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Fiction. HTML: When Fat Charlie's dad named something, it stuck. Like calling Fat Charlie "Fat Charlie." Even now, 20 years later, Charlie Nancy can't shake that name, one of the many embarrassing "gifts" his father bestowed-before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie's life. Because Mr. Nancy left Fat Charlie things. Things like the tall, good-looking stranger who appears on Charlie's doorstep, who appears to be the brother he never knew. A brother as different from Charlie as night is from day, a brother who's going to show Charlie how to lighten up and have a little fun. And all of a sudden, things start getting very interesting for Fat Charlie. Exciting, scary, and deeply funny, Anansi Boys is a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth, a wild adventure, as Neil Gaiman shows us where gods come from, and how to survive your family..… (more)
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Neil Gaiman shows a knack for taking mythology and folklore and bringing it into this world. With Anansi Boys, Gaiman brings Anansi, the trickster spider of African and Caribbean folklore to life. As with other classical mythology figures, we
The story is enjoyable for a number of reasons. If you are a fan of traditional folktales, you probably know of Anansi. Gaiman does a nice job of relating some Anansi stories you may not be familiar with and showing how these stories became transformed into Americanized folk tales. He also fashions a modern adaptation and, continuing the theme from American Gods, Gaiman posits that old gods are still among us if you know how to approach them.
True to the Anansi stories that Gaiman draws on to give us this story, Anansi Boys is a parable. In this case, the moral is the dual nature of our selves and how we must strive to keep balance within our selves. Charles Nancy is the first son of Anansi we meet. We later meet his brother, Spider. Still later we are lead to believe that Charles and Spider were once the same person and Spider was drawn off from Charles. Spider the archetypical trickster, always walking on the edge of getting in trouble, getting what he wants by tricking people and in general, living the good life at he expense of others. Charles is the antithesis of Spider, very down to earth without a devious thought in his mind.
Enter two other characters, both female and both opposites. Rosie, a proper young lady, betrothed to Charles, and Daisy, a fun loving, but still sensible young woman with a distinct wild side. Just as Charles and Spider are actually counterparts to each other, these two women play a counter balance to the two main men of the story. Through these characters we learn about balancing our natures. While it is not hard to figure out who ends up paired with whom, the story lies in how it happens.
While American Gods was decidedly a heavy story, Anansi Boys, like the Anansi tales themselves, is at times side splitting funny, with just enough danger and suspense thrown in to keep you rooted to the tale so you learn the message of the parable. In Neverwhere, except for the obvious comic relief, I don’t think the story was meant to come off as much of a comedy. I have a hard time imagining Anansi Boys was ever intended to be anything but humorous.
An all around great story, well written and, in the case of the audio book, well told. The only problem I have is trying to decide just how high to rate this. I do not feel it is truly a five star story because it did not exactly rock my world. Nonetheless, I still found this more enjoyable than the previous Gaiman stories that I’d given four and a half stars to. Since we do not have a four and three-quarters star rating, I’m going four and a half for this one. Just imagine that the rating really says 9½ out of 10 and the others are 9 out of 10.
There’s the “wacky things happen when you least expect it, but roll with it” aspect that I always enjoy. An ordinary
I certainly wouldn’t say this is one of my favorite books of this type – but it was an enjoyable read. I picked it up mostly because I recognized Gaiman’s name from Coraline which my kids saw and liked. Based on that frame of reference that I had, this book was NOTHING like that. Which is fine. Oh, but before I go further, I should mention that the main character’s name is Fat Charlie.
“Fat Charlie tried to remember what people did in prison to pass the time, but all he could come up with was keeping secret diaries and hiding things in their bottoms. He had nothing to write on, and felt that a definite measure of how well one was getting on in life was not having to hide things in one’s bottom.”
It’s an interesting story with colorful characters as Fat Charlie discovers the world behind the one he had been inhabiting all his life. He has a good set of eyes with which the reader can see this unusual world, and sometimes his vision provides the reader with more than one might expect.
“Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat’s eyes, or an octopus’s) are only made to see one version of reality at a time. Fat Charlie saw one thing with his eyes, and he saw something else with his mind, and in the gulf between the two things, madness waited. He could feel a wild panic welling up inside him, and he took a deep breath and held it in while his heart thudded against his ribcage. He forced himself to believe his eyes, not his mind.”
Fat Charlie is the definition of everyman, plodding along through life until he is forced to learn more about his father and his newly discovered brother, Spider.
“If he (Spider) had not been perfectly certain of his own sanity, certain to a degree that normally is found only in people who have concluded that they’re definitely Julius Caesar and have been sent to save the world, he might have thought he was going mad.”
I guess, in the end, I enjoyed this book but didn’t love it. I liked Gaiman’s easy writing style and most of the supernatural goofiness and found several of the parts to be funny in a gentle way.
“Charlie pushed his fedora back onto his head. Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you. This hat was one of those, and Charlie was up to it.”
Charlie, who somewhere along the way, stopped being Fat Charlie and became a man of his own. With a jaunty hat.
Previously, his humor was only an occasional element, but there was apparently something in the writing of this particular book which finally allowed him to unleash his sense of the comic as a whole entity. The text swims and bobs with the ridiculous, the unfortunate, and the clever.
After reading the book 'Good Omens', written by Gaiman and Prachett, I was told that without Prachett, it would have retained none of the humor. I now begin to wonder whether Prachett's only addition to that book was the predictable and banal snatches which so fill his discworld books. Indeed, this work of Gaiman's overshadows that earlier work in both degrees and shades of the insightful and entertaining.
The book also works as an amusing analysis of storytelling itself, so that anyone who studies the nature and classification of tales will find certain asides and references particularly amusing. It is rare these days that an author will write a piece of fiction which explores on a subtextual level a concept or idea fundamental to the work itself. I have come to wish that more authors could gain the audacity that Gaiman found here.
There is a degree to which this story matches Gaiman's usual monomythic progression from naive outsider to coy insider, which at the outset was my greatest difficulty with the work. The inevitability and redundancy of this trope makes me wish for Gaiman's more eccentric and perverse moments. However, I found in the clever and skilled text a story worth experiencing, and one which matches or exceeds Gaiman's other attempts in the modern fantasy genre.
The story is not as epic or dire as Gaiman's tend to be, and without that there is a loss of urgency in the story. This is not really a deficiency, however, as the playful humor could not cohabitate comfortably with an ever-steepening plot curve.
The work fits into Gaiman's usual mode, exploring the myths and psychologies that most interest him. It may lose some of his fans in that it is less dark and brooding, less hopeless, but this could hardly be counted a loss. Any reader who wants more of the same can re-read his old works. the rest of us may appreciate seeing a master storyteller exploring his form in a new and engaging way.
The audiobook was an awesome performance.
Yes and no.
Gaiman is a brilliant writer, no question, but for several reasons this book didn't connect for me. The characters are fully
I appreciate the writing, but this book just isn't a keeper for me.
Charlie’s fiance talks him into inviting his dad to their wedding. When Charlie calls he finds out his dad has died. While singing karaoke in a night club he suffers a fatal heart attack and dies’ but, not before though pulling down a woman’s tube top and exposing her to everyone.
After the funeral Charlie is told 2 very important things about his dad. The first one is, he has a brother he never knew about. Second his father was a god.
When Charlie asks how to get a hold of this so called brother he is told to talk to a spider. He does just that. Not long after his brother shows up at his apartment door. He gets more than he bargain's for with his brother. Spider turns poor Charlie’s life upside down.
Very humorous and a fun story to read. An off beat comedy of 2 brothers learning that their dad truly was a god.
Gaiman's quirky humor shines through in this novel. All of the separate story threads sparkle on their own, but by the end they are dazzling as they weave together to make his spider web of a story. It is a beautifully crafted, laugh-out-loud novel that you should definitely pick up.
BUT, it was worth reading...
In its way, this book is just as stunningly creative as American Gods. The animal-people who represent the ancient African gods are excellent--- especially, of course, Tiger. Just as creative are the characters, who are much easier to care for than any of the ones in Gods. They get into hopelessly awkward situations and seem so real that you can't help but be on their side. Even the villain is likable, in a nasty sort of way.
Finally, these modern-fantasy-splotched-in-alongside-the-real-world books are simply my favorite kind of fantasy novel. You can't get away with high fantasy anymore, really. The genre's been done to death over the last fifty years, and unless we want to tire it out completely, there are a bunch of authors who might want to give it a rest. Much more enjoyable, to me, are the fantasy novels that manage to be straight-up fantasy without having elves or castles or swords of any kind in them-- they're often ten times as creative, much fresher, and a lot more fun to read. Other books like this, from both youth and adult fiction, include Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, the not-quite-fantasy-but-silly-enough-to-count Thursday Next and Jack Spratt novels by Jasper Fforde, and, on a slightly different note, the Terry Pratchett Discworld series, which takes every sentence and uses it to make fun of high fantasy and, more recently, of modern daily life. The Watch mini-series within the greater Discworld canon is particularly good at this-- I would call it Urban Fantasy, actually.
At any rate, I simply liked Anansi Boys a lot more than American Gods. It felt like a runner who'd had time to stretch the legs a bit and get into a rhythm.
When I was a child who was much too prone to being serious for her own good, there was a catalpa tree in our backyard. Now, if you don't know what a catalpa tree is, it's worth a Google. Catalpas are beautiful and exotic, with giant leaves we used as "plates" to have
As an adult, however, this tree that looms so gargantuan in my imaginary landscape seems small and shrunken, like a wizened grandparent, its limbs not so big, and I realize that, while I felt like I was climbing to the top of a skyscraper, I was barely 10 feet off the ground.
I bring this up because this is the closest approximation I can make to the difference between reading as a child and reading as an adult. As a child, there was a magic in stories, and I'm not talking about pixie dust and wands (although there was certainly some of that). There was a magic in not knowing (or caring) where a story was going. A magic to realizing why, hey, that main character is kind of like me. A magic to finding that you could read the same story over and over and over again and it would never get old and would never be the same story twice, not really. The colors were brighter. The emotions were palpable. There was nothing but possibility. And, yes, there's certainly still magic in the stories I read as an adult, but it's never quite the same, is it? I'm a little more jaded in that, as soon as I can predict where the story is going, I lose a little interest. There's a little more cynicism, a little more impatience with an "I've been here before" narrative, and a little more sadness in knowing that I can never immerse myself in adult stories with the same abandon as that 10 year old reading under the catalpa tree.
Now, I bring this up to explain that this is why I love Neil Gaiman. Gaiman can, more so than any other author, create that childlike awe of story within the adult me without telling a children's story. It's a peculiar and wonderful literary alchemy, this ability to take the adult world, the "real" world, and transform it into a place where one can find the same charm, humor, unpredictability, and enchantment found in the best children's narratives. And Anansi Boys is such a book.
A companion book to American Gods, Anansi Boys, follows the story of Fat Charlie, son of Mr. Nancy, a rascal of a man with a wicked sense of humor, an eye for the ladies, and a knack for purposely embarrassing his introverted, sensitive son. When Mr. Nancy dies, the now grown-up, soon to be married, and tenuously employed Fat Charlie is relieved that his father can never humiliate him again; however he soon finds out that life is not going to settle into a mundane, predictable pattern for him. He learns that his father was Anansi, the trickster spider god of African folklore, and he learns that he has a brother, Spider, who inherited his father's mischievous spirit and magical abilities. It's not long before the reunion between the two brothers breaks out into a serious (and frequently hilarious) case of sibling rivalry, with Spider usurping Fat Charlie's apartment, girlfriend, and life, and Fat Charlie going to extreme lengths to rid himself of his demigod brother.
Anansi Boys lacks the darkness of American Gods and is a much more whimsical, comedic read. Initially, this did cause a bit of a disconnect for me until I gave in to the story without trying to connect it with or hold it up to my expectations of American Gods. While following the adventures of Fat Charlie, I found myself laughing aloud and relishing each twist and turn in the story (as well as looking forward to the humorous "in which" chapter titles). Gaiman's love of story is evident and, as we learn through his depiction of Anansi folktales, the stories we tell and the stories we live are important not just for entertainment, but for creating the world as it should be. And the world as it should be is something as close as possible to a catalpa tree as seen through the eyes of a child--a place where anything and everything is possible, because that's where real magic resides.
Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder
With Gaiman, as with Gene Wolfe and John Wright, it's not so much the story as how it's told—you go along for the ride and see where it takes you. Except for the marvelous command of the language, though, he's not really anything like them—his stories are much wilder and crazier, and even harder to predict. Partly this is because he's drawing on different mythologies—African and Native American, where Wolfe and Wright draw more on classical and northern European sources—but, mostly, I think that he's just a wilder and crazier guy.
Highly recommended.
Old and unfamiliar gods play an important part in the story and as an arachnophobe I even came to like
This is the first book by Gaiman that I've read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Gaiman has based the book on the Anansi stories from West Africa and the Caribbean, and as the book progresses the magical realism of the stories becomes just as "real" as real life. The Anansi of myth is a spider and he weaves all the stories and songs that make up the world. He is a trickster and sometimes interferes with people's lives to do good, sometimes to do mischief, and sometimes just for the heck of it. The trickster figure can be found in many cultures, usually serving much the same purpose. Gaiman does an excellent job of intertwining traditional the traditional trickster myths with today's world. The book is humorous, and Gaiman's style fits the content perfectly. This was a fun book, well-written with a fast-moving plot - I'll be reading more from Gaiman in the future.