Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason

Books read: 12. Books blogged: 11 (Yessss! Getting closer!). Valentines day’s ruined by infectious disease: 1. No. of bottles of Gatorade drunk in past 24 hours: 1. No. of bottles of Gatorade kept in stomach in past 24 hours: approx. 1/2 (bumpy start, but we’re getting there…)

Hurray! Another funny book! I love Helen Fielding, love love love. Her style is so unique, and Bridget Jones is such a great character. The movies, though equally entertaining and ultimately warm-fuzzy-inducing, are completely different from the books which basically amounts (for me, at least) to a double dose of awesome Bridgetness! It’s like the Sookie Stackhouse books and “Trueblood,” two works of serial entertainment that are similar enough to be connected but otherwise inhabit their own separate spheres. However, Bridget Jones is not really anything like the Sookie Stackhouse novels, other than the obvious fact that both are about blond women and are humorous.

The sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason is just as delightful as the first novel, but with a bit more serious undertones. Bridget and Mark Darcy are a couple, and Bridget is happier than she has ever been except for the intrusions of the bitchy and conniving Rebecca Gillis, who tries to make Mark break up with Bridget at go out with her. Bridget gets super insecure and the couple break up, then tries to make over her life so that she can learn to be fulfilled without a man in her life… because, surely, that is when she will find true love and have a man in her life. The whole book is like holding a mirror up to the attitude of single women today. Girls and young women feel this desperate need to be a part of a couple, and if they do decide they are fine on their own it is part of a plan to make themselves more desirable to men.

Bridget Jones embodies so many of the feminine rituals I don’t particularly enjoy participating in; at one point she draws a hilarious portrait of what she expects she would look like were she to “allow her body to revert back to nature,” and go without the regular shaving, waxing, plucking, straightening, tanning, polishing, whitening, painting, dieting, exercising etc. Bridget also obsessively reads self-help books to improve her love life, and in the end discovers that the various labyrinthine rules and guidelines supplied by such works as Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus are what contributed to the end of her relationship in the first place.

I think this is a really important message, and it is relayed in one of the best possible ways. Because Bridget learns these lessons through hilarious trial and error, the reader learns along with her and laughs all the way. This obsession with dating, especially the obsession with dating and marriage being the only way one can find true happiness or self-worth, is poisonous and rampant. And, unfortunately, it’s mostly only women who suffer from it. Men tend not to really care because they aren’t governed by the same absurd social rules women are. Do they feel pressured to do any of the things we are supposed to accept without complaint (IE waxing, tanning, makeup, lifelong dieting, etc)? Am I saying that this is because the world is run by men and they order us to do these things while they run around thinking they are perfect just the way nature made them? No, in fact I think women do this to one another. Helen Fielding, I think, would agree with me, because it seems to be the way she shaped the world in which Bridget lives. She and her friends sit around worrying over outfits and behavior, and in the meantime Mark Darcy has no idea any of this is happening for his benefit.

Anyways, I don’t really know what to say about this book other than I laughed heartily, and enjoyed every moment of it. The epistolary style, while not in any way new, is re-vamped by Fielding to incorporate more modern language, shorthand, and the fact that the narrator is also the narratee, and therefore it has a more candid, vulnerable feel than some of the more famous works which were written as letters or diary’s meant to be read by outsiders. For instance, Dracula may be a novel composed of letters and journal entries, but it is bound together to tell a story and meant, by the characters who write it, to be read by others. However, Bridget does not intend for anyone but herself to ever read her diary, and therefore it is more similar in fact to religious journals, or some of the early American novels meant to resemble them. I think that the combination of a style that resembles a journal regarding spiritual growth, and a contemporary, rather shallow context, makes for unavoidable humor. I love Bridget because her diary is like so many of my own. I learn lessons, write them out, and vow never to make the same mistake twice, and the next thing I know I’m knee deep in the same crap that taught me said valuable lesson.

Anywho, I apologize for the shortness of this blog post, but my head hurts and I think I need to go back to sleep and get rid of this virus once and for all. Tomorrow, my ever-so-late Valentine’s blog of Necklace of Kisses.

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather

Ok, am complete failure at blogging. No picture this time, because all I really care about at this moment is getting caught up with posts. Plus I couldn’t really think of anything clever to correspond with this awesome novel.

