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Apr. 8th, 2004 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
decemberthirtyI finished Mysteries of Pittsburgh a few days ago. It seems rather slight when compared with Michael Chabon's later work, but I thought that it was really quite impressive for a debut novel. There's just something about the characters that makes it very easy to identify with them, despite the fact that their circumstances are ridiculous and their lifestyles are often blatantly unrealistic. I'm not sure that I really loved the way Chabon had Art deliver a kind of sum-it-all-up, moral-of-the-story type speech at the end, but all in all I thought it was quite well-written and gripping.
After finishing, I started Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. I really should have read it back when I was twelve and in my extreme Civil War buff phase, but even now I'm finding it to be a great book. It's obviously very thoroughly researched, and Shaara does a great job of capturing the personalities and temperaments of these different men, and expressing the ways in which their individual natures influenced the course of the war. For some reason, the book is making me think about the way that certain names just evoke the history with which they are associated. The names of certain battles, certain men, just seem to kind of echo through the culture, and just by invoking those names you can call up strong emotions: Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam. The particular names at Gettysburg: Seminary ridge, the peach orchard, Pickett's charge... And the same can be said of the place names in other wars, at other times. I don't think I'm doing a good job of expressing what I mean.
My one little quibble with The Killer Angels so far, is the fact that the only people who are turned into fully fleshed-out characters are the officers. The ordinary soldiers who fill up the ranks are never even given names. Certainly when dealing with a subject as big as the battle of Gettysburg, an author has to be selective about he does and doesn't include, but it makes me wonder what Billy Prior would have to say about Shaara's exclusive focus on officers.
After finishing, I started Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. I really should have read it back when I was twelve and in my extreme Civil War buff phase, but even now I'm finding it to be a great book. It's obviously very thoroughly researched, and Shaara does a great job of capturing the personalities and temperaments of these different men, and expressing the ways in which their individual natures influenced the course of the war. For some reason, the book is making me think about the way that certain names just evoke the history with which they are associated. The names of certain battles, certain men, just seem to kind of echo through the culture, and just by invoking those names you can call up strong emotions: Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam. The particular names at Gettysburg: Seminary ridge, the peach orchard, Pickett's charge... And the same can be said of the place names in other wars, at other times. I don't think I'm doing a good job of expressing what I mean.
My one little quibble with The Killer Angels so far, is the fact that the only people who are turned into fully fleshed-out characters are the officers. The ordinary soldiers who fill up the ranks are never even given names. Certainly when dealing with a subject as big as the battle of Gettysburg, an author has to be selective about he does and doesn't include, but it makes me wonder what Billy Prior would have to say about Shaara's exclusive focus on officers.
