[Sinisdar Toste]

no that was like, the ilgres barghast i think

This post has been edited by Sinisdar Toste: 04 March 2010 - 09:51 PM

[foolio]

Quote

Btw, does anyone else take it that there are (were) the White Face Barghast clans, and then there are OTHER groups of Barghast clans back on Genabackis. meaning the White Face are not the entirety of the Barghast race/people, are they?

- Abyss, barghasteologist

Do the Moranth count?

[D'rek]

Ilgres is one of the clans of the White Fact Barghast nation. The Ilgres was the main clan allied with Brood back in MoI, but there were other Barghast fighting in the war, including some on the Malazan side. Thing is, none of them are ever referenced as a seperate nation other than the White Face (and the conflict between the un-unified clans in MoI would surely be enough to explain them fighting on opposing sides). It may well be simply that the Genebackan Barghast were all part of the White Face since they remembered the existance of other Barghast (culturally through legends, not personally) that settled elsewhere on other continents. Since they were sea-based for so long it'd make sense to me, fleets easily get split up in storms and whatnot. Heck, maybe there are no other Barghast anywhere else but they called themselves the White Face because they were hopeful that there were...

[worry]

Such an optimistic group, the Barghast! We could really learn a lot from them.

[Bole]

I read this book some time back but i agree with you that The Bonehunters is not Eriksons best work. i know its difficult maintaning the high standard he has set for himself. i found Adjunct Tavore really annoying and boring. just finished reading TTH and i must say that it was an amazing book

[Fox]

Bole, on 05 March 2010 - 09:54 PM, said:

I read this book some time back but i agree with you that The Bonehunters is not Eriksons best work. i know its difficult maintaning the high standard he has set for himself. i found Adjunct Tavore really annoying and boring. just finished reading TTH and i must say that it was an amazing book

Did you mean Dust of Dreams is not Erikson's best work? Because this is the Dust of Dreams section.

and I agree with you, I thought TtH was amazing too!

[Panador]

I haven't actually finished DoD yet so I haven't read the thread other than some parts in OP's post.

I have to agree with the part about the children snake though. I skipped whole sections there, I just didn't like that part of the story, I only skimmed over it to see if there's anything else than "we're hungry, she tells poems, she's got flies on her lips, Rutt holds Held, Badalle does not like Brayderal etc.".
The sad thing is, I know or rather suspect that those parts are important, that they are related to Kolanse (they ain't related to anything else so they sure as hell better be relevant for that...) so I know that I should read them but I just can't bring myself to do it... they are just so boring and interesting and we know virtually nothing about those characters or where they come from and why the hell we should care.

I also did not like the ... narrator parts in Toll The Hounds, the ie. flying through Darujhistan and narrating what is happening here and what is happening there, without any actual actors in this part. Just third-person observations.
That's actually one of the parts about Malazan I don't like or rather got problems with. Pretty much every on of the first 5 books or so starts with a new set of characters which we're just confronted with. We know nothing about them or their location or anything at all that's relevant to this new set of circumstances. It was this way with Gotm and every one that followed. Everytime I started a new one of the books I had real trouble getting into the characters. It always worked out and I usually ended up loving the characters.
But this snake part just feels like this first, tedious part of the books over and over again.

ASoIaF also had this 'plunging into a new environment' but somehow Martin pulled it better of than Erikson, I never felt quite as lost there.

Just an example, it's that way for pretty much every Malazan book: At the beginning I read 3 pages here, 10 pages there, 5 pages here. The farther along I get the more pages I read at a time because I get more invested in the story until, usually near the end, the last couple hundred pages I just can't stop, I actually read through a couple nights everytime I finished on of the books, I just couldn't stop, it was so good. But it was never this way at the beginning of the book.

[amphibian]

Panador, on 08 March 2010 - 04:56 PM, said:

The farther along I get the more pages I read at a time because I get more invested in the story until, usually near the end, the last couple hundred pages I just can't stop, I actually read through a couple nights everytime I finished on of the books, I just couldn't stop, it was so good. But it was never this way at the beginning of the book.

You are going to be flipping the pages like a deranged addict at the end of this book if that has been your previous pattern. It ends FAST.