I have been sick for the past few days, home from work and not fully conscious and everything. This bug that I’ve got is pretty miserable, and today is the first day I have felt like I may not die, and have been conscious enough to start to get stir crazy. I literally have done nothing but sleep, be sick, and watch TV for days. Unfortunately, this might be a shorter post than usual because of the blinding headaches that have been coming and going since the onset of this illness. So please, bear with me if it’s not exactly up to par.

Right. The Godfather. I don’t know if this is because of the male driven attitude of the entertainment industry, or because I have three older brothers, or because I’m just not all that girly in some respects, but I have always preferred more masculine movies over the girly ones. I mean, I love a chick flick (particularly a funny one), don’t get me wrong, but if I were to make a list of my favorite movies, I’m guessing there would be far fewer “chick flicks” on it than more gender neutral or masculine ones. Heck, even some of the chick flicks I love are intended for a male gaze (you know the ones, where all of the female characters are gorgeous and sexy and flawless, and the men may or may not be particularly good looking, and for the most part the major plot points are all about who she is going to sleep with), but I digress. My favorite movies are, hands down, “The Godfather,” “The Godfather Part II,” and “Tombstone.” All manly movies. The novel that “The Godfather” was adapted from is fan-freaking-tastic!

Perhaps it’s because of the way they were written, but whether this is so or not, I identified much more strongly with the male characters than the female ones. I think Francis Ford Coppola (and the actors who played them) did a good job of making the female characters in the film more 3 dimensional and… well… human, than they were in the novels. For the most part, the main female characters were not only flat, but almost animalistic in their sex-and-reproduction-driven attitudes, their desperation for copulation and lack of interest in much else. Now, I feel like I’m misrepresenting myself here starting off saying that this is a fantastic novel, and then saying that Puzo paints obscene pictures of the main female characters in said novel. Let’s get a couple of things straight: I’m an unabashed feminist. I hate the way women are portrayed in the media, the whole Madonna/Whore thing. And yes, after I thought about it for awhile and mentally compared the book to the film, in hindsight Puzo’s female characters border on the grotesque. However, my point is this: while I was reading the novel, I didn’t even notice that fact. He writes the male characters so well, that you don’t really even think too much of the women. Maybe I’m being harsh, maybe it wasn’t even a purposeful portrayal but an accident because Puzo himself can’t much identify with women and thinks of them only as sexy men? Who knows.

It disturbed me when I thought about how inhuman they seem, though they are at the same time quite literally the soul of the cast of characters. What a double standard! But then, thinking back on my response to the story while reading it, I genuinely enjoyed it and allowed myself to be taken along for the ride, which is kind of the point of reading a novel, isn’t it? If that’s so, then Puzo wrote a magnificent novel! I really identified with the main characters, found myself feeling satisfied at the end when the grand coup was accomplished and Michael Corleone emerged victorious, and also envied these characters their ability to act on their primal animal instincts. After all, who hasn’t encountered someone in whose bed they wanted to leave a dead horse’s head?

What I really liked about the novel was how thought provoking it was. This is something that doesn’t really come across that well in the movies, and it’s one of the main reasons why these actions that are so disturbing are at once so satisfying. The very heart of the story lies in an anecdote told at right about the midpoint of the book, in which a young man from one of the main “families” decides to refuse to have any part in the family business and instead goes to college and law school. He eschews all support from the family, racks up debt, works in a dead-end job for years because that’s how you work your way up in law, and eventually is a patsy in a fraud scheme. He tries so hard to avoid this life of crime, and he is screwed over completely, leaving his family (wife and kids family, not “family”) without a bread winner. The question that is posed here (most bluntly, but also more subtly throughout the text) is what can America really do for you? Indeed, what good does it do to do everything right when the legal system, the justice system, the economy, etc. can all be bought by crooks? The poor guy would have been better off putting his law degree to use in the family business, but he didn’t know that. In the end, it all comes down to who you know, and who knows you. That’s true in everything, especially in times like these — getting a job, getting into a good school, getting that loan at the bank — it all depends on who you know. What a depressing thing to think about. However, in Michael Corleone’s world, justice is swift and thorough.

And next, something completely different (which I enjoyed thoroughly, though it is undeniably girly), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.