oz617's reviews
469 reviews

This was always my least favourite Dahl book. Probably better if you're English and patriotic about it.

Really loved this. Ignore the daunting title - it's a charmingly written account of an incredibly (but largely harmlessly) stupid man's attempt to catalogue some birds and learn a new language. He has his moments of being a Victorian Englishman, but they're decently few, and interspersed with long arguments against the status quo, praising the native people and condemning those who'd call them lesser. 

Aubyn is at his best when not in a survival situation, evidenced by him losing most of the skin on his hands before his assistant realised that they could wear their extra socks as gloves. It took longer for either of them to realise that, rather than just shooting and skinning them for museums, one can also cook and eat birds. They'd eaten raw bacon before they worked that one out. 

There's times when he worries the reader must be getting bored, and moves too quickly on from an account I wished he'd linger on. He talks to the reader directly a lot, especially near the end, as if he can't believe we're still there. I'll miss him. I hope he manages to catch a fish soon.

Surprised to say I genuinely hated that.  Paradise Lost gets compared with the Divine Comedy a lot, which I think is a disservice to the Divine Comedy, because what I've been loving about Dante is how precise everything is. The Divine Comedy is easy to follow, clearly structured, and the changes it makes to theology all seem reasoned. Most importantly for me it's critical, and it's about *people*. It tells us who went to hell, and why, and often Dante even disagrees with it. The main character has feelings and emotions and wants explanations.

Paradise Lost on the other hand is functionally a Bible retelling, but positioning itself, for some reason, as scripture. Satan is the only character who has wants and desires, but they're Evil wants and Evil desires and he spends most of his time just brooding. The one exception to this is Eve, who eats the fruit so she might become godlike, but this is undercut by being told constantly that she was made to be pretty but brainless. Man's fall isn't blamed on her, or on Satan, but on Adam, for giving his wife the freedom to make that choice. The author jumps in to tell us women always do that. 

That bit could easily be criticised by telling me it's from a different time, and I almost accept that, except that I just read the pilgrim's progress - a book from the same era, by another puritan man, and I was so amazed by how much less sexist than I'd accounted for that was. It even Specifically tore apart this point of view!

The thing I've not decided whether I like or not is the reference to classical mythology. Paradise Lost invokes Greek and Roman epic constantly - I've read the first manuscript, but the revised version was even structured into 12 books so it would copy the Aeneid. But this is all really weird feeling, because it's 1) English, and 2) Christian. It feels insulting to be constantly comparing your heroes to the Greco-Roman ones, while also saying their Gods either didn't exist or were spirits that belong in hell. But a lot of that is my own conjecture, because the poem really doesn't explain itself on that count, so it winds up feeling more like an appeal to intellectuals who've read the epics than anything else.

This extends to the language too. TS Eliot said that Milton wrote English like it was a dead language, and I agree. It's structured like Latin, which does feel very Biblical, but makes it harder to read. And it creates a style that I frankly just dislike. It's clearly meant to be read on the page, and that means it doesn't flow in the way Dante's does. Maybe I'm just biased by how much I Do like the divine comedy.

Essentially, it feels like a poem you're supposed to study rather than read, and I just don't like it enough to care to. Maybe I'll do this again in 10 years and love it then, I don't know, but for now, not for me.

Absolutely mad in a brilliant way. It's very hard to say what's a flaw and what's intentional, got me thinking the whole way through. Some sections dragged. It was worth it

Well, that was creepy. As it should be, really. Tinkerbell has died off-stage, and Peter has forgotten killing Captain Hook. "I forget them after I kill them". Peter very almost kills Wendy's daughter with a dagger, but chooses not to after realising *she* can be his mother now instead of Wendy. Wendy lets this happen, and is happy to, I suppose because as an adult now she can more easily see how lonely this whole thing is. Also cycles, you know. 

It's a bit overly expository, and doesn't add anything, but it's clearly not supposed to. This was written to be performed one time, as a gift to the actress who'd originally played Wendy. In that context, it's quite lovely. In as much as Peter Pan can be lovely. Freaks me out really.

 I was expecting to be debating and rolling my eyes at this quite a bit, after reading Segev's introduction about his enduring admiration for the first Israelis. I think that part might have been intentionally vague in order to let this book get published, because as the book continues, his condemnations of the very first settlers, the state of Israel's politicians, and of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine generally, very much ring out. Segev is scathing about Ben-Gurion especially, which is extremely refreshing after reading Benny Morris's account of the same events.

Impressively, it did leave me with a large amount of sympathy for the Israelis I think Segev was alluding to - the thousands of immigrants from the diaspora lured under false pretenses to a state that was in no way ready to take them. The Yemeni Jews forced to cut their sidelocks by the European immigrants who believed the Israeli culture must also be European, the Ethiopian Jews who were thrown out of their new houses by the IDF when the housing shortage became apparent, everyone who sent letters home saying Israel was not what they were promised it would be, only to have those letters confiscated and never received. 

There were a couple times I'd question the wording of something, mostly just when Segev quotes an account from the time then continues to use its questionable use of terms for that paragraph without presenting them in quotation marks (which would show they're now inaccurate at best), but it's extremely minor. Overall I thought it was the best Israeli perspective you could want, and I can see why the Institute for Palestine Studies republished it.