Pretty Pessimist

Rather than doing my homework last night, I decided to curl up with a book and while the night away.  Very irresponsible!  I could have been writing my Gatsby paper, which is due tonight, or reading Euripides’ Helen for Thursday’s class, but I couldn’t bring myself to do either, preferring instead to escape the chores ahead of me with A. Mordeaux’s Bathory: Memoir of a Countess.  I read the entire thing, all 232 pages, in about four hours.

At this point, I’d like to preface my review by saying that ever since I discovered and ordered the book on Amazon, I’ve been eagerly awaiting its arrival.  When I got half of my shipment from Amazon early and this book wasn’t in it, I was really disappointed, and when it finally did come, I could hardly contain my excitement.  I was able to put off reading it in favor of finishing Kushiel’s Avatar, Sappho, and Gatsby, but only barely.  I’ve been looking for a good book about the Blood Countess and this one seemed like it might be just what I’d sought after, so I was eager to devour it.

I’ve never been so disappointed by a book in my entire life.

So, first from Amazon:

“The legend of Elizabeth Bathory has captivated generations, but her true persona eludes many. She has been called the most renowned serial killer of her time, accused of torturing and murdering more than 600 people. Conflicted, wanton, and sadistic in nature, was Elizabeth the result of generations of inbreeding? Was she a twisted byproduct of an archaic environment? Or was she merely a victim of a political conspiracy? Travel back in time and explore her story, told in her own voice, and discover the many facets of Countess Elizabeth Bathory.”

This is the product description, not a review, but it helps to put things into perspective.  Elisabeth Bathory was a murderess of the highest caliber, believed to have bathed regularly in the blood of  both servant and aristocratic virgins to sustain her youth.  She wasn’t just a killer, she was a sadistic torturer, as well.  This is not a sympathetic character, though she is a fascinating one.  So, if anything good could be said about this book, it’s only that the story is interesting, but is a story not of the authors devising.  History gives us this character and her tale.

**Includes spoilers beyond this point**

I say then, without reserve, that this is the single worst book I’ve ever read.  I do mean that, the absolute worst.  Though the character is historical and her story is fascinating, the book is utter garbage.  The prose are stiff and at times difficult to follow, just a lot of sentences haphazardly forced together.  The story unfolds in jagged fits and spurts of time.  There is absolutely no continuity.  The historical details are poorly researched, the character is poorly rendered, and the ending is ridiculous.  Dialogue is both modern and unbelievable, and there is not a single moment when the characters are speaking that I didn’t want them to just stop (the book is most certainly not written in “her voice” as the product detail suggests).  It was horribly, horribly distracting and stole away any credibility and suspension of disbelief this book could have had.

The character recognizes herself as depressed (the historically accurate term is melancholia), her husband calls her stressed, and she gets what they recognize as influenza (which didn’t become a medical term for more than 100 years after this book is set).  If I had a dime for every time this book said castle, I would have made up the cost of the book. I actually laughed out loud at the term “castle management.”  This is historical fiction and shouldn’t sound like the characters are going to stay at a cheap motel.

In the midst of all of that, the book depicts in horrible, and horribly written, detail scenes of graphic torture and depraved sexuality.  I’m not one to be insulted by sex, nor am I such a prude that I can’t accept torture in it’s historical context (we are talking about Hungary in the fifteen- and sixteen-hundreds after all), but the book went over the line.  If the author wanted to write bad BDSM, they should have done so and left history out of it.  There is heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, child molestation and torture, rape, murder, mutilation and all manners of horrors.  Innocent bystanders are tortured and killed to no purpose, which doesn’t fit with Elisabeth Bathory’s profile.  I don’t have a weak stomach for these things, but this book made me nauseous.

As if all that weren’t enough, the book has so many loose threads, we could weave a cloak!  Characters are introduced and then disappear.  Children are had and the disappear until the author needs them later.  The only mention of her any of her children being married is that of Elisabeth’s middle daughter, Katalin, though her other children are apparently wed as well.  Her son and one of her sons-in-law come to her aid, for no reason at all, while her other son-in-law is apparently, and for no apparent reason, conspiring against her.  Her cousin puts her under house arrest for 3 years, is cruel to her, won’t even give her water to bathe with, and yet in the end, this same cousin simply lets her go with a bag of money and tells her to go somewhere and disappear, with no explanation of why.  A young woman is lead into her chambers as she leaves them, and we are left to assume that that woman will serve as a stand-in corpse for Elisabeth, because history says that Elisabeth dies under house arrest.

Though there are many gaps in the record of Elizabeth Bathory, some historical facts are known beyond question.  That she dies under house arrest is one of those fact and yet the author screws that up, too.  In the Author’s notes, in the end of the book, Mordeaux attempts to explain away their poorly constructed story and admits to doing most of their research on the internet.  Okay, I research using the internet from time to time, but I also use databases which are unquestionably useful resources.  Oh, and Mordeaux’s website links to Wikipedia, the internet’s most notoriously unscrupulous source, where anyone can write anything.

After reading this ridiculous book, cover to cover mind you, I did some digging around to find out about the author and publisher.  The book is, not surprisingly, self-published and after this I will never buy another self-published book again as long as I live.  This accounts for the fact that this book has almost no editing.  Many sentences are run together in such a way that they’re almost indecipherable, punctuation is wrong in more places than I can count, it is more than clear that no fact checking occurred, words are misspelled, and the author often uses the wrong word entirely (ie. Mordeaux says boar when they mean bore).  Where was the editor?!  I would be humiliated to put my name on this if I were Mordeaux, yet they don’t have to be humiliated because they take no credit for their work.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that authors unwilling to put a face with the name have zero credibility.  This author’s website is thin on information and has no author bio.  I don’t even know if the perpetrator of this heinous crime against the English language is a man or a woman.  The icing on the cake is that the author is trying to make money, on their website, by selling t-shirts and mugs and bumperstickers with their brand on it.  Credibility first, then t-shirts and mugs, otherwise you just look like a shyster.

Whatever you do, do not buy this horrible book.  I never leave reviews on Amazon, but I think that this time I’m going to.  One of the reviewers over there suggested, quite conspiratorially, that Mordeaux had their friends and family put up dummy reviews to bring in more sales.  When I first read that, I was appalled, but now, having read the book, I’m not only not appalled, I believe that’s probably the case.  I should not only get my money back, but should be awarded hazard pay for the four hours of my life I wasted on this trash.

What a disappointment.

I’ve written before about how much I dislike my neighbors, but I think it warrants mentioning again.  The house next door to us is a rental and the people who’ve rented it have always seemed to be the absolute lowest sort.  We frequently have new neighbors over there, in the last 5 1/2 years we’ve had 10 different neighbors.  I never see them bringing anything –no furniture, no clothes– they just appear out of the blue one day and then are gone just as quickly as they came.  The most recent batch of neighbors are always changing, but someone is always living over there.  There’ll be a couple, then one of them will disappear replaced by someone else, then the other one will disappear replaced, yet again, by someone else.  It’s ridiculous and it’s starting to get to me.

When we first moved here, there were a whole bunch of “cowboys” living over there.  They ran around in their boots and hats and had big trucks with gun racks.  One night, we came home and they were drinking beer and cradling their riffles, all of them were drunker than a skunk.  I almost called the cops then and there, but I decided the better of it when they went inside and didn’t show their faces again until morning, all hung over and bleary eyed.  They were ridiculous and a menace, but they were relatively harmless.  Other than their stupidity, I only took offense to their dogs, which they kept in a little tiny chain-link kennel, of sorts, in the yard between our houses.  I always thought those dogs looked sad and were ignored.  I counted my blessings when they left.

Then there were 5 or 6 people to follow, all particularly shifty eyed and unfriendly.  I worried about them, but they minded their own business and we did them same.  The people who came after them were assholes, who I was glad to see go.  The husband was mean as all hell to his wife and baby, who I heard him beating on on more than one occasion.  Those people are the ones who called the cops on us when Matt and I got into a fight one night, I know it was them because they would look at us with their sunken eyes and whisper whenever they saw us outside.  After them, the house sat empty for a good year or so, for which I was grateful, only to be filled with obnoxious single mothers with passels of kids.  There had to be two or three of them over there, and a good 10 kids between them.  They were noisy and unfriendly and always had random men coming in and out, which made me nervous.  It was when they built a damn trampoline between our houses, where their kids would spend hours screaming at the top of their lungs, that I thought I’d lose my mind.  Then they were gone.

