The Hunger Games afterthoughts

Can I takeback most of the things I said about The Hunger Games’ style being jarring toread? Well, it still is, a bit, in the first book, but it works for theadventure style of the book. I guess it also means I wasn’t prepared for howthe writing improves exponentially in Catching Fire and Mockingjay.

There’s onething that is obvious: Suzanne Collins can write action, and write it well. Onceshe gets started on the actions scenes you can’t put it down.

The thingabout book 2, Catching Fire, though, is that it’s part 1 of book 3, Mockingjay.Mockingjay picks up almost immediately after Catching Fire, so if you stopbetween the two books you basically want to kill yourself because it’s at acliffhanger. So in part, it’s somewhat like the literary version of the two partsof the Deathly Hallows movies – the first part is exposition and lead up to thesecond part. Of course the first part ends with the climax.

I’m going tohave to go back and reread both Catching Fire and Mockingjay in more detailsbecause I was skimming quite a bit just to get through the story last night butI have to say that I’m sufficiently speechless by the fact that Collins writesthree books and manages to build such a world and such a story that sucks you in but is still so disturbing all the time. (And then the United States starts to come up with the Internet censoring stuff and I do wonder whether it's the beginning of Panem, if not even Oceania.)

I stillthink the love triangle is weak but the good thing is that then it doesn’toverpower the rest of the story.

That said, rightnow I’m just floored by the last paragraph(s) of the series. It’s still thesame direct, rather blunt prose, but there’s so simply beautiful about it.

Peeta and Igrow back together. There are still moments when he clutches the back of achair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over. I wake screaming fromnightmares of mutts and lost children. But his arms are there to comfort me.And eventually his lips. On the night I feel that thing again, the hunger thatovertook me on the beach, I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale’sfire, kindled with rage and h`tred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I needis the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead ofdestruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses.That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.

So after,when he whispers, “You love me. Real or not real?”

I tell him,“Real.”

I’ll go offand search stuff about the movie now.

The Hunger Games - First book, first thoughts

The thing aboutme is that I have this weird compulsion to resist reading popular books justbecause everyone keeps telling me I should read them. That is, until somethingabout it just gets my curiosity up so much that I cave in and read them anyway. Currently I’m trying to not read the Millenium Triology, which probably meansthat at some point I’ll read them anyway.

It was likethat back in 7^th grade when my best friend carried Goblet of Fire around school for weeksand there was one guy in the class who was quite obsessed with the series and kepttalking about it. At that time, the school library also go the four (as wasthen available) books for the first time. Our school library was tiny and quitelimited and I probably was running out of things to read so I just rememberstarring at those four books, thinking, what the heck. I didn’t expect to getso sucked into it, because back then, honestly I was still reading Sweet Valley and Baby Sitters Club. The idea of a book about wizards and boys didn’t’exactly appeal to me. But I digress.

With Twilight, it was a different story.Facebook had come into play by then and too many people I know were havingTwilight-related statuses, but at the same time I’m hearing a fair amount ofcriticism for it.  So I read it just tosee what on earth people were complaining about. And apparently people whocomplain have a point. I’ve probably raged and ranted more about Twilight thanis healthy but I still can’t get over how much I hate Bella Swan. But Idigress, again.

Anyway, thepoint is, I’ve been seeing The HungerGames everywhere lately and people keep saying oh, it’s the next Harry Potter/Twilight and quite frankly,after hearing Twilight being described as “the next Harry Potter” and the disappointment that that resulted in, I’mtaking this claim with a fairly large grain of salt. I wasn’t planning to readit, even. It’s dystopian fiction – that much I knew - not my favourite genre,and I was forced into too much of that in school already. Then the movietrailer came out and Josh Hutcherson just looks so good that I ended up reading the first book of the triology.

I’ll saythis much first: it’s addictive and a page-turner which was why I didn’t get tosleep until 1am last night and spent about fifteen minutes contemplatingcalling in sick to work this morning because I was sleep-deprived and (moreimportantly :P) I wanted to keep on reading the second book – Catching Fire. But I didn’t.

