Hunger Games

Tale of Genji is a long haul and I needed a swift read. I read half of Hunger Games last night. Here are my thoughts:

In a way it's a perfect adolescent narrative about the hypocrisy of adulthood, the contradictions of adulthood, the absurdity of adulthood. Parents have clay feet if they live, or become heroes of mythology if they die.

The novel goes from natural to artificial, similar to that of the passage from childhood to adulthood. Then it's back to nature, but as an adult, it's cutthroat, literally in this novel.

Susan Collins has a knack for names. What great names. A masterclass on naming characters. 

Also there's a real feeling of controlled narrative. Things could expand or get obsessed with, but she doesn't bloviate. Crisp tight plot narrative. She allows Katniss to summarize what might have been off putting if we'd really gone close into her thoughts.

Reading the book with Katniss the narrator, I began to think Jennifer Lawrence wasn't a good actor. She is too flippant. She could not carry the depth of conflicts. But it's not her fault she's acting, and not narrating an inner dialogue. I realized they are different mediums, books and movies, and that is no more starkly shown here. A book has all kinds of details. Movies are visual, less internal monologues. Books have more, but movies less is their virtue. I can't help but see the actors since I saw the movie first, and wish I'd read the book first, though then I would have been really disappointed with the movies because they can never live up to the book. The movies are wonderful in their own way.

But am I getting off on the drama, the romance? Am I complicit in the appreciation of the drama? Even though it's fiction, there are plenty of real scenarios where the drama is entertaining. The raise of reality shows isn't for me, but it's hugely popular. We can join Katniss in hating the murder, but what are we doing about the people who are dying in today's hunger games?

Shakespeare really invents the human as Bloom suggests, but so often we don't know what characters are thinking, drama doesn't have the internal monologue so much, though there are soliloquies of the hero and heroine in the plays. Novels can follow a first person narrator into their depths. I really wish Shakespeare would have taken to novel writing in his retirement, I'm sorry he died so young at 52. I'm 53, and I've just started writing novels (not very good ones I grant you, too self indulgent).

My transcendentalist reading group, that spawned off Shakespeare 2020, is starting with Margaret Fuller. I'm not sure how closely I'll follow this reading group. I lost interest in reading all of Dostoevsky, and grinding all the time, but I think I'll be jumping around more. Reading Hunger Games is a palate cleanser to all the grinding on hard books I've been doing. There's something to be said for sci-fi young adult adventures. I love Hatchett and Adam of the Road. I have no shame reading young adult fiction.