After them were the people who live there now.  The ones residing there right now are generally friendly, but I dislike them nonetheless for it.  For a long time I’d come home to find furniture in the yard –sofa’s, broken washing machines, beat up wicker furniture.  It got old fast.  Then, when they stopped that it was trash.  There were actually dirty diapers and all manners of garbage all over the yard, not just theirs but scattered around on ours, too.  The managers asked them to clean it up before I had the chance to talk to the manager about it, for which I was grateful.  Now, it’s the mess their dogs are making.  They have two large dogs chained up outside, and two smaller dogs in the house.  In the mornings they’re letting their dogs off the chains to run loose in our yard and they’re making a huge mess!

I finally had enough and went to talk to the manager about it.  This is when it gets tricky.  The manager is a generally nice guy, I haven’t had much trouble with him, but he tells me that the guy who lives next door to us does work for him.  In other words, they’re friends.  Great, just freaking great!  He told me that he told my neighbor that they have to build a fence over there, but it hasn’t been done yet.  Now, since I talked to the manager, things have actually gotten worse.  When I came home from school the other night my neighbors big black dog was in the yard unchained.  I sat in the car for a while, looking at it, because I’m afraid of dogs.  I finally, after 15 or so minutes, willed myself to get out of the car and trek the 10 or so yard to the house, when the dog ran at me.  I bolted for the house, dog barking at me the whole way.  I was scared out of my mind.  Then, when we came back from the grocery store the other day, that same damn dog was off his chain, in the yard, and tried to attack Matt.

Okay, so, I’m going to have to talk to the manager again, but I’m worried about doing so because he’s friends with the guy who lives over there.  Will it get worse?  When I come home will both of the big dogs be off the chain?  I don’t think I should have to sit in my damn drive way, too scared to go inside, because my neighbors dogs are loose and might attack me.  It’s ridiculous, I pay my rent and shouldn’t have to deal with this crap.  I told Matt he should go with me to discuss this with the manager, but he doesn’t seem particularly interested in doing so, so I’m going to have to go alone again and I don’t think it’s going to do much good.  For my part, I’ve resolved that next time this happens, next time I find myself sitting scared out of my mind in the drive way in 30 degree weather at 9:30 at night, all because my neighbors are jerks, I’m calling the cops and the humane society.  Animal control can come and take their flea bitten mutts away for all I care!!

It’s getting to be ridiculous!!  I’m going to go talk to the manager again tomorrow and hopefully something will get done.  I’m at the end of my rope with the jerks who live next door!!

Wow, is it really February 1st already?!  Time flies when you’re having fun, I suppose.

Anyway, I spent the afternoon reading the last 200 or so pages of Kushiel’s Avatar, the first book on my Busy Bookworm Challenge list for the year.  I know, I know, I’m just now finishing the first book!  Shame on me!!  In my defense, I can say only that it’s 750 pages and not a particularly quick read, and also that it’s not the only book I’ve finished this month (as in, January, not February, not yet!). I also read The Great Gatsby and The Complete Poems of Sappho.

Kushiel’s Avatar by Jacqueline Carey is Book 3 of the Kushiel’s Legacy series, preceded by Kushiel’s Dart and Kushiel’s Chosen, in that order.  For this reason, this review will be extremely thin on specifics, so as not to include spoilers that might ruin the books, Avatar included.