I guess youcould call it 1984 for teenagers. I reallylove the world that Suzanne Collins built up, the premise of the Hunger Games,and how it reflects reality TV in the modern world. I don’t watch a whole loadof reality TV shows, because all the drama and backstabbing and crying justseem rather fake to me. I watch American Idol sporadically, only ever managedto get through Junior MasterChef because it’s so much less stress than theadult version and the only cycle of America’s Next Top Model I got through wasarguably the least dramatic – Cycle 13.  TheHunger Games basically just encompasses all that I feel about reality TV – the pointlessness,the drama, the babarism, and sense of so-what – and takes it all up a notch (orseveral notches).

I like that Collinsdoesn’t shy away from the truth of the matter – that the games forces teenagersto kill each other, and while survival instincts allow them to kill, it doesn’tever become ok, that you can be haunted forever. I like the ideas how “allies”can turn against each other when enemies are all eliminated, because it is afight to the death. I like the social commentary on the power of the state,freedom and poverty – which, let’s face it, are timeless themes.

I like theuniverse, the world building and the entire idea of the Hunger Games. It’s realand gritty and makes for an exciting story. The Games both simultaneously makes you want to just keep on reading, feeling disgusted if you think that this could happen in the real world, but at the same time you do have to get excited with all the suspense. That’s what was keeping me turningthe pages.

I love the fact that even in this life or death situation where you literally have to kill everyone to survive, Katniss still finds someone to care about - Rue. The relationship between Katniss and Rue is just heart-wrenching because you know it can't last, you know Rue will die, but the manner of death was just heartbreaking. Rue's death coupled with Katniss' first direct kill marks the loss of innocence (if you could even call Katniss innocent in the first place) for the character and it's the best chapter in the book, both in terms of writing and content. 

I’m not inlove with Katniss, the main character yet after a third of the series, but sheis a pretty fleshed out character. She is capable and cunning, and no fuss ismade about that, she’s not expected to lean on anyone to survive just becauseshe’s a girl. She’s got compassion and capable of cowardice, hatred and andguilt, which gives her depth. As far as character, even more, a femalecharacter, go, I don’t have that much to complain about. I just am at a placewhere I don’t really click with her just yet.  

What bugs meabout this book is the love-triangle-that-isn’t.

First off,Gale doesn’t make much of an impression on me, except that he’s a good guy, hecares for his family and he’s friends with Katniss and seems to have a crush onher. I guess, the book goes so straight into the Hunger Games – which Gale isnot a part of – that I don’t really get the idea that I’m supposed to care thatGale likes Katniss and how that’s going to affect her relationship with Peeta.

On the otherhand, Peeta is a saint. He’s kind, he’s caring, he’s patient, he’s wonderfuland totally in love with Katniss, and he’s the kind of guy that I wonder whyanyone would not want.  He’s bordering ona Gary Stu but without the annoying traits. Actually, the lack of bad traits(so far) from Peeta  could be kind ofjarring if I let myself get too into it, but I genuinely want to like Peeta,and the author’s making it so damn easy to like him.  

So I’m readingand wondering, not why Katniss is in a conflict between Peeta and Gale, but whythe author even bothers trying to paint up this love triangle. It’s kind ofobvious that Peeta has the upper hand here: the book is in first person, andKatniss is in the Hunger Games with Peeta while Gale is not. It means thatafter the first three chapters, Gale disappears off the face of the book,except in Katniss’ brief flashbacks, while Peeta is always there. Constantly.She’s supposed to kill Peeta. You get the idea that, after all the backstory andwonderful-boy-too-good-to-be-true  scenariothe author builds up, either he’ll die tragically, or that he won’t die somehowand Katniss and he will end up together.

But I guessit’s not fatal (yet) – I’m just wondering how much this triangle will play upin the second book, and the third, when Gale would probably appear more often.I just hate the idea that the triangle that everyone knows the end of mightsomehow end up shadowing the story, which is good.

