Buddha by Osamu Tezuka

I'm going to keep using graphic novels until I can no longer justify it with the fact that I read long novels.

This was awful. I’d heard of this series a while back, heralded as an exemplary, powerful graphic novel representation of the biography of the Buddha. Tezuka is supposed to be the father of Japanese graphic novels. If that’s true, I have no desire to read any Japanese graphic novels.

He wrote Buddha when graphic novels were still mostly a children’s medium, so it’s annoyingly juvenile. There’s a lot of humor that you’d expect from a Saturday morning cartoon. The story consisted of very loosely linked episodic plots, and only just began to talk about the Buddha. There are six more volumes that I don’t plan on reading. Just when I’d expect it to develop into a mature novel, someone would get hit in the crotch with something. A lot of stupid anachronistic jokes, like a pack of cigarettes falling from a monk’s pocket, a yeti, and a cameo appearance by the author (in doctor uniform) don’t quite make this the “insightful, amazing” work that was promised.

The only redeeming quality about the art was the few landscape scenes. These were truly impressive. For everything else, anatomy was way off, faces were amateur and inexpressive, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a horse do a front flip, especially not with a rider on its back.

Bad art aside, I wondered if maybe it was the translation that made this book so bad, until I came to this wonderful piece of work:

“Look… heh, heh, we’ve been pierced through. But it’s better like this… skewered together… don’t you think, mother?”

“We’ll never be parted again… never…”

There is no language on earth that could keep that from sounding stupid.

If you promise not to tell anyone that I read this, I promise not to make you read it.

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

I am quite thankful to be done with this maddening, suffocating, revolting book. I only finished it because I had to read it for a class, and if I hadn't vowed to read fifty books I probably wouldn't have read the whole thing then, either. Here is the plot as best as it can be described: A massive and maniacal person known only as the Dog-Woman fishes a baby out of the Thames and names it Jordan. They live through the rule of Cromwell and Jordan imagines some really dumb crap and tries to pass it off as a narrative. At the end, there is a hastily tacked-on epilogue which tries to introduce a couple of new modern characters and convince us that they are the reincarnations of Jordan and the Dog-Woman, and that that is somehow interesting or innovative.

The whole thing is full of metaphors beat senselessly into the ground:

He called me Jess because that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon.

Palpable anti-male bias:

5. Men deem themselves weighty and women light. Therefore it is simple to tie a stone round their necks and drown them should they become too troublesome.

6. Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkenness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her own life unhindered.

And a whole bunch of forced images and vignettes that have no connection to any plotline whatsoever, and are only justified through the use of tired and half-baked metaphysical garbage:

OBJECTS 1: A woman looks into her bag and recognizes none of her belongings. She hurries home. But where is home? She follows the address written in her purse. She has never seen this house before and who are those ugly children wrecking the garden? Inside a fat man is waiting for his supper. She shoots him. At the trial she says she had never seen him before. He was her husband.

Winterson is insulting me by placing that last line there; I knew it was her husband. Read the whole thing again but leave off the last line--isn't that much better? Writers like Winterson spend so much time being clever that they come off as if they think they are much more clever than you. And then there's the recycled time is not linear ideas, the liberal self-righteousness, the flat characters, the Faulkner-lite trading off of point of view. This book prides itself on being about ideas, but if these ideas didn't get worn out in the twentieth century, surely Winterson has killed them.

Do not read this book.