Shuarian’s Weblog

As noted yesterday, I enjoyed reading The Winter Queen (wikipedia) for the most part. It generally employs an agreeable writing style and sometimes a certain ironic undertone I quite liked. Story-wise I didn’t expect too much, and was generally pleased with the pace and the plot, even though the story twists don’t always come as big surprises (to engage in the fine art of understatement).

There were, however, two points which genuinely annoyed me and which I’d like to extend upon. The second point spoils the end of the novel, so continue reading at your own risk.

I. Reactionaryism: Apart from the very argument to be made in point 2, it’s hard to name any precise areas / quotes from the book, yet put together, the overall tone just smells of nostalgia for the good old days.

Conflicts get resolved by action; despite his intelligence, the hero mostly survives by the use of force or - another reactionary motif - fate. Leaning onto the fate theme, love for one’s fatherland is crucial to one’s worthiness, and that love being a negative or exclusive love, most bad guys are foreigners. Hard work in the service of the emporer is noble and will be rewarded.

At first, the hero appears to show some understanding for young students who oppose the status quo and reject what they perceive as tyranny of the society towards them. However, that notion gets disposed quickly, as the protagonist undertakes actions which clearly distinguish him from the ordinary and troubled young masses and subsequently turn the pale, nervous clerk to a handsome and fearless super agent.

II. The Role of Women: There are three women who play a signification role in the novel. The one most prominently featured is described as a Cleopatra-like figure; mysterious, beautiful and able to seduce men easily. She also has a strong will and knows how the get what she wants. Of course, that woman is a criminal figure, a whore who (mis)uses her body for achieving her goals only and isn’t afraid to get innocent people killed.

The second woman is described quite favourably at first; she’s a well-educated, caring and lovely lady. Her only flaws are that she takes her good intentions too far - a much needed warning that women shouldn’t aspire to run serious businesses, indeed - and (this one playing into the first point) that she is a foreigner. Consequently, she dies near the end of the story, but not before committing a selfless act first and thus saving her soul in a very Christian inspired way, at least.

Then there’s also a third woman; or rather, a girl. Which of course is even better, because girls are innocent, and thus superior to women. She’s described as being angel-like, pure and naive. As far as I remember, all the dresses she wears are white. She’s also the first of the three women the hero meets, and thus proves that faithfulness is absolutely important; the other women just want to keep the hero away from his luck! And her luck, or so it has to be assumed. For unfortunately, the little princess doesn’t appear to have any thoughts of her own - the protagonist meets her, falls in love with her beautiful looks and she obediently returns his feelings.

Seriously, how can anyone find that even remotely romantic? But it gets better, because they eventually marry. However, marriage means sex, which would destroy the picture of the perfect - virgin - woman. So at the very end of the book, literally before she’s about to lose her virginity, our little angel gets killed (compare to Madonna / Whore complex. Discuss). This gives him another noble reason to continue with his detective/secret agent work.

It comes, of course, as no surprise that this book fails the Bechdel test miserably.

As a final thought, I’ve called my second point The Role of Women. I could easily expand on that by mentioning the pitiable role model of men in the novel, but I guess this becomes obvious from reading all of the above.

I’ve just read The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin (wikipedia). It’s no match for the likes of the recently featured WE, yet it’s a pleasent read which I quite enjoyed for its writing style:

The sight of a gentleman gesticulating with a gun could not fail to attract the attention of the promenading public.

… for all of the witnesses repeated more or less the same thing, differing from each other only in their degree of perspicacity: some affirmed that the young man’s appearance had instantly filled them with alarm and foreboding (’The moment I looked into his crazy eyes, I went cold all over,’ stated Titular Counsellor’s wife Khokhrayakova, who went on, however, to testify that she had only seen the young man from the back); [...]

Even though I enjoyed reading The Winter Queen overall, I have a few specific issues with the book; I’d like to highlight them in a separate blog post.

The media world lives from selling news. News can, in some ways, be seen like every other market commodity. There’s news which sells well, and news which doesn’t.

The reality, however, is more complex; the demand cannot be easily quantified, but that goes for every other good out there, too. The important distinction then is that real news cannot be produced. Both are bad business factors, thus the media tries to control these unknowns.

On the supply side, they screen news not only by its relevance, but also by the interest they think their typical customer will show. And in order to absorb the unpredictable quantity of news, no-news like gossip, celebrities focused articles or evergreens (and, to be provocative, opinion columns) gets produced.

Now that there’s a commodity to sell, it has to be sold to the customer. This gets done, like with other goods, by marketing it. For news, this means for example (a) placing the commodity as the first on the marketplace, i.e. getting the news out fast, and (b) creating the illusion of the news being of significant value.

Case in point — Apparently, today a power outage caused the two national TV stations of Switzerland to interrupt their airing in large parts of the country for one to one and a half hour. I can, of course, understand that something like this is really life-threatening, especially as such important events like a Formula One race and the final ceremony of the Olympics were supposed to be on air.

So, how does one of the largest newspaper of Switzerland, the Tages-Anzeiger, handle such an incident? They put it on the frontpage of their website, and even several hours after the incident, the corresponding article still is presented as one of the top tree events of the day.

(click on the image for a larger version)

The headline, not surprisingly, labels the power outage as historical.

If you can read German, it’s quite interesting to compare the coverage of the Tages-Anzeiger with the one by another Swiss newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ); the latter appearing to be more informative.

Is this better journalism the NZZ displays there? Or just the sign of another customer profile they have in their business model?

Reading WE, by Yevgeny Zamyatin (wikipedia):

"… A person is a novel: you don’t know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth reading to the very end…"

Yesterday, during the national holiday of Switzerland, my vacuum cleaner decided to blow itself up in a cloud of smoke.

So today I went to the city’s main shopping mile, in search of a worthy successor. Even though I didn’t find a worthy replacement, I still enjoyed my short excursion; mainly as I couldn’t help but chuckle about the way the manufacturers brag about their brand new products - better handling!, higher air speed!, bigger dust bags!, and of course more watts! It makes me feel really proud to be part of the species which has developed such advanced techniques for disposing their dust.

Wandering freely through the shopping mile for a bit, I noticed the many people who seem to think they own a lot of stuff, but fail to realise that in fact these goods own them instead.