Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd
Nov. 14th, 2006 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaI've got cranky going on tonight, like some kind emotional scab picking.
Anyway... I finished another William Boyd book and disliked it. A woman is working for a project observing chimpanzees. She discovers infanticide, cannibalism, and a possible war going on with the chimp community. The head researcher whose one of those "chimps are better than people" types, doesn't believe her. When he does observation with her and sees the chimps violent behavior for himself, he blames her for it, as though she has corrupted to the community.
Earlier she was married to a mathematician studying turbulence and went nuts.
And in the middle she gets kidnapped by one of the three warring factions in the African nature where they are doing chimp research.
The book is very chaotic and throws around mathematical theories and phrases like "strange attractor" without explaining them very well. Even with my limited (extremely limited) knowledge of the terms, I didn't feel they had been particularly well applied.
However, one of the themes of the novel is that chaos is often blamed on/caused by females. Whether chimp or human there is a lot of violence circulating around the female in estrus.
And it kind of pissed me off, even while it made some excellent points about scientific prejudice (the alpha-male model of biological behavior has largely been observed by important male humans and reflects an applied viewpoint, not necessarily unprejudiced observation), and about the kinds of nonsense that are often laid at the doors of female. (Her mathmatical boyfriend blames her first for not being able to think, then tells her he can't think without her.)
The main character in the novel is fairly happy/well-adjusted when living alone, in part because she is obsessed with being able to predict and control things. She finds people, and even chimps, to be a little complicated in the predict/control model. Also, she has a real tendency to attract assholes, liars, and madmen.
Anyway, it was provocative, disturbing, and not particularly good. Then I got woken up in the middle of the night (this would be Sunday) and got to spend the rest of it thinking about my problems.
I've been struggling to find some kind of balanced narrative with my relationship with males. The easiest route seems to be to forget they exist, and to pretend my relationships have had very little impact on me. (I've become very practiced on doing this with Ex, but that is in part because it's what I did to cope with him while we were still together.) I am reaching for a middle path where I accept responsibility without being a victim or a virago.
I tend to be kind of over-responsible about some things. Picking up garbage that doesn't belong to me just because it looks interesting, or might be useful someday. I hoard emotional baggage, including other peoples. I should be out there picking apart chimp droppings, trying to discover what they ate, or how they were feeling while they digested each other.
Because that's how I'm feeling tonight, tempted to go trolling for other people's garbage so I can remember how to hate them, and why.
This means its high time to get off the net, make myself some herbal tea (without whiskey,) read some nice, friendly, stories with happy endings, (or an article about an infectious disease that's been cured) and put myself to bed.
Anyway... I finished another William Boyd book and disliked it. A woman is working for a project observing chimpanzees. She discovers infanticide, cannibalism, and a possible war going on with the chimp community. The head researcher whose one of those "chimps are better than people" types, doesn't believe her. When he does observation with her and sees the chimps violent behavior for himself, he blames her for it, as though she has corrupted to the community.
Earlier she was married to a mathematician studying turbulence and went nuts.
And in the middle she gets kidnapped by one of the three warring factions in the African nature where they are doing chimp research.
The book is very chaotic and throws around mathematical theories and phrases like "strange attractor" without explaining them very well. Even with my limited (extremely limited) knowledge of the terms, I didn't feel they had been particularly well applied.
However, one of the themes of the novel is that chaos is often blamed on/caused by females. Whether chimp or human there is a lot of violence circulating around the female in estrus.
And it kind of pissed me off, even while it made some excellent points about scientific prejudice (the alpha-male model of biological behavior has largely been observed by important male humans and reflects an applied viewpoint, not necessarily unprejudiced observation), and about the kinds of nonsense that are often laid at the doors of female. (Her mathmatical boyfriend blames her first for not being able to think, then tells her he can't think without her.)
The main character in the novel is fairly happy/well-adjusted when living alone, in part because she is obsessed with being able to predict and control things. She finds people, and even chimps, to be a little complicated in the predict/control model. Also, she has a real tendency to attract assholes, liars, and madmen.
Anyway, it was provocative, disturbing, and not particularly good. Then I got woken up in the middle of the night (this would be Sunday) and got to spend the rest of it thinking about my problems.
I've been struggling to find some kind of balanced narrative with my relationship with males. The easiest route seems to be to forget they exist, and to pretend my relationships have had very little impact on me. (I've become very practiced on doing this with Ex, but that is in part because it's what I did to cope with him while we were still together.) I am reaching for a middle path where I accept responsibility without being a victim or a virago.
I tend to be kind of over-responsible about some things. Picking up garbage that doesn't belong to me just because it looks interesting, or might be useful someday. I hoard emotional baggage, including other peoples. I should be out there picking apart chimp droppings, trying to discover what they ate, or how they were feeling while they digested each other.
Because that's how I'm feeling tonight, tempted to go trolling for other people's garbage so I can remember how to hate them, and why.
This means its high time to get off the net, make myself some herbal tea (without whiskey,) read some nice, friendly, stories with happy endings, (or an article about an infectious disease that's been cured) and put myself to bed.
