What I've Been Reading

I had been planning to show you my trip to Modena and Vignola last weekend, but what with the laptop still down, I had to resort to other plans. 

So in the end, with the excuse that I wanted to practice my Italian, I succumbed. This is the Italian version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, in case you couldn't tell. I had already absorbed a lot about the series through osmosis, although I'd only seen scattered clips of the film and hadn't read any of the books. And since I keep a reading journal anyway, I thought I'd share my opinions now that I've finished it.

I still remember my first experience with Harry Potter; it was 1998 and I was nine years old, waiting for my flute lesson in my flute teacher's living room. The mother of another student was there, reading the first book that had just hit bestseller lists, and she handed it to me. I'd never heard of it, but the page I turned to was about a hooded figure slurping blood out of a dead unicorn's wound. And so began almost twelve years of contempt for Ms. Rowling and her wizardly books. When my friend G.C. Waldrep (a poetry professor at Bucknell) heard that I was one of those people who refused to read the series, he nodded understandingly. "Ah," he said sagely, "you're a Harry Potter agnostic."

I have a strange relationship with wildly popular books, quite different from wildly popular movies. I shamelessly plunged into the ultra-fandom of the Lord of the Rings movies, for example (it helped that all my NZ cousins were extras), and all the big movies thereafter were sure to see me in the seats (Troy, Gladiator, The Dark Knight, all of the big-budget action films). With cinema, I never felt a single twinge of guilt for joining the masses. Literature, however, is different. Perhaps huge book franchises are different from big movies, or perhaps it's just because I'm so close to my literature, I'm not sure, but my natural reaction to a monster-book tends toward disdain, and that's often not a fair judgement.

I read Twilight (oh, that loaded word), in fact, while it was still circulating through book clubs, before the teeny-boppers got a hold of it--New Moon hadn't yet come out in paperback--and I remember enjoying it immensely. While my feelings did not extend to include the fourth book (fail), there seems to be this weird sentiment that "If too many people like it, it's not good anymore," in the mainstream. Which is odd, because it's...the mainstream.

At any rate, it was an experience reading Ms. Rowling's work, especially in translation. I read the first chapter in Italian, and then in English on Amazon, and to tell you the truth, I preferred reading the Italian. It makes me slow down and appreciate what's going on, rather than just blasting through at light speed.

Here are some fun translations that will give the average avid fan a hernia:

Albus Dumbledore:              Albus Silente (Silent)

Severus Snape:                     Severus Piton (Python)

Professor Quirrell:                 Professore Raptor

Professor McGonagall:        Professoressa McGranitt

Gryffindor, Hufflepuff,         Griffindoro, Tassorosso (red-badger), Corvonero

Ravenclaw, Slytherin:         (black-crow), Serpeverde (green-serpent)

Quaffle, Bludgers,                Pluffa, Bolidi (meteors), and Boccino d'Oro

and Golden Snitch:            (kind of close...bocciare means to flunk or reject)

While I worked out Piton and Silente, the others were lost on me until I looked them up. They kept most of the names the same, so I was able to pick out who was whom, but Rowling was none too pleased, apparently. According to a quote from Wikipedia:

‘The translator took the word “dumb” in “Dumbledore” to mean “mute,” ’ she said. In reality, Rowling notes that dumbledore is an old form of the word bumblebee. ‘I chose it because I had the idea that this wizard…always in motion. … For me the name Silente is a total contradiction. But the book is very popular even in Italy, which means that this mistake doesn’t at all bother the Italians! ’

This kind of attention to detail, especially in the names of things, is what makes Rowling’s world so sparkling. Plenty of fantasy worlds are original, but most of them fail to charm the reader like this one. The very Englishness of it is what is so appealing (as opposed to the worlds of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, which are really self-contained cultures). She has a natural sense for quiet, matter-of-fact humour and little turns of phrase that build on each other and never once bored me.

However, if Rowling has had the good fortune of developing a style and a memorable voice this early in her career, this book was crowded with classic first-novel faults. Unfortunate but almost inevitable, really. The first half of the novel was very cleanly plotted and flowed well, but the Dursleys would have been so much more interesting if they had been allowed to develop more complex personalities. A family whose coping mechanism is outright denial is a stroke of genius, but Rowling is already heavy on the archetypes: Harry the downtrodden hero, Hermione the bookworm, Dumbledore the wise mentor, Malfoy the nemesis, etc. Ready-made characters are useful, but in large doses they make character interactions overly predictable (how many times could Mr. Dursley shout at Harry and have it be really interesting…?), because two archetypes can’t really do anything except clunk together in the same way every time.

I know, I know, it’s still a children’s series at this point. In reality, Rowling has plenty of room to work with her characters (especially child characters, which are notoriously difficult). Quite a few of the characters felt like they were still settling into their personalities.

Harry and Ron meet for the first time on the Hogwarts Express.

The one slip-up that I could not excuse was Hagrid’s dragon. The whole set-up of the unicorn scene in the forest was a thoroughly dreadful plot device (sending children with no hunting experience into a forbidden forest, at night, to track down a wounded wild animal that has been attacked by an unknown but extremely fast and dangerous creature? I don’t think so, Rowling…), but it was made even worse by the fact that Hagrid had disobeyed the rules to get a dragon and then let Harry and his friends take the punishment for it while they were fixing the problem for him, and then not say a word of apology for their punishment. Completely out of character, especially when you look at his reaction after Harry’s final fight, where he is full of apologies for letting the secret out about his three-headed dog. 

By contrast, I thought Snape and Dumbledore were both seamlessly organized and realized—I can see why Snape is a fan favourite—which was a relief considering the second half of the novel is victim to rushed plotting and clumsy dialogue. Solving the mystery of the Stone isn’t a bad idea in itself, but it condemns Harry and his friends to continually explaining backstory in long monologues, and guessing plot-twists right on the first try. Combined with the series of obstacles in the final scenes…I don’t know, I just didn’t buy it compared with the careful work in the first half. It feels like Rowling invested enormous effort in the first part and midway got carried away with herself. She had me wishing that Slytherin had won, just to make things more interesting. 

She ended up pushing Quidditch aside rather lightly, too, I thought. Perhaps this is just my bias, because I was convinced that the ending scene would have Harry astride a broomstick, chasing the Stone that flew like a Golden Snitch. The Quidditch scenes were among my favourites, with Diagon Alley (ha-ha, diagonally, yes I got it) and the Hogwarts Express also high on the list. Rowling is very good at giving you huge, heart-stoppingly detailed panoramas, full of life and colour that hits you all in the face at once. All of those scenes impressed me very much, because having tried to write them myself, I know how difficult it is to do well. Her world-building is a series of details (like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans) that your mind fills in as it pleases, and the reader ends up with a very personal experience of the world of Hogwarts. 

All in all, a fun read, a good start, and perhaps I might even try the others.