Thursday, August 24, 2006
As good as it gets
Minimum of Two
My hatred for Tim Winton's short stories knows no bounds. It's probably compounded by the fact that my teacher and classmate gush about him, about Jerra and Rachel, and Sam and boy and girl and gravity and blood and water. (Think you're so profound, Mr Winton, ey? I thought you like it when critics call you ocker.)
Sorry, guys. I like to think that I'm a mostly tolerant person, but lately English lessons have become so difficult to sit through. I squirm because the main character, Jerra, is lifeless and flat as cardboard to me. I grit my teeth because his wife Rachel is such an incredible bitch - I find her selfish, self-absorbed, self-pitying, brutal, harsh, irritating, grating, (somebody owns a thesaurus, eh) BITCHY BITCHY BITCHHEAD. (Sorry. Just Needed. To. Let off some. Steam.) Baby Sam is a cutie but he's a gnat - small and sometimes annoying.
It also didn't help that a week or so before my class started on this book, I had my expectations lifted by someone who had already started studying it.
"The last story, " Jane says to me, "will put you off having children."
Oooh, I go. Sounds interesting.
Well, we did do that story today, Blood and Water. And what should have been a terrifying, gory, pyschologically scarring read turned out to be a mild exercise in fighting to keep awake and alert at 3 in the afternoon. The baby should have been ripped and torn out of her body in a glorious explosive splatter of blood, amniotic fluid, raw dripping sweat and fecal matter. For all his raw bloody descriptions, all Winton did was illicit a "What, that was it?" from me. Pffft, come on, could've done better than that.
Perhaps I'm cynical, perhaps I'm jaded. I know I can't write even a tiny fraction as well as Mr Winton does. What I know I can do though, is to respond honestly to a text, and this is as honest (and annoying; again I have to apologise to my friends for Winton-related complaints... I have made a conscious effort to stop them and limit them to a terse smile and a response along the lines of "Oh, Tim Winton? No.") as I can get. I don't like this collection of short stories. I don't like his language - people find it dry, raw, earthy - I find it choppy, disjointed and abrupt. People like the sparseness of his writing style - I find it patchy and thinly spread. People love his dialogue. I find it doesn't ring true. People find strength in his characters - I see poorly sketched out, unsympathetic, hollow characters that bear little to no resemblance to any real people.
That said, I'll try to be a bit less bitchy and say that his non-Jerra/Rachel/Sam stories are OK. And that's as good as I'm going to give.
My hatred for Tim Winton's short stories knows no bounds. It's probably compounded by the fact that my teacher and classmate gush about him, about Jerra and Rachel, and Sam and boy and girl and gravity and blood and water. (Think you're so profound, Mr Winton, ey? I thought you like it when critics call you ocker.)
Sorry, guys. I like to think that I'm a mostly tolerant person, but lately English lessons have become so difficult to sit through. I squirm because the main character, Jerra, is lifeless and flat as cardboard to me. I grit my teeth because his wife Rachel is such an incredible bitch - I find her selfish, self-absorbed, self-pitying, brutal, harsh, irritating, grating, (somebody owns a thesaurus, eh) BITCHY BITCHY BITCHHEAD. (Sorry. Just Needed. To. Let off some. Steam.) Baby Sam is a cutie but he's a gnat - small and sometimes annoying.
It also didn't help that a week or so before my class started on this book, I had my expectations lifted by someone who had already started studying it.
"The last story, " Jane says to me, "will put you off having children."
Oooh, I go. Sounds interesting.
Well, we did do that story today, Blood and Water. And what should have been a terrifying, gory, pyschologically scarring read turned out to be a mild exercise in fighting to keep awake and alert at 3 in the afternoon. The baby should have been ripped and torn out of her body in a glorious explosive splatter of blood, amniotic fluid, raw dripping sweat and fecal matter. For all his raw bloody descriptions, all Winton did was illicit a "What, that was it?" from me. Pffft, come on, could've done better than that.
Perhaps I'm cynical, perhaps I'm jaded. I know I can't write even a tiny fraction as well as Mr Winton does. What I know I can do though, is to respond honestly to a text, and this is as honest (and annoying; again I have to apologise to my friends for Winton-related complaints... I have made a conscious effort to stop them and limit them to a terse smile and a response along the lines of "Oh, Tim Winton? No.") as I can get. I don't like this collection of short stories. I don't like his language - people find it dry, raw, earthy - I find it choppy, disjointed and abrupt. People like the sparseness of his writing style - I find it patchy and thinly spread. People love his dialogue. I find it doesn't ring true. People find strength in his characters - I see poorly sketched out, unsympathetic, hollow characters that bear little to no resemblance to any real people.
That said, I'll try to be a bit less bitchy and say that his non-Jerra/Rachel/Sam stories are OK. And that's as good as I'm going to give.
# posted by me lah @ 9:21 pm 