The story isgood, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the writing is stellar. And this writingisn’t stellar. It’s not Twilight-quality, certainly, but it can be quite uncomfortableto read. I get the feeling that the author lacks finesse and subtlety,everything is stated out in the open, with comparisons between past and presentevents made too directly. It just feels like a whole load of telling in themost direct way possible. It doesn’t exactly lack poetry, the author can putout nice turns of phrase in certain places, but overall the writing approach isjust heads-on.

Though, now that I think about it, to be totally fair, the choppy, heads-on, blunt style of writing does work better in the Games where things are happening in the moment, people are dying in the moment. I guess Katniss has to be blunt there to get the narration across and it does create the mood for the Games. Still, it can be quite bumpy to read.

Then again,as I said, the story overall is good, so I can say that while I’m not overlyawed by The Hunger Games, I’m not disappointed that I read it. The story drawsyou in enough so that you keep reading despite the occasional bumps with thewriting style. I’m looking forward to getting more into this world with thenext books.   

I suppose the moral of the story is don't judge a book by its title?

I spent the months of March, April, May wrestling with a book that will be my horror until the end of time.

Consumer.ology by Philip Graves.

I think I was fooled by its funky title when I agreed to translate it. (I was also fooled by the purple prose. I think when I read it before I accepted it, I was reading it on autopilot mode, so the book superficially appeared to be interesting.) I regretted it for a whole three months.

The book on the surface was supposed to be about consumer behaviour, which to be honest wasn't a subject that came to me easily when I did it at university. I actually got a decent mark in it but it was hard. But I thought I'd at least have some background on it and would be able to do it, though it might be a little harder than Brand New World.

Oh boy, I was wrong. The basic gist of the book is: market research is popular, but it doesn't work, because people don't know what they want and they say one thing but want something else. Sounded simple enough, except that the book was laced with about 80% pure, academic psychology, which, let's just say, I don't have enough background to even understand in English. But that actually wasn't the problem.

The problem was that this book just read like a very, very long piece of discouragement. The author went on and on and on about how market research is faulty, lists reasons a, b, c about why market research is terrible, based on these x, y, z theories of psychology, but doesn't tell you what the alternative to it is. It was extremely repetitive, like someone took a hammer and was beating the message into my head. There came a point in the book where I literally banged my head down on the keyboard and wanted to scream, "Fine, I get it, market research sucks! Now tell me what to do differently!"

And I've finished the book, but I still don't know what the alternative is.

Actually, no, I do. The author says that instead of asking people (market research) what they want, you should see (observe) what people do and base your market decisions on that. Except that when he finally got to this alternative method, it was like he ran out of steam, having spent 200 pages talking about how faulty the talking method is. So he sort of waffles through a couple of examples of the observation method and say that this is the best method.

Except I have a feeling the author rather misses the point of the whole concept of market research in the first place. He defines market research (very narrowly) as going around talking to people and having people telling you what they want. Then he spends the whole book shooting it down, saying this is horrible. Yet his alternative is just another aspect of market research. I thought the idea was rather obvious. Of course you can't base your decisions on what people say alone, you have to observe what they do.

I don't think any undergrad student who took MARK2012 (Marketing Research) at my university really thought that the company we did our research project for should definitely sell rainbow lollies because a bunch of UNSW students who came to our focus groups say so. Even applied to real life, isn't it rather obvious that yes, people do change their mind, and yes, if people are in a focus group being filmed, they're going to act not themselves, so you shouldn't take everything they say at face value? (That's his entire argument against market research, basically.)

So I guess in the end, I just don't know what the point of the book was. It was rather like proving the obvious, yet in a very long-winded, discouraging, repetitive manner.

It didn't help the translation process that I wasn't convinced by many of the author's arguments in the first place, and his writing style was...weird. It was like reading an academic piece of Conrad (I can't stand Joseph Conrad's writing style.) My editor wasn't too fond of this book either so I'm not sure what state it will be in when it finally hit the printers. I have a feeling it'll be a lot shorter.

PS: I have absolutely no idea why my ISP has decided to block the domain blogspot.com. I have to use a proxy to actually view blogspot. How fun.

I'm going to be published!

Well, not really me, per se.

So last year, a friend introduced me to a book editor at a publishing house in Ho Chi Minh City and the editor asked me to translate a book for them from English to Vietnamese. The book? Brand New World by Max Lenderman.

Whilst it is a very very interesting book about marketing in BRIC countries, this post is more to talk about the art of translation in general.

I have just received the final edit of the translated book and it's due to be published at the end of this month. Let me tell you, there's something about seeing your name on a book, even as just the translator, that is just...I can't describe it. I was literally jumping up and down. Thankfully I took the day off and wasn't at work because I wouldn't be able to concentrate on work after receiving that. (My taking two days off work had nothing to do with the book).

Of course I knew that it was going to be published sooner or later (they paid me, after all) and that I translated it, but it wasn't until you see the actual page, with the book's name and your name on the same page, that it really starts to sink it. I can't wait to have the actual book in my hand though.

Frontispiece

Anyway, I'm looking at the pdf of this book. It's 328 pages in full, with cover pages and end notes which I did not translate, but for this book I did translate about 280 pages, which now when I'm looking at all of it one place, I'm sort of in disbelief. I'm even more in disbelief reading back at it, because I don't remember writing any of these words but nonetheless, the words are here on the page. The unfamiliarness wasn't due to the edits, most of it was actually my words when I compared to my manuscript. I swear I'm reading it, and the first chapter sounds familiar but that's because I agonised so much over it but then as I go on, I start reading it as if a book someone else had written and translated, that I was reading this for the first time. Which is weird because at the back of my mind I knew I translated it but it doesn't feel like it. I think it's partly because the actual original words and the ideas behind the words weren't mine to begin with, so it doesn't feel I'm reading myself.

The only problem with actually having translated a book is that for a while you go a bit funny and read everything with the intent to translate it. I was reading a translation of Eat, Pray, Love and I kept translating it back into English from Vietnamese. But that's partly because the translation wasn't that great to begin with and it distracted me (I don't mean I am by any means a perfect translator, but this particular translation of Eat, Pray, Love wasn't to my style. Then again maybe that's just the original book itself). Then I watched the movie and was bored and so right now it doesn't look like I'm going to be finishing the book.

Back to translation. Now that I look back at it, my whole "career" in translation is rather scary, mostly because I'm totally making things up as I go and I'm not remotely qualified to do it; I still feel like I have no business translating a book that is going to actually be published. The most obvious reason for that is that my Vietnamese isn't even that good to begin with. I went to Vietnamese school for exactly 3 years of my life and the rest of it was spent in English-speaking schools and university with very limited expose to learning Vietnamese as a language. My grasp of vocabulary is woefully limited and when it comes to marketing lingo? I swear I looked up every single marketing term on the internet for the Vietnamese translation. And yet it was because I had so lost touch with Vietnamese in my education that prompted me to get into translation in the first place.

It started when in my first year of university in Australia, having too much time on my hand and in an environment with too little opportunity to use Vietnamese and I was afraid that after three years here, my Vietnamese would be even worst than it already it. At the time, for reasons now unknown to me, I was member of an online forum about movies and they were starting a group who would translate movie news from English into Vietnamese. I joined. I totally didn't intend to stay there for the whole three years of university. The circumstances in which I left the group and the forum wasn't the most...cordial, shall we say, but looking back, I can't help but be grateful for that time because as useless as it sounded, spending all that time online, I learned so much and met some people who are now really close friends (including said friend who introduced me to said book editor who offered me said book :P). So yes, I went to translating gossip news about Lindsay Lohan's DUI cases to translating a book, but hey, you had to start somewhere, right?