So then, first from Amazon:

“Terre d’Ange’s inhabitants are the descendants of angels, a race of breathtaking beauty whose highest law is Love as Thou Wilt. Extraordinarily skilled as a courtesan as well as in diplomacy and espionage, Phèdre nó Delaunay has risen to be a queen’s companion and peer of the realm…. Peace and her life were bought with the sacrifice of her friend Hyacinthe, who assumed an ancient, eternal contract as apprentice to the master of straights.  Phèdre [then] vowed to free him, and has finally discovered how. She must speak the true name of God, which will banish the embittered angel Rahab, who controls Hyacinthe’s fate.  To discover the true name, Phèdre journeys to distant lands and dangerous places…. For Phèdre is the only living anguisette, chosen by the god Kushiel to experience pain and pleasure as one, and to maintain divine balance in the world.  At the hands of the insane warlord[...], Phèdre learns what true horror is, nearly losing her soul to keep the covenant with Kushiel.  As her spirit and strength drain away, the love of her life, Josceline the Cassiline warrior priest, must stand by.  Carey’s lush, sensuous prose again makes her heroine’s story a savory feast for mind and heart.”

I chose this particular summary from Amazon, by way of Book List, because this one sums it all up without giving away too much.   A huge number of people who read this book enjoyed it, myself among them, though there are some reviewers (on Amazon, not professional reviewers) would have potential readers believe it’s filled with depravity when it certainly isn’t.  There is sex, and if that offends then this book (indeed, series) is not for you, and there is some element of torture but there isn’t anything too horrible or graphic that it can’t be taken in context.  I was certainly moved by the horror at times, but only when it was appropriate and not overly taken aback.  Amazon’s review calls this adult fantasy, which for me summons up images of romance, and though it’s not exactly that, this book was certainly not written for children.

The story is very tightly woven, with no discernible loose ends to be tied up.  Carey is meticulous in making sure that every thread is secured and follows through in a way that leaves readers satisfied.  Further, as the last book in the first trilogy of a series, it ties up not only it’s own loose ends, but all of the loose ends left as plot threads from the two previous books in the series.  I was left only with the grim satisfaction that always finds me at the conclusion of a really satisfying book/series.

It’s also of note, where this book and series are concerned, that the characters mature in such a way as to be believable and sympathetic.  I can see, quite clearly, every single character and how they interact.  The cast is somewhat large, but they’re vivid, each with his or her own personality and style.  And, so as not to get lost, there’s a “Dramatis Personae” in the beginning of the books that helps to keep everyone in perspective.  Although, it’s really difficult for me to say that having read about half of the “Wheel of Time” where there are droves and droves of characters to be followed.

Anyhow, after a bit of a lull where the second book in the series is concerned, this book reignites the spark kindled by Kushiel’s Dart (Book 1) and has left me wanting more.  Thankfully, there’s more to be had since there’s a second trilogy in the series!  Still, If I had to say anything was amiss with this book, I would say that at times it can be a bit melodramatic and that the story takes us so far away and to so many places it’s sometimes hard to know how they’ve gotten to where they are.  She follows the characters on their long trek across the world and, much to my chagrin, all the way back.  I felt a bit like she could have skipped the details, either coming or going, and not lost anything but pages for the mercy.  Ultimately, almost every scene added to the story in some meaningful way, making the excess in description tolerable and at times charming, especially with the inclusion of one Imriel de la Courcel, a Prince of the Blood, and a fantastically energetic young character.

Imriel is of particular note because, as it turns out, he is the narrator of the second trilogy of the Kushiel’s Legacy series.  Imriel, having grown by then to young adulthood, narrates books 4-6.  Of this, I was particularly wary as when I get attached to a narrator, I want to keep them!  I wasn’t sure how I would feel about the change, from Phèdre to Imriel, but having finished Avatar, I feel like I’m going to really enjoy the next 3 books.  I’m even wondering why I ever doubted it at all!  Besides, who can really resist a name like Imriel?!

So, there you have it and though I think this goes without saying, I highly recommend this series to everyone over the age of 18!  I loved it, it’s one of the most beautifully written trilogies I’ve read in a very long time.  Jacqueline Carey is amazing in her ability to form prose that make your heart ache for their beauty!  To say she’s eloquent seems an injustice, but will have to do.  I simply cannot wait to start the next book, and perhaps the next after that!

Now, I’m off to watch House and contemplate when I’ll be able to start the next book.  Hopefully, my next review won’t be nearly as long and rambling, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you!