Fizzy Lifting Drink?: On Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

My memories of Charlie are from the movies. I never read the book, but the movies do add things as movies will do and now I understand the differences arising between the two Chocolate Factory movies. The directors had to add some sort of conflict. Dahl's story is like this: Charlie is poor; Charlie gets golden ticket; Charlie is virtuous where the other children are bad; Charlie is awarded factory by Wonka.

In this, the original story, everything plays out nicely and everything is too simple. Charlie is poor but his family is entirely good. All the others we see are horrible and one-dimensional and their defining traits become the mode for their downfall. But if you're poor you can be good just by keeping your head down and good things will happen to you. I was dismayed to learn that Charlie and his grandpa avoided the Fizzy Lifting Drink and avoided any complexity to their characters as is in the version I cherished.

Wonka is an entirely wonderful and novel creation, and I understand why such talented actors wanted to fill his shoes. However, he is not a hero of the working class. Expelling all your workers as a way to avoid corporate espionage is bad enough, but enslaving a whole race of people as your personal worker-army is a little much. I would hope that the Salts or the Gloops or one of the other families enlighten the government as to the conditions at the factory. Also: Wonka has a beard.

In the end, reading the book for beloved stories like this always create more perspective. Dahl is a talented writer but this creation is written for a different audience than me. In that respects, I feel it is an effective text. For me however, it works in concert with the creative efforts spawned by it to forge a synthetic idea of just Who Willy Wonka and Charlie Bucket really are. I am glad I read it.

On Blankets

I continue to feel that I read graphic novels, or whatever you want to call them, way too fast. A good part of this is that there are far fewer words per page in a graphic novel than in a more traditional novel. Description is laid out in pictures instead of words, saving the reader much time. I think that having pictures creates a stickiness for the reader. The force of the speed pulls you through and makes you want to continue until the end. I'm a fairly quick reader of text, but there's no sense of momentum built up in reading even quick reads as there is in graphic novels. The pile in your left hand grows at the expense of the pile in the right.

One caveat is that this process happens best when the art is there to serve and enhance the story, instead of moving into the foreground and becoming the story itself. Craig Thompson's _Blankets_ uses such transparent art. He uses the genre to pull the reader into the world he created (and recreated from memory), immersing you into his own sort of memories. The novel is a brilliant evocation of the late teenage years. It is a story about love and finding yourself and coming to terms with who you are and brotherhood. It is life, split and worked into a nice and believable narrative arc. The story is alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking and entirely worth your time.

A leftist, radicalized, American version of Joyce: On The 42nd Parallel

The Library of America has printed the entire USA trilogy by Dos Passos in a nice hardcover. U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money (Library of America) I however, do not particularly like hardcover books of many pages - they hurt my left wrist as I read. Therefore, I did not buy the entire trilogy in hard cover. I was also covering my bases. Had I not liked the first novel of the trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, I would not be burdened by having bought and thus `having' to read the whole 1000 pages of the three books. I thought I was saving money, but now I wish I had bought the whole thing to begin with.

Dos Passos is something of a leftist radicalized, American version of Joyce. If that sounds good to you, get the book(s). He does something interesting here about the nature of storytelling and history in the early part of the twentieth century. He weaves together bits and pieces of history and fiction and song and poetry to get at what was real about that time. Some of the bits take you out of the narrative he's stringing together for your elucidation, but they help give you (and reinforce) context of the time. Dos Passos' strength is in creating characters. Too many books that try to bring several characters and have them serve as narrative centers for a time suffer a common weakness: some of the characters are stronger than others. Dos Passos does not suffer from this deficit, and his storytelling benefits as a result. All the characters are rounded out and have a life you want to see played out.