fills in many gaps and, while it may not be as robust as those plays, I love it just as much. The issue of kingship and the king's body will be carried through and reexamined throughout the tetralogy; I love the way that it interacts with the theme of grief here. There are deaths, but they're more distant than in the other histories, less visceral than the action scenes in the Henry 6 plays, less guilty pleasure than in Richard III; much of the mourning is conceptual or, like the Queen's, preemptive: grief at the loss of life as defined by social and political role as much as blood and breath. Shakespeare's language here is superb, and of a different breed than the wit and wordplay which I've enjoyed watching evolve in other plays; it's more eloquent, providing an emotional depth and introspection which is necessary to the themes. I appreciate seeing the tetralogy as a whole, but what won me was just that refrain of grief, empathetic, thoughtful, but in many ways deserved, with vast personal and political reverberations.
(My mother and I had the same response to this one, that sense of "why did no one ever tell me?: we saw Henry IV parts 1 & 2 at OSF last year and they were phenomenal; Henry V is this year and has overlapping casting, of course, and we expect great things; I still have good memories of their production of Henry V in 2011/2012; I know those plays, and fairly well, and Henry V himself is a remarkable character and so I understand the emphasis on them and him. But it all begins here; it contributes so much to plays I thought I knew.
And also is amazing in its own right. I wrote more about it here on Tumblr, reposted below the cut.)
BUSHY
Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;
For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects;
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry
Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty,
Looking awry upon your lord’s departure,
Find shapes of grief, more than himself, to wail;
Which, look’d on as it is, is nought but shadows
Of what it is not. Then, thrice-gracious queen,
More than your lord’s departure weep not: more’s not seen;
Or if it be, ‘tis with false sorrow’s eye,
Which for things true weeps things imaginary.
QUEEN
It may be so; but yet my inward soul
Persuades me it is otherwise: howe'er it be,
I cannot but be sad; so heavy sad
As, though on thinking on no thought I think,
Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.
BUSHY
'Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady.
QUEEN
'Tis nothing less: conceit is still derived
From some forefather grief.
—Richard II 2.2, William Shakespeare
to be fair to myself: many of my twenty shadows are not so—'things have been legitimately shit lately in big and petty ways
but to be more fair to myself: the shadows are always real
I can't better articulate myself as both parts of this argument—the reminder to self that they are shadows; the reminder to self that there is some forefather grief—without a long personal essay which I have no desire to write just now
but I am hashtag called out by Shakespeare 2018 and
"grief boundeth where it falls / not with the empty hollowness but weight"'
(and let me be entirely clear: forefather grief does not need to have an identifiable external origin. my entire life with double depression? valid cause of shadows! valid 'so heavy sad'! but to witness one unfold into the other within myself—to see the thousand thousand shadows of this grief—is devastating me)