Post by Erasmus on Apr 21, 2011 19:37:59 GMT -5
I like this idea: Patrick Ness's recommendation of novels for teenagers considered too young to be reading them.
I would add just about all traditional folk and myth in its original. Before Disney and the Victorians got at the Brothers Grimm, as grim indeed they were as might be expected from Germans peasants living in robber-infested forests where breaking on the wheel was still a form of execution, and what the Greek gods got up to should put paid to any fancy ideas about sexual right and wrong. Actually plenty of the classics that we expect in school revolve around deceit, adultery, murder, and all those other fun human activities that kept Shakespeare, Sheridan and Dickens in business (I have never liked Dickens!)
I'm afraid that my early teen reading was somewhat dissipated on science-fiction and the Pan series of horror and ghost stories. I've never read Dracula but I have the feeling I wouldn't recommend it to anybody out of their teens: even accounting for film adaptations, the various plotlines, unlikihood of His Voivodship wanting to move to Whitby (of all places!), astounding denseness of all concerned and peripheral characters like Renfield who do nothing but gibber on the sidelines put me off. Besides, I have read his The Seven Stars which Hammer Horror did beautifully except for sweetening the ending he makes almost certain that evil has triumphed (OK because I reckon the Egyptian Princess had a lot more going for her thah the drip of a girl Our Hero is in love with). It is full of narrative holes and implausibilities.
I doubt if there is an age 'too young' for it, but I would recommend Northanger Abbey as a classic laugh because the characters are still absolutely identifiable, from the anti-heroine obsessed with Gothick Horror so very like today's vampire chic to the undergraduate Boy Racer whose horse simply cannot go at less than ten miles an hour but she observes always requires far more cursing and dramatics for a rougher ride than his friend she fancies. If I remember, his gig even has a go-faster stripe!
Other than that, three strange French ones: L'Exilé de Capri (Roger Peyrefitte), Les Enfants Terribles (Jean Cocteau), and Les Petite Sirènes (Yves Dangerfield). They all to some extent carry a moral that adult life requires growing up - which the protagonists fail to do, and JG Ballard's Running Wild
Peyrefitte was a homosexual activist writer and Exile is a kind of fan-fictionalised biography of France's answer to Oscar Wilde (without the talent), Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen (with a name like that, who needs talent?)
Disgraced in 1903 at a relatively young age for holding what he called Pink Masses attended by most of the Parisian élite in which their teenage sons featured, but were considered to be blasphemous obscene parodies, he moved to Capri with his lover and the novel recounts the life there of the community of Europe's rich and infamous during the first couple of 20th century decades.
Cocteau was another homosexual. However, the brother and sister concerned in some way contrive to lose (or murder) their family young and grow up unknown except to a few friends in an attic where they support themselves by petty theft. At first, it is a child's dream of absolute freedom, but as they pass puberty, so they remain innocent in the sense that was once synonymous with simple and as dangerous as any innocent animal, so gradually their life degenerates to murder, incest, rape and - just about anything one cares to name of a couple of aliens with no socialization whatsoever. No children, we do not want you innocent - we want you very aware that actions have consequences.
Maybe Yves Dangerfield was homosexual too, since I see from the only thing with much to say about him, that he died of AIDS-related (SIDA in French) disease aged 32 in 1992, which makes him France's (or Belgium's - I'm not sure!) answer to Richard Beckinsale with a promising film and possibly literary career ahead of him.
He was 16 when he started The Little Mermaids about a sexual liaison between a girl of 15 and a labourer in his 30s, 18 when it was published. He said himself that it was based on people he knew, and to some extent himself. Therefore let it be a warning to all young teens inclined to see the world in terms of romanticised dangerous flouting of convention.
It is a simple story where she often sees herself in a much more glamourised 'wicked' than she really is. She is, for instance both disappointed and relieved when asking her round for an evening with his male friends turns out to be an invitation, not to an orgy with her as centre of attraction, but a night playing cards that she finds pretty boring. It is fairly clear that her lover likes her and does not treat her as a 'pet' to pamper with treats or as a convenient prostitute, but at the same time he does not 'love' her in any real sense, any more than she really does him - but she adores the sense of defiance and shocking if only they knew the realities beneath her prim school uniform.
Of course it is only a matter of time before her unthinking about contraception and his considering it her business mean that they do know. The date is too early for her to be subjected to modern humiliations of being treated like an idiot victim swept off her feet by a monster in human form, but the adult world and its responsibilities still do come crashing in on her, not least her anguish that he might be jailed for something she wanted and encouraged (and possibly instigated but it's nearly 30 years since I read it). Again, it is the clash of innocently acting in accordance with her natural feelings and social requirements.
Both these latter have been filmed with the author's active involvement.
JG Ballard is the kind of author I like, able to utilise a fantastic background to make psychological points, or to depict psychology as making a banal background fantastic - as his Concrete Island where a man finds himself unable to cross a busy motorway from the 'island' where his car has crashed and gradually finds a strange community in the same plight - or is he just slowly going mad imagining them?
Running Wild is about deprived children. One day, all the adults of an elite private estate are murdered and the children disappear. The obvious conclusion is that terrorists are holding them to ransom. However, no ransom ever shows and gradually it emerges that the children had been planning for a long time to murder their parents. Subsequently, they are probably responsible for random acts of violence-terrorism, culminating in Lady Thatcher's kidnap (though I am none too sure what is 'terrorist' about that). These children have had everything money can buy. Therefore they expect it. Money can't buy love - they have never experienced it, so they cannot experience it. They truly are Thatcher's Children.
I would add just about all traditional folk and myth in its original. Before Disney and the Victorians got at the Brothers Grimm, as grim indeed they were as might be expected from Germans peasants living in robber-infested forests where breaking on the wheel was still a form of execution, and what the Greek gods got up to should put paid to any fancy ideas about sexual right and wrong. Actually plenty of the classics that we expect in school revolve around deceit, adultery, murder, and all those other fun human activities that kept Shakespeare, Sheridan and Dickens in business (I have never liked Dickens!)
I'm afraid that my early teen reading was somewhat dissipated on science-fiction and the Pan series of horror and ghost stories. I've never read Dracula but I have the feeling I wouldn't recommend it to anybody out of their teens: even accounting for film adaptations, the various plotlines, unlikihood of His Voivodship wanting to move to Whitby (of all places!), astounding denseness of all concerned and peripheral characters like Renfield who do nothing but gibber on the sidelines put me off. Besides, I have read his The Seven Stars which Hammer Horror did beautifully except for sweetening the ending he makes almost certain that evil has triumphed (OK because I reckon the Egyptian Princess had a lot more going for her thah the drip of a girl Our Hero is in love with). It is full of narrative holes and implausibilities.
I doubt if there is an age 'too young' for it, but I would recommend Northanger Abbey as a classic laugh because the characters are still absolutely identifiable, from the anti-heroine obsessed with Gothick Horror so very like today's vampire chic to the undergraduate Boy Racer whose horse simply cannot go at less than ten miles an hour but she observes always requires far more cursing and dramatics for a rougher ride than his friend she fancies. If I remember, his gig even has a go-faster stripe!
Other than that, three strange French ones: L'Exilé de Capri (Roger Peyrefitte), Les Enfants Terribles (Jean Cocteau), and Les Petite Sirènes (Yves Dangerfield). They all to some extent carry a moral that adult life requires growing up - which the protagonists fail to do, and JG Ballard's Running Wild
Peyrefitte was a homosexual activist writer and Exile is a kind of fan-fictionalised biography of France's answer to Oscar Wilde (without the talent), Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen (with a name like that, who needs talent?)
Disgraced in 1903 at a relatively young age for holding what he called Pink Masses attended by most of the Parisian élite in which their teenage sons featured, but were considered to be blasphemous obscene parodies, he moved to Capri with his lover and the novel recounts the life there of the community of Europe's rich and infamous during the first couple of 20th century decades.
Cocteau was another homosexual. However, the brother and sister concerned in some way contrive to lose (or murder) their family young and grow up unknown except to a few friends in an attic where they support themselves by petty theft. At first, it is a child's dream of absolute freedom, but as they pass puberty, so they remain innocent in the sense that was once synonymous with simple and as dangerous as any innocent animal, so gradually their life degenerates to murder, incest, rape and - just about anything one cares to name of a couple of aliens with no socialization whatsoever. No children, we do not want you innocent - we want you very aware that actions have consequences.
Maybe Yves Dangerfield was homosexual too, since I see from the only thing with much to say about him, that he died of AIDS-related (SIDA in French) disease aged 32 in 1992, which makes him France's (or Belgium's - I'm not sure!) answer to Richard Beckinsale with a promising film and possibly literary career ahead of him.
He was 16 when he started The Little Mermaids about a sexual liaison between a girl of 15 and a labourer in his 30s, 18 when it was published. He said himself that it was based on people he knew, and to some extent himself. Therefore let it be a warning to all young teens inclined to see the world in terms of romanticised dangerous flouting of convention.
It is a simple story where she often sees herself in a much more glamourised 'wicked' than she really is. She is, for instance both disappointed and relieved when asking her round for an evening with his male friends turns out to be an invitation, not to an orgy with her as centre of attraction, but a night playing cards that she finds pretty boring. It is fairly clear that her lover likes her and does not treat her as a 'pet' to pamper with treats or as a convenient prostitute, but at the same time he does not 'love' her in any real sense, any more than she really does him - but she adores the sense of defiance and shocking if only they knew the realities beneath her prim school uniform.
Of course it is only a matter of time before her unthinking about contraception and his considering it her business mean that they do know. The date is too early for her to be subjected to modern humiliations of being treated like an idiot victim swept off her feet by a monster in human form, but the adult world and its responsibilities still do come crashing in on her, not least her anguish that he might be jailed for something she wanted and encouraged (and possibly instigated but it's nearly 30 years since I read it). Again, it is the clash of innocently acting in accordance with her natural feelings and social requirements.
Both these latter have been filmed with the author's active involvement.
JG Ballard is the kind of author I like, able to utilise a fantastic background to make psychological points, or to depict psychology as making a banal background fantastic - as his Concrete Island where a man finds himself unable to cross a busy motorway from the 'island' where his car has crashed and gradually finds a strange community in the same plight - or is he just slowly going mad imagining them?
Running Wild is about deprived children. One day, all the adults of an elite private estate are murdered and the children disappear. The obvious conclusion is that terrorists are holding them to ransom. However, no ransom ever shows and gradually it emerges that the children had been planning for a long time to murder their parents. Subsequently, they are probably responsible for random acts of violence-terrorism, culminating in Lady Thatcher's kidnap (though I am none too sure what is 'terrorist' about that). These children have had everything money can buy. Therefore they expect it. Money can't buy love - they have never experienced it, so they cannot experience it. They truly are Thatcher's Children.
Omega
From there, I think it was straight downhill to Peyton Place, Lady Chatterly, Valley of the Dolls and Atlas Shrugged. lol
