Stuff from the Eighties.
Jun. 30th, 2005 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedBook and manga blogging! The book is my father's. He's something of a Russian Communism nut, something of a murder mystery nut. Gorky Park is both.
Martin Cruz Smith - Gorky Park
Smith started this book in 1973 and finished in 1981. Can you imagine what would have happened if the Cold War had ended first? On the back it says From the moment when three frozen and mutilated bodies are uncovered from the snow in Moscow’s Gorky Park, I was engrossed in an alien, terrifying and fascinating world, and on the jacket it says This is what it must be like to live in Russia today. Russia: unknown world. It might as well be the Moon.
If this had come out after 1989, would it still have been a bestseller? The most impressive thing about Gorky Park is knowing how hard it must have been to do the research.
I spent a lot of this book torn between loving and hating the premise. The problem is that I like detective novels, and most good detective novels are about good detective work. There’s no denying that Head Investigator Arkady Renko is a good detective—considering the circumstances. The entire book is about how impossible it is to be a good detective in Russia. The murder itself isn’t much. Being allowed to solve it is. (At least Arkady gets to tap phones and bully people into cooperating? Somehow this doesn’t seem like adequate compensation when your boss is trying to kill you.)
I also found myself thinking that there was too much commentary, it was getting in the way of the plot. Arkady is walking towards his office and suddenly there are two pages about Lenin that aren’t integrated at all. At this point I had to laugh at myself. Why was I reading if I didn’t want to hear about Lenin? Wasn't Lenin the point?
I mean, was I reading for the fingerprinting, or was I reading for lines like
"In an unjust society a man may violate laws for valid social or economic reasons. In a just society there are no valid reasons except mental illness. For too long, the organs of health and justice have worked separately in an uncoordinated fashion..."
and
”What must be attacked, uprooted and destroyed,” the academician explained, “is, generally, the tendency to place legalisms above the interests of society and, individually, the tendency among investigators to place their interpretations of the law over the understood goals of justice. Individualism is just another term for Vronskyism...”
I liked the book a lot more once I got my priorities straight.
Didn’t like the end, though. It takes place in New York, and the whole thing is a sort of compare-contrast between US and Soviet justice. Cool, I can get behind that. But it really dragged, and comparing the sudden wealth of detail to sparse-but-formerly-real Moscow, I was painfully reminded that the author has likely never been to Moscow. I couldn't believe Arkady was really Russian after that.
I’m also amused by how incredibly slashy this book is. Murderer/Arkady OTP! (Is there ever a detective/criminal boylove story where the detective isn’t bottom?)
Got the manga in a package from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
telophase; two out of three of the series she sent have, as a major character, a Japanese student pole-vaulter who's lost the ability to jump. I hadn’t realized this was a wide-spread phenomenon.
Akimi Yoshida - Banana Fish
So I’m reading this series, and I’m wondering why it’s considered shoujo – oh, right, that’s why – and I’m having to constantly remind myself that New York City circa 1980 *really did* have youth gangs, and that this part of the story is not as bizarre as it seems. (If it was LA I wouldn’t have been bothered at all.) Considering the setting, the fact that every American character owns a gun is not as bizarre as it seems. Considering the genre, the fact that every major villain wants to molest Ash is not as bizarre as it seems.
The only thing that tripped me up was the steering wheel on the right side of the car. I wondered how anyone who’s seen as many American movies as Akimi Yoshida obviously has could get this wrong.
...Three volumes later, I remembered that the art is flipped. ^^;;telophase, you were willing to part with these because there’s an un-flipped version coming out, right? Or was it because of volume six’s Rambo-style machine gun massacre? That scene was when I gave up justifying and decided to just go with it.
I did get a little tired of hearing, alternately, how great Ash is, how dangerous he is, and how much like a wild animal he is. Enough already, I get it!
The best thing about this series is that it takes place in the eighties. XD
The other series were Shadow Star and X-day. I really like Shadow Star, except for the Evangelion vibes. (This is almost like saying that I liked Peter Pan, except for the sexual undertones.)
Martin Cruz Smith - Gorky Park
Smith started this book in 1973 and finished in 1981. Can you imagine what would have happened if the Cold War had ended first? On the back it says From the moment when three frozen and mutilated bodies are uncovered from the snow in Moscow’s Gorky Park, I was engrossed in an alien, terrifying and fascinating world, and on the jacket it says This is what it must be like to live in Russia today. Russia: unknown world. It might as well be the Moon.
If this had come out after 1989, would it still have been a bestseller? The most impressive thing about Gorky Park is knowing how hard it must have been to do the research.
I spent a lot of this book torn between loving and hating the premise. The problem is that I like detective novels, and most good detective novels are about good detective work. There’s no denying that Head Investigator Arkady Renko is a good detective—considering the circumstances. The entire book is about how impossible it is to be a good detective in Russia. The murder itself isn’t much. Being allowed to solve it is. (At least Arkady gets to tap phones and bully people into cooperating? Somehow this doesn’t seem like adequate compensation when your boss is trying to kill you.)
I also found myself thinking that there was too much commentary, it was getting in the way of the plot. Arkady is walking towards his office and suddenly there are two pages about Lenin that aren’t integrated at all. At this point I had to laugh at myself. Why was I reading if I didn’t want to hear about Lenin? Wasn't Lenin the point?
I mean, was I reading for the fingerprinting, or was I reading for lines like
"In an unjust society a man may violate laws for valid social or economic reasons. In a just society there are no valid reasons except mental illness. For too long, the organs of health and justice have worked separately in an uncoordinated fashion..."
and
”What must be attacked, uprooted and destroyed,” the academician explained, “is, generally, the tendency to place legalisms above the interests of society and, individually, the tendency among investigators to place their interpretations of the law over the understood goals of justice. Individualism is just another term for Vronskyism...”
I liked the book a lot more once I got my priorities straight.
Didn’t like the end, though. It takes place in New York, and the whole thing is a sort of compare-contrast between US and Soviet justice. Cool, I can get behind that. But it really dragged, and comparing the sudden wealth of detail to sparse-but-formerly-real Moscow, I was painfully reminded that the author has likely never been to Moscow. I couldn't believe Arkady was really Russian after that.
I’m also amused by how incredibly slashy this book is. Murderer/Arkady OTP! (Is there ever a detective/criminal boylove story where the detective isn’t bottom?)
Got the manga in a package from
telophase; two out of three of the series she sent have, as a major character, a Japanese student pole-vaulter who's lost the ability to jump. I hadn’t realized this was a wide-spread phenomenon. Akimi Yoshida - Banana Fish
So I’m reading this series, and I’m wondering why it’s considered shoujo – oh, right, that’s why – and I’m having to constantly remind myself that New York City circa 1980 *really did* have youth gangs, and that this part of the story is not as bizarre as it seems. (If it was LA I wouldn’t have been bothered at all.) Considering the setting, the fact that every American character owns a gun is not as bizarre as it seems. Considering the genre, the fact that every major villain wants to molest Ash is not as bizarre as it seems.
The only thing that tripped me up was the steering wheel on the right side of the car. I wondered how anyone who’s seen as many American movies as Akimi Yoshida obviously has could get this wrong.
...Three volumes later, I remembered that the art is flipped. ^^;;
telophase, you were willing to part with these because there’s an un-flipped version coming out, right? Or was it because of volume six’s Rambo-style machine gun massacre? That scene was when I gave up justifying and decided to just go with it. I did get a little tired of hearing, alternately, how great Ash is, how dangerous he is, and how much like a wild animal he is. Enough already, I get it!
The best thing about this series is that it takes place in the eighties. XD
The other series were Shadow Star and X-day. I really like Shadow Star, except for the Evangelion vibes. (This is almost like saying that I liked Peter Pan, except for the sexual undertones.)