Reviews for Outlines of astronomy

The average rating for Outlines of astronomy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-17 00:00:00 Francis Kong There's a lot to like on a sentence level in this Glaswegian family novel, and especially in the narrative by twelve-year-old Anne Marie. (And I say that as someone who doesn't necessarily like child narrators.) However, I wasn't so fond of the rather clumsy and sometimes predictable storyline between her parents Jimmy and Liz, or of some of the ways Buddhism was employed in the story. Do other people have books that feel as if they are more famous than they actually are? This is one of mine. I used to own a copy of Buddha Da, and until yesterday it still bugged me as an 'unfinished' book. In 2005 or whenever it was I tried to read it, I probably didn't even read to the end of the first chapter, given the unfamiliarity of that this time round. It'll have been because I didn't read further on account of being too ill to get into it. There are many other books I've read more from - and not continued with on account of merely not feeling like it or not having time - that didn't feel 'unfinished', like a small defeat, in the same way. Anne Marie's chapters were great. I looked forward to them throughout the novel, and often wished she narrated the whole thing. I especially liked the friendship in which she bonds with classmate Nisha over old pop music (Madonna) and singing. This rang very true to me from when I was younger, how it was all about shared interests, resonant experiences with family and unselfconsciously talking about your respective heritages, in these two's case Punjabi Sikh and Irish Catholic. (I remember times like these fondly after, as an adult, the politics of the 2010s made me more aware of difference and otherness and I would sometimes become overly conscious of a friend as a PoC of and what online activists might think about things like their avid fandom of white pop culture. I resented this for getting in the way of I'd always seen them, as another person with some similar interests and experiences who like me also has family from another culture - and I'm pretty sure it made me a worse and clumsy friend. Some of the essays in The Good Immigrant helped me resolve this but I still think I may have better socially before.) The melting-pot of cross-cultural participation in the novel seems entirely celebratory, and innocent of culture wars (which at the time this was written had died down somewhat in the US, and in the UK they hadn't been such a big deal in the 90s anyway). Jimmy does Tibetan Buddhism; Anne Marie and Nisha, as fans and then music makers, blend American pop, Catholic and Buddhist chanting, with Nisha's brother's DJ samples of Euro house, bhangra, Bollywood tunes and just about anything. (Fatboy Slim is invoked, but the sheer breadth and variety also suggests DJ Shadow.) So far as I can tell from my limited experience - for a while I went to FWBO/Trinaratna Buddhist Centres in two UK cities, and, years earlier, an old flatmate became seriously involved in Tibetan Buddhism - the novel is using an odd mashup of these two types of Buddhism and implying it's all one thing. Perhaps as if Buddhism didn't have different schools, as Christianity has denominations, because that would be too complicated for the readership? (I'm prepared to be corrected by readers who know more.) The place Jimmy goes to has resemblances to photos of the Glasgow Buddhist Centre - in being beside a takeaway (and it's called a Buddhist Centre), but there are lamas. The term 'lamas' seems to be overused in the book for Buddhist monastics, and whilst that could be down to some characters being uninformed, if it were I'd have expected Jimmy to stop using the word later in the novel as he learned more about Buddhism. And even if Tibetan Buddhists did go around looking for newly reincarnated lamas in Britain (so far as I know this is only done in certain regions of the world), why on earth would they take a newbie meditation student of a few months' standing on a trip to talk to the parents of one, who were strangers to him too? This incident is at the beginning of the novel and it reads like a clumsy comedy sketch, contrived to showcase characters' personalities - and to make a point about sexism in Buddhism, which could have been done more naturally and realistically in another context. In a later scene, 'lamas' who are wise and considered in other contexts suddenly become rather socially inept, as if they may not have understood the English being spoken around them, despite appearing to have perfect English in other scenes. Buddhism seems at times to be bent around a cartoonish and contrived plot. Though as some Buddhists try to cultivate a sense of humour, maybe it isn't the worst the novel could do. Jimmy has various experiences which either show why he connected with Buddhism in the first place, or which are typical for someone starting out in it. When it's convenient for the plot, other more experienced Buddhist characters appear to give commentary and contextualise (e.g. the Rinpoche on how listening to the rain was meditation too, and Barbara on right livelihood, clarity and ahimsa), making the novel seem like a somewhat didactic representation of a spiritual journey. (And Barbara as a character generally subverts tropes, which is good.) But then when it becomes inconvenient for the plot, this commentary tactic suddenly disappears. Why does Jimmy never get told anything similar about spiritual egotism and early enthusiasm, or about working to control his temper, when there are obvious opportunities to raise these things? Because it would get in the way of the story that had been planned out. Likewise, it implies through events that Buddhism can't be supportive of a better family life. Yes Buddhism has a strong monastic tradition and isn't family-focused like the Abrahamic religions, but in an urban Buddhist centre you would very likely meet people who combine family life and Buddhism and who would explain to someone like Jimmy how to do so in a more effective way, and hint how Buddhist traditions of community could point the way to pulling his weight at home. The novel has some useful things to say about Buddhism - and how Buddhism can be useful - but also shows a clichéd story about a man who becomes interested in something ostensibly positive but whose new pursuit leads to extra work for his wife. Sort of an incomplete response to The Dharma Bums? Liz has a lot of issues that would later become common topics of discussion on Mