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"Sometimes we don’t pick the books we read; they pick us."
Wicked- The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
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Wicked- The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
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5 journalers for this copy...
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Received by mail today...Next up to be read.
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If you’re expecting to meet the characters and places you know and love from L. Frank Baum’s book—or from the movie—please revise your expectations. Yes, Dorothy, there is a Wizard, but he’s totally different from the one you’ve met. And Oz is a troubled land. In Maguire’s version of Oz, everything is turned upside down. This isn’t a bad thing, and the book is very good. But I think you’ll enjoy it more if you don’t expect the story to be just the Witch’s take on Baum’s story. Once I stopped spluttering, “But that’s—that’s—that’s not what Oz was like,” I was much happier. And the poor Witch…Baum’s Witch might have been wicked. Maguire’s Witch, Elphaba, is just afflicted by everyone’s expectations of who and what she is; even her own expectations are a bit too much for her to deal with. She’s unforgiving of herself and of the people she loves, of the people she believes have failed her, and of the people she thinks she’s failed. The first three quarters of the book sets up the part of the story we know—or think we know. Except for one brief scene that foreshadows what is to come, Dorothy doesn’t…um…drop in until page 331: _____Afterward, there was a lot of discussion about what people had thought it was. The noise had seemed to come from all corners of the sky at once. _____Journalists, armed with the thesaurus and apocalyptic scriptures, fumbled and were defeated by it. “A gulfy deliquescence of deranged and harnessed air” … “A volcano of the invisible, darkly construed” … _____To the pleasure faithers with tiktok affections, it was the sound of clockworks uncoiling their springs and running down at a terrible speed. It was the release of vengeful energy. _____To the essentialists, it seemed as if the world had suddenly found itself too crammed with life, with cells splitting by the billions, molecules uncoupling to annihilation, atoms shuddering and juggernauting in their castings. _____To the superstitious it was the collapsing of time. It was the oozing of the ills of the world into one crepuscular muscle, intent on stabbing the world to its core for once and for all. _____To the more traditionally religious it was the blitzkrieg of vengeful angel armies, the awful name of the Unnamed God sounding itself at last—surprise—and the evaporation of all hopes for mercy. _____One or two pretended to think it was squadrons of flying dragons overhead, trained for attack, breaking the sky from its moorings by the thrash of tripartite wings. _____In the wake of the destruction it caused, no one had the hubris or courage (or the prior experience) to lie and claim to have known the act of terror for what it was: a wind twisted up in a vertical braid. _____In short: a tornado. |
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The book went out in the mail (media rate) today to Humberts-doll.Folks--be advised. The book weighs more than one pound and you'll have to deliver it to the post office. Due to postal security concerns, you can't just drop it in a mailbox or leave it for your carrier to pick up...unless your carrier's a real sweetie, like mine is (but if he gets in trouble with his boss, the package may come back here for me to take to the post office myself). |
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