[Panador]

Yeah, just finished it last night, when I read about it ending in a cliffhanger I expected something different, although, I guess not knowing whether anyone from the Bonehunters is still alive qualifies as a cliffhanger i guess. ^^
Damn, did not see that coming though... How will he end the series with The Crippled God?? The Bonehunters haven't even got close to doing what they actually wanted to do and they've been pretty much annihilated already along with their allies. While nothing has actually happened in the overall storyline so far. The Crippled God is nowhere near being defeated/saved/whatever, all this stuff about Edgewalker, Telorast&Curdle, the stuff happening in the Realm of Hood, the Malazan Empire going down the drain etc. sooo much stuff hanging in the air... and SE wants to end it next book? That's either gonna be disappointing or the thickest book I've seen yet. Oo

This post has been edited by Panador: 09 March 2010 - 11:28 AM

[SonOfDarkness]

Reading the snake almost made me Dragnipur myself.

I have a feeling it was a necessary evil.

SE is a genius in my mind and so far he has not let us down. I dont beleive that he would put anything in the book that he didnt deem necessary.

All of the eye gouging scenes of the Snake and Barghast and even the Squad PoVs will come into fruition in the last book i am certain of this.

A good book, He was being as gentle as he could possibly be, while believing in the readers to just read.

This post has been edited by SonOfDarkness: 18 March 2010 - 10:17 PM

[globish rip]

god this book was so pompous and overwritten. kinda interesting reading this thread because i was weirdly infuriated with the book & forced myself to finish it & im still not certain why i found it compelling enough to torture myself reading it. i guess beyond the basic emotional investment of having read the other like 10 books erikson is p obv a thoughtful & ambitious dude & as a genre partisan im delighted at having someone attempt meaningful "big-idea" epic fantasy novels.

but - & i guess this a part of longer argument - i think this book is sort of a nadir in the series ethically. feel like erkisons's misberalist nihlism is going p much unredeemed at this point & all the moments are pitched at such an overwrought nonsensical tone that they become farce. like so many of the character vingettes felt redudant both structurally & philosophically. & sort of hateful and bathetic and just too much. like the only character that felt even real to me was the genuinely terrible barghast women. sure she was greedy & cruel but that felt honest whereas so much of the hard truths 4 u last of the mohicans garbage was shallow & unconsidered.

also a really basic level this book was poorly constructed & ugly. overlong redudant sentences lots of dissonant adjectives. also kind of shitty pacing v v slow to start & then sudden in its fury. he often switched povs/storylines in jarring ways. assuming this ugly bludgeoning quality was intentional not really sure what/how much it achieved.

[Illuyankas]

Well, of course the pacing is off, it's the first half of a novel that's been cut in two. Considering he warned us about everything happening at half the pace, I'm not that worried about it.

Also this is going to come across as all 'why don't you write proper before you criticise Lord Erikson, ahurr' but I have no idea what misberalist means, and I feel using v, p, u and 4 style shorthand stuff detracts from your argument. Or in other, less tactful words, fuck textspeak, use English.

[worry]

I don't want to convince you to change your opinion, cuz it is what it is, but I would suggest that reading any of the MBotF as miserablist, nihilistic, hateful, or even particularly mean-spirited is completely missing the mark. If anything, SE depicts life as hard because it is, he depicts some people as making life even harder than it has to be because that happens, and he depicts moments of such beauty and heroism that they redeem much of the petty evils that plague humanity because these moments exist, these heroes exist. I am entirely grateful that SE manages all this without some chosen one who must make some epic sacrifice to redeem everybody else. And he eschews the crutch of predestination while understanding how the past catches up with the present eventually. But there's nothing that suggests his worldview (even on this fictional world) is devoid of empathy, and in fact the opposite is pretty clearly true.

Stylistically, nothing about the architecture of this book makes it a misfit with the others. He's always experimenting with the form of the novel, book to book (Karsa's book, Midnight Tides) or chapter to chapter (Y'Ghatan, Kruppe's narration), but it's all ultimately SE's voice. So while nobody has to like his style, Book 9 isn't some crazy departure from the previous eight.

[HoosierDaddy]

eng lng rip, on 18 March 2010 - 11:26 PM, said:

....
but - & i guess this a part of longer argument - i think this book is sort of a nadir in the series ethically. feel like erkisons's misberalist nihlism is going p much unredeemed at this point & all the moments are pitched at such an overwrought nonsensical tone that they become farce. like so many of the character vingettes felt redudant both structurally & philosophically. & sort of hateful and bathetic and just too much. like the only character that felt even real to me was the genuinely terrible barghast women. sure she was greedy & cruel but that felt honest whereas so much of the hard truths 4 u last of the mohicans garbage was shallow & unconsidered.
....

Despair and misery was very much the overall feel of the book. And it is going to contrast greatly with this:

Quote

blackzoid : Posted 07 September 2009 - 10:30 PM
One of DoD's themes was the folly of hanging onto past traditions and the theme of Toll The Hounds was death and redemption. So can we ask SE what the theme of The Crippled God will be about?

SE: A: Heroism.

From the SE answers some questions thread.

[globish rip]

But there's nothing that suggests his worldview (even on this fictional world) is devoid of empathy, and in fact the opposite is pretty clearly true.

yah theres p much 0 empathy in his depiction of the power-hungry barghast woman. i mean theres a lack of self-absorbed wallowing in her pov that gives her character a clarity and honesty that i half-admired like yeah being rich and powerful is rad so f the haters, get rich & powerful - but theres not a lot of nuance or generosity in her depiction. the later novels often use these kind of spiteful caricatures to give storylines form & motive. some of the lether industrialists, laseen (sort of), each of the last few books has had at least one of these.

anyway we probably differ in that erikson isnt really portraying life or ppl to me theres an alienation of affect happening on a couple of levels in the last few books & partic in dust of dreams. also your defense kinda hinges on erkison functioning as a realist (this happens because thats just how it is) & i mean, hes not. & his works dont f(n) in realist/realistic ways. also & most importantly empathy in this context depends on the author having individualized his characters with a level of "personhood" that erkison doesnt achieve & realistically goes out of his way to deny them. like theres a p strong authorial voice running through even the most gimmicky of his characters and a blending/doubling/redundancy in many of the characters.

its been superlong since i read "art as device" but i think its relevant that erikson uses a lot of classic defamilirization techniques in his works so much so that the stuff in toll the hound (?) with the donkey seemed like a direct reference to "kholstomer". my argument i guess is that he doesnt use these techniques well or subtley enough. like instead of being powerfully disorienting scenes would just end up boring and/or repititve. as an example he completely undermined the maiming & toture of hetan with this passage where generic barghast woman explains in overly emotive, bathetic terms the entire subtext behind the women's complicity in hetan's raping. so unnecessary & devaluing.

[worry]

I don't agree that he has no empathy for Stolmen's wife. I think he understands her makeup entirely, how nature, nurture, and personal agency sometimes culminate in such creatures (as they might among certain housewives of Orange County, for instance). It has less to do with constructing a caricature than depicting someone who has turned themselves into a caricature. I think perhaps your reading of her is shallow...not because SE has defined her, the individual, so completely, but because he requires readers to use personal experience to fill in the blanks. Some human beings simply do not have very much nuance in their substance. And it's up to the reader to offer what generosity they deem fit, to such people and to such characters. He can't force a mass of readers to all feel the same level of empathy for the least relatable characters, nor would it be right to push that way, but he certainly gives the reader the benefit of the doubt that they are capable of making such decisions for themselves. If I didn't already know that SE's academic fields involved archaeology and anthropology, I think I would be able to guess pretty quickly. I would imagine he understands people and peoples equally well. And I think he enjoys them, perhaps with some healthy disappointment and even a bit of well-directed outrage, but that certainly isn't miserablism, nihilism, or cynicism really.

In addition, I don't think I was suggesting realism in the sense you're taking my comments about what is. I think SE visits realism on occasion, in the most intimate moments with some characters, but all in all his goals involve broader truths about history and culture and conflict. In terms of individual characters, I think he varies a lot on how much "personhood" he grants them; in other words, I don't disagree with you except insofar as you're making a universal statement that's polar to what you thought my defense was about. There's variety. I mean, it's pretty clear he's a fantasist, he delights in the epic and the heroic and the tragic, he has plenty of comic relief, and he deals a lot with duos/partnerships that explore a variety of themes. The characters in general often serve themes rather than the other way around. But he lays enough groundwork to give us the tools to bridge gaps in the definition, and the themes reflect realities in the human condition (not to sound too cheesy). Does he need to explain that indeed, every child within the Snake is actually an individual who had parents and perhaps siblings and friends and goals and desires, any more than a historian would have to confirm that fact about those damaged or destroyed in the Trail of Tears. I take it as a sign of respect that SE writes with the assumption that his readers are human beings with the facility to comprehend the suffering of other individuals. Likewise, we know the people of Lether may endure joy or grief or any other available emotion, even as we understand that they serve a broader theme in the story being told.

I guess this comes off as a defense, but I don't offer it that way personally. I'm not really able to offer each of your points a counterpoint. But it's fun to dissect the plot, the themes, the motivations of the author, and all that...it doesn't kill it for me like having to explain a joke might hurt the joke, especially since I think this series is interesting on just about every level. But like a joke, there's the matter of getting it or not, and then there's the matter of getting it and laughing or getting it and groaning. If you're groaning at where the Malazan tale is headed, there's little anyone can do to change that.

This post has been edited by worrywort: 19 March 2010 - 05:46 AM

[globish rip]

lol no worries dude - this discussion is proving a p enjoyable diversion to a really tedious research paper im writing. & again normally id just quit reading/engaging with a book i disliked this much but there is something in eriksons work i find compelling. it is interesting to think about imo.

I think he understands her makeup entirely, how nature, nurture, and personal agency sometimes culminate in such creatures (as they might among certain housewives of Orange County, for instance). It has less to do with constructing a caricature than depicting someone who has turned themselves into a caricature

this is p deeply presumuptious and arrogant idea dude & "such creatures" is incredibly dismissive (and depersonalizing!). maybe my reading is shallow but i dont really have a problem w/ erikson having less than fleshed out characters serving as focal points for various themes/plots he wants to resolve. my issue w/these characters is really more effect than intent - like regardless of how u felt about how the letheri dick cheney dude worked as a pyschological profile he was just so cheesy, you know? i still qn whether these character would be thinking of their own actions in such cartoonish langauge but the way theyre used is so graceless and blatant.

and - again - this hasnt been particularly well-argued on my part but we're clearly reading erkison in really different ways. like im certainly comfortable w/ the idea that the characters in the series f(n) more as representatives and ideas and not "knowable" or "sympathetic" people. thats always felt like the point - finding meaning in the spaces btw the lives of these characters as symbols and signifiers. like imo i wouldnt read stolmen's wife as depicting anyone, even a type. shes there as a symptom a riff on an idea and as a counterpoint. & plenty of major-ish characters like errant are playing with the idea of a being that is a living symbol

like i guess it does boil down to: the ideas/themes that hes trying to portray through his characters are deeply muddied & underserved by his language which is stilted & heavyhanded & maudlin. and i think the ideas he does express - abt living morally and the value of sacrfice and the nature of community - are underthought and nihilistic. sure, theyre realistic and this novel in particular is sort of the darkest moment before dawn but im skeptical of his ability to gracefully reconcile some of his ideas. clearly u feel differently.

[worry]

I was aware of the risk of sounding a bit arrogant with that phrasing, but I don't think it was depersonalizing. Creature was meant somewhat figuratively, in that it was meant to disparage her behavior rather than disregard her humanity. Though I don't think it's particularly arrogant to suggest that some people, for a variety of reasons, have lowered themselves to the level of caricature, and deliberately. I take that as a given, and a matter of fact. I don't make a habit of railing against reality shows, but I do think the worst of them celebrate this very phenomenon. It's observable. And I don't think it's wrong to judge people's behavior, as long as one's own behavior doesn't degrade as a result. The golden rule applies. But in terms of that character, I didn't mean to be presumptuous. I meant that SE has designed a world, a history, and a culture that contributed to this particular individual's set of choices, and she chose a path that I find detestable (although it's clear that many in her society consider it normal and even proper). That's all I meant by SE knowing her completely. She's his creation, but also a logical outcome of a relatively thorough set of preceding creations.

Secondly, I didn't mean to suggest that the characters are merely personifications of concepts, because I don't feel that way. Besides the gaming origin of the world, I just think SE created this particular (and fairly vast) set of characters in service of the themes he wanted to explore. But I don't think he's sacrificing character for plot. He's in control of all of it, and I believe he's found a startlingly close to perfect balance. So the books are meditative and heavy with themes, and of course convergence-driven by nature, but he's populated his cast with characters I happen to find extremely interesting. I don't think they're sketches for the most part, or symbols, though they might step into those roles occasionally. As they step in and out of the roles in the Deck of Dragons.

Lastly, in terms of simply feeling differently, we agree! I can't relate any of the adjectives you use to SE's writing, and I chalk that up to personal taste. I guess I naturally chafe at some of them ("underthought and nihilistic" just seems like we're reading different books all together), but oh well. I happen to find his language particularly riveting, not at all maudlin, and I don't mind the occasional stilted line. I think a little stiltedly perhaps, so it fits my mind like key and lock.

[foolio]

Quote

feel like erkisons's misberalist nihlism is going p much unredeemed at this point & all the moments are pitched at such an overwrought nonsensical tone that they become farce.

I am sorry, but I am from South Carolina and dont know what this means.

[cleantoe]

foolio, on 19 March 2010 - 07:02 PM, said:

Quote

feel like erkisons's misberalist nihlism is going p much unredeemed at this point & all the moments are pitched at such an overwrought nonsensical tone that they become farce.

I am sorry, but I am from South Carolina and dont know what this means.

I think he meant "miserabilist nihilist" which means someone who enjoys being depressed and believes in nothing.