Okay so Clan of the Cave Bear was interesting. It's basically about this girl who's of our species, whose tribe all dies in an earthquake, who's found by a clan of Neanderthals who speak only in sign language, who don't cry or smile or laugh, who think she's hideous, who raise her as their own despite all the ways her frontal lobes cause her to act weird.
Here are the problems I had with this book:
1. The beginning was boring. It was not unlike Anne of Green Gables, which starts with a whole chapter about an old woman named Marilla sewing a quilt and looking out the window. HEY, I THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO BE ABOUT A REDHEAD LITTLE GIRL WHO WALKS ON ROOFTOPS. ACCORDING TO THE COVER ART. It eventually is. But why, Lucy Maud Montgomery, would you start the book with the most boring chapter possible? Oh, because Marilla totally has a bigger character arc than Anne does, because you could view her, actually, as being the protagonist because she undergoes a more drastic change than Anne - where Anne basically just matures, Marilla's cold dead heart comes back to life? Okay then.
Anytime a book starts boringly (which is OFTEN), I think of Anne of Green Gables. Clan of the Cave Bear is so boring at the beginning, and I was so unconvinced I was going to get into it, that I skipped to a page in the middle and started reading there.
I told myself that if it seemed interesting I would go back and read the first part, but I never did because I never needed to. People do this all the time with tv shows and movies. It's really not that weird. Same with compulsive re-reading. People will watch a tv show episode for the 34th time, knowing it all by heart, and not think it's strange, and not feel guilty because there are so many tv show episodes out there in the world they haven't seen yet. But those same people will tell you they don't re-read because there are too many books in the world and it just seems wrong.
Nabokov agrees with me that re-reading is the bomb:
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it.
A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a
rereader.”
I didn't mean to copy and paste his picture, but there you go. I recently re-read the short story by Deborah Eisenberg, "Rosie Gets a Soul," about a recovering heroin addict who paints leaves and flowers on the bedroom walls of rich people, and enjoyed it immensely. I am currently re-reading the novel Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams, which is the most aphoristic, perfect perfect, bizarre amazing novel I have ever read. The plot means nothing to me. The plot is obligatory. The dialogue is... like if no one ever said anything boring, ever. Instead of usually/always.
2. Clan of the Cave Bear: the main character (whose name I already forget) (which was rough for me in school when an English teacher would give us a quiz to see who did the reading and I'd barely pass it or not pass it despite having done all the reading and having many opinions on it) (What is the name of the protagonist?: I don't know! The Girl Whose Head We're In! I don't need to know her name! This is also how I am when a boyfriend tells me stories about his ex-girlfriends: I am interested but I can't remember them by name and instead always have to be like, "Wait, is she the one who shaved her arms? Oh, well then is she the one who threw a hair dryer at you?")... uh... so, the main character. She's a big-time Mary Sue.
From TV Tropes:
"She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name.
She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas,
and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon
setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant,
character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be
endearing.
She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story.
The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her
beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as
one of their True Companions, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn't love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal."
I mean as much as I relate to characters like this (HAR HAR) it gets old. It makes it hard to take the book seriously. The main character whose name I forget is not all that different, in degree of Mary Sue-dom, from the protagonist of the Twilight series. (Not that I've read Twilight. You know why I haven't? Okay, there was once this library patron who checked out one of Obama's books, who called us to say she would return it only after she was done making the necessary changes to it. Meaning, she was crossing things out and writing in the margins, because she disagreed with the book so strongly that she couldn't help herself. As much as I think the library would benefit from having an unauthorized feminist critiqued copy of Twilight... my penmanship is too recognizable and I would be fired.)
3. Um, is this book racist? The main character, the human among Neanderthals, has blue eyes and blonde hair and is tall. She's Nordic, despite being from roughly the same area as the Neanderthals. I mean it does say she comes from further north, which would be correct, evolution-wise, but she's from walking distance of the Neanderthals. Not like, different-continent north. I don't know. It crossed my mind while I was reading that there was something a little prickly and uncomfortable about this white girl who's smarter than all the savages, but I ignored it. Then when I was telling the plot of the novel to my friend her eyebrows met her hairline and she was like, "WHAT." She thought it was racist and I was actually trying to make it sound not-racist because I wanted her to read it so we could discuss it. I just googled "clan of the cave bear racist" and it appears other people have noticed it too.
SO. HOW DID I LIKE THIS BOOK.
I liked it! Despite the Mary Sue, despite the racism, despite the boring beginning... this summer I read an article in either Harper's or the New Yorker about the co-existence of humans and Neanderthals which I found fascinating. This was like the fanfiction of that article.
While I was on the phone with my sister tonight, for some reason the topic of Leah and Rachel from Genesis came up (I really don't remember how), and we talked about how Leah's described as having weak/soft/tender eyes, which is an ambiguous description, and Jessica made me look it up in my Bible and then google it to find out what's up with that (conclusion: some people think it means she cried a lot because she was probably going to have to marry Esau, who was bad news; some people think it means she was near-sighted; some people think it means she was the opposite of "easy on the eyes," i.e., ugly; some people [mainly my sister and I] think it means her eyeballs were smushy and weird looking), and in the course of doing so I wondered if there is such a thing as Bible fanfic. Is there? I just googled it, and yes. Of course there is. First result: Jesus Goes to Hogwarts. God bless the internet.
