sarahbande epitome of incomprehensibility Spoiler alert for the first chapter, and a little suggestion: don't read this book. It's fucked up. You probably can't even read it in English yet. Context: e_o_i rambles through a massive street sale on St. Catherine and finds a Quebec novel with a cool title. SARA(H)BANDE, the cover calls it. "Oooh," thinks e_o_i, "a musical/dance term AND parentheses! Exactly what will compel me to read a book in my second language!" See, titles with brackets and slashes and whatnot were all the rage in literary criticism a few years back. You'd have journal articles called things like "Gen(d)red Inevitability: Post-Lacanian Image/inary (Bi)naries in Anne of Green Gables." ...So Sara(h)bande seemed right up my alley. Except the alley is fucked up AND clee-shay, and it's not an alley, but a cabin in the woods where a teenage girl goes to play the violin. Why does she do that? Well, she's been corresponding with a mysterious man who tells her that he's in love with her but he'll only have sex with her if she plays a certain violin piece perfectly (Sarabande, Giga and Badinerie by Arcangelo Corelli). So she goes out to a cabin, part of a row of mysterious cabins on the outskirts of her prestigious music school, and she's playing the piece with sexually-tinged passion, also thinking about how she wants to please her father (non-sexually, one hopes) by becoming this great violinist. She senses a presence. She gets scared and plays a wrong note. He's there, it's him, and he graciously motions her to continue. Now, she's also inserted an "objet de plastique" up her ass at his request. One does not know from the narration what it is. One does not necessarily want to know. She finishes the piece, they start making out, he lifts her up on to the desk, she's in raptures of joy, and then he violently knocks her from him and she hits her head on the desk (ow). He starts to leave. She's sad, because it means he didn't overlook her mistake. "I wasn't perfect after all" (this is an almost exact translation of the same sentence in the book - did I mention it's from the point of view of the girl?) But he comes back... out of the shadows, with a knife... and kills her gruesomely, first stabbing her "between her legs" and then slashing her numerous times. Before she loses consciousness, she can't help hoping that her father would be proud of her. ...End of chapter and quite enough for today. Je le n'aime pas; Mme. Epi-tome, la, elle a une limite. Elle prend la Nopetomobile. She doesn't like this sick pedophilic Freudian stuff in her Quebec parentheses-laden literature... Come to think of it, I'm not the hugest fan of murder mysteries anyway, so might this be a genre thing? Hm. A few criticisms, though. Besides my delicate sensibilities saying, "If you have to get murdered in a sado-machostic way, can't you wait until you're at least eighteen?" the character also acts very, very stupidly. This is possibly a genre thing too: the first victims in slasher films tend to be the stupid ones, right? It's meant to be kind of funny at first? And then the suspense ramps up when the serial killer is after the characters the audience is primed to identify with? Think that's how it works. But this isn't funny, it's just... bother, I'm going to say "fucked up" again and be boring. Another thing. The murdered girl has an East Asian name, which leads to racially-charged clee-shays - strict Asian perfectionist parents, musically-inclined Chinese girls only playing "delicate" instruments like violins, and maybe an echo of the "black guy dies first" trope (a pale echo, I'll say, if I'm allowed to be silly). Okay. Something silly. Where's something silly? Find me something merely silly to read and I'll read it. The book too disturbing right now, especially when my stomach still isn't feeling quite well. But I was out and about for tutoring, then I was at the sale, and then - ah yes, je vois un peu de relatively innocuous entertainment, in movie form. On the way home, I stopped at a garage sale and bought Firestarter 1 and 2 and Robocop. 160716 ... e_o_i ...But now there's a police detective speaking funny Fringlish. Things even out. The centre has to hold. Mere Franglais is loosed upon the world. So, give icky French gorefests a chance? 160802 ... e_o_i Nah, it was one of the books I put in the little_free_library before the whirl of school started up. Adieu. 230916 what's it to you? who go blather from