They haven't sent me the terms of employment yet and I'm getting antsy.
Today was filled with annoying tourists and rooms of god awful, pink paintings. I hyperbolize; they're not horrible but they're not very good. They kind of look like something you might find on some wannabe artist's DeviantArt account. They look like concept art for a Super Mario Brothers game. In shades of pepto-bismal.
I finished Body Count by Martin. Finishing it felt kind of like eating a dessert I don't really like; at the end I feel a little ashamed to have spent time/calories on it that could have been put to better use elsewhere. The villain was not who I thought it was so I'm not smug but nor an I pleasantly surprised. She pulled The Dante Club trick; make the villain an extra, someone you would never have guessed simply because they were entirely unimportant to the story and had no real scenes. It's the way for less than clever authors to pull a fast one to wow less than clever readers. The authors can feel smart for keeping readers from following clues (mainly because there are none) and the readers can feel happy because they put no real effort into reading and are surprised by the "twist". This sort of thing works much better on film where and actor can work to show depth despite having few lines. Also, the thing that really bugged me is that Sophie's prowess as a hand-to-hand fighter is painstakingly shown in the beginning of the book but at the end it's like she's completely lost all that and all she can do is run, while hoping the big, bad man (with, as far as we can tell, no combat experience) doesn't find her. Ew. Seriously woman, if you want a strong female lead actually let her do her thing.
As a side note, I have just finished Herta Muller's The Passport. Muller won the Nobel prize for literature in 2009 and it caused a minor stir because few people outside Germany had heard of her. Well, my library now has a few of her books and I thought I'd give her a try. A German family in Romania is trying to get a passport to go to Berlin. That's it basically. Windisch wants to be honest about obtaining it and tries to bribe with flour but eventually has to send his daughter around to have sex with the officials.
Okay, I don't know what the hell kind of standards the Nobel prize committee has but it certainly doesn't include awarding this thing based on readability or an interesting story. Muller writes exactly the way countless generations are taught not to write, not because it hampers creativity but because it makes you sound like a retarded child. Half the sentences begin with "The". Each sentence contains one thought, one solid thing. Each description is broken down into its component parts, creating a disconnected picture, forcing you to carefully string everything together yourself in order to picture what's going on. It's tedious. Like Saramago's style, it makes reading artificially difficult for no good reason.
The dress was long. It was blue like the soft fuzzy stuff inside your jeans pockets. They nested in the dress. The dress billowed as she walked. She walked along the path. The path was a duck's sigh in the night.
Shit like that. The surrealism is less so and more like non-sequiturs. And she commits the cardinal sin of writing; if your characters aren't likable at least make them interesting. She does neither.
On the plus side I'm reading The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri and that's going pretty well. His main character, Inspector Montalbano, is kind of laid back, a little grumpy, and clever. And I, Claudius still pleases. That one is going to take a while though.
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