Last of the pre-semester pleasure reading

Last night I finally finished What is the What by Dave Eggers. If you didn't know, it's a novel based heavily on the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "lost boys of Sudan." There's really not a whole lot I can say about the book without trivializing the unforgivable things that happen to Valentino and other children. Eggers did choose an interesting and effective way to frame the novel, and the narrative is devastatingly paced - the way this boy's life must have been. Each event just punches you in the chest. It's difficult to say if I recommend the book, or if I liked it. Basically, it just made me think about the utter pointlessness of this (and many other) conflicts, the way people use each other for retaliation, for volume of destruction. It's despicable.

Switching gears entirely. A friend of mine came back into town recently and lent me The Bell Jar on CD, as read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I was pretty excited; MG is one of my favorite actresses. I read The Bell Jar probably when I was about fifteen or sixteen, and it had a huge impact on me. Hearing it again, I realized how good it is, how well-written. There are those unmistakable Sylvia Plath metaphors, like comparing some fixture (a lamp, I think) to a "death's head." And Gyllenhaal is really great at the tone - there are times when she'll pause between words and it's perfect. She also sounds, a good deal of the time, like the recordings I've heard of Plath reading her poems - a low voice, dropping each word as if she couldn't wait to get it out of her, was a little disgusted by it. Plath, though, always sounds older, though she only lived to be thirty. Hearing Maggie Gyllenhaal is like what I imagine this young college-age Plath sounded like. It's pretty spectacular.