Films and Historical Fiction

Over the past month or so I've been reading some historical fiction. It's a bit of a relief from the sort of high-art post-modern mass I've been reading this year. 

David Gutterson's classic Snow Falling On Cedars is impressive for the sheer bulk of research and imagination that obviously went into the novel. The novel borders on genre (mystery or romance) once in a while, but its deep investment in the representations of place pay off. The result is that it succeeds in transporting the reader wholly to the communities inhabiting the islands in Puget sound in the first half of the last century. The book leaves a lasting and honest impression. It also speaks strongly to beliefs about American masculinity and nationalism, perfecting its picture of the laconic, war-haunted frontiersman. 

I can't say enough positive things about Geraldine Brooks's 2006 Pullitzer Prize-winning novel March. It engages with a so many fascinating topics and ideas: civil war history, transcendentalism, american religious reform, pacifism and tolerance, abolitionists, racial relations in the south during the war, and some critiques of paternalism that are essentially anti-colonial. Brooks also does an amazing job developing March's character as a self-obsessed tunnel-visioned eccentric who none-the-less holds all the right convictions. Brooks's prose is seamless enough to render plot development inconspicuous. Perhaps this is partly because the plot is necessarily contained within Little Women's plot and Louisa May Alcott's father's personal letters. 

Zach and I saw Away We Go last week. I can't decide if the film is an uncanny representation of us, or we are just a typical double-M-Arts couple. The film is funny but we liked best the fact that the characters are committed and in love without any of the typical dramatic complications that usually accompany romantic comedies.  

Early early this morning I saw the sixth Harry Potter movie with my sisters. Fun times, sore necks.