Inkheart

by Cornelia Funke
translated by Althea Bell

Meggie and her bookbinder father live alone in a house crammed with books and the joy of reading.  When a mysterious visitor named Dustfinger arrives, calling Meggie’s father “Silvertongue,” Mo acts secretive and alarmed.  They take a trip to the house of a relative, Elinor, who is just as book mad as they are.  There, however, they are set upon by kidnappers who want a specific book, and Mo himself.  When they’re captured, Mo reveals his terrible secret.  When he reads aloud from books, he brings the characters to life, literally. Ten years previously, he read so lyrically from the book Inkheart that a pair of the book’s villains appeared in our world, while his wife was spirited into the book!  With some help from Dustfinger, who is by no means an ally but wholly self-interested, the three try desperately to work out a plan that will end the villain Capricorn’s reign of terror as well as get his wife back – a plan that depends on help from Inkheart’s own author.

I was not bowled over by this book.  It’s an interesting premise, even if it has been done before, but the book is overlong at 540 pages or so.  The characters are flat (the villains uninterestingly and thoroughly villainous; Meggie and her father are selfless and beatific), as well as obtuse, which I found irksome.  It’s absurd to think after you’ve been kidnapped from your own home by a mad, violent, powerful man who wants something from you, and then escaped, that you can simply meander back to that home with your ordeal over.  It’s downright stupid to think that situation can be resolved by talking. Some of the conceits of the plot are also a bit ridiculous: a normal, illiterate man from a magical but medieval world appearing here with nothing but the clothes on his back, somehow rising to become a crime lord?  And even established as he is in the story, Capricorn is the sort of tyrant who could be dealt with by two men with handguns; hardly an indefatigable enemy.  Finally, once the main conflict has been established, the book drags; the plot repeats itself and Funke takes a dreadfully long time to get to the real point of Capricorn’s plan, to unleash a murderous magical creature on this world.  For all that it is a love letter to classic children’s literature (Tinkerbell is appropriated as a minor character, as is a figure from The Thousand and One Nights), I found it more boring than engrossing.  I’d rather reread E. Nesbitt.


three stars

Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend

by Thomas Mann
1947
translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter

This 500-page tome is a dense, rich experience detailing the deterioration of Germany from a paragon of culture in the 19th century to a force-worshiping anathema by the ignominious end of WWII.  The narrator, Serenus, is a staid, conservative Catholic bourgeois, who worships his subject, the composer Adrian.  This latter is a Lutheran, possessed with musical genius and detached from the world after a sinful tryst.  Adrian's genius and madness parallel Germany's genius, its symbolic deal with the devil to exchange power for culture, and its fall.  Along the way, Mann expounds at length and at great detail about the state of religion, art, teaching, politics and class structure in modern Germany, explaining how men like Serenus could stand back and let the fatherland they worshiped become such an ugly beast.  This is one of the most difficult novels I have ever read, and I think I have a few problems with the translation, which is nonsensical at points, but it was all worth it.  The tale works on so many levels it's hard to connect them all; still, even as a tale, or even as commentary on the state of arts in war-torn Germany, it's fascinating. 

four stars