Octopus’ Garden

Date: 2010.07.11 | Category: Books, Movies | Tags:

The World Cup is finally over, and forget about the games — there was no better story than the amazing tale of Paul the Octopus, who correctly predicted the outcome of every match. Can he also play the vuvuzela?

Back in March, I mentioned that I was going to skip reading The Girl Who Played With Fire and just wait for the movie to come out. It finally made it to our shores this weekend, and was another fast-paced adventure featuring the ultimate Lisbeth Salander, Noomi Rapace. (Carey Mulligan and Kristen Stewart have both been rumored for the U.S. remake.) I didn’t know much about the plot, having skipped reviews to avoid spoilers, but I do remember reading somewhere that Lisbeth gets a boob job. Luckily, that is not the case here. There’s no reason Rapace, who appears topless in this film (and is obviously un-augmented), should have to go that far for a role.

I don’t want to ruin any surprises, so I’ll just say that there were some gasp-worthy revelations about Lisbeth’s past. Unlike “Dragon Tattoo,” which gave more screen time to crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), this is definitely Salander’s film, and she does everything you want to see her do — Taser bad guys, hack into computers, ride a motorcycle, slink around in various disguises, and just generally be a bad-ass. Awful things do happen to her, but nothing in this film is as horrifying as what takes place in “Dragon Tattoo.” Even when she’s in mortal danger, well, we know that Episode #3 — “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” — will be out next month. “Fire” is “The Empire Strikes Back” of Scandinavian thrillers.

In my month-long effort to read literary, non-mystery fiction, I just finished up John McNally’s After the Workshop, which is in one of my favorite subgenres: fiction about fiction-writing (see also: Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, Steve Hely’s How I Became a Famous Novelist). McNally, like his protagonist Jack Sheahan, is a graduate of the famed Iowa Writers Workshop, and a former literary escort — the guy who drives authors who are on a book tour around the city, taking them to signings and lectures. Jack published a story in the New Yorker years ago and has suffered from a mondo case of writers’ block ever since. In Workshop, everything that could go wrong does go wrong for Jack: one of his authors goes missing, his car is breaking down, he has an ill-advised fling with his ex-fiancee, and another writer comes to town intent on stealing the manuscript of Jack’s unfinished novel. Throw in a naked neighbor, a crazy publicist, and a couple of alpha-male novelists who remind Jack of his unrealized potential. Over the top? Yes, but anyone who’s ever spent time in the world of authors and publishing will be able to relate.

After the Workshop is at its heart a book about a guy who is stuck in a life he never envisioned for himself — and you don’t have to be a member of the literati to sympathize. Still, to show how inside-baseball After the Workshop can be, I got the biggest chuckle out of a bit where Jack is browsing through literary magazines in a bookstore. “I always made a point to pull one out and look it over, but I never recognized anyone anymore, except for Stephen Dixon, whose work appeared in every third magazine on the shelf, and other than examining the quality of the paper, the readability of the font, or the texture of its cover, I never actually read any of the work itself. I might as well have been studying an arrowhead or a piece of primitive pottery.”

Stephen Dixon was my writing professor at Johns Hopkins, and is known for being incredibly prolific. I last saw Dixon several years ago at an alumni event in San Francisco. I had done well in his classes and he remembered me, which was nice. After the Workshop serves as a reminder, as if I needed one, why I was wise to choose a non-literary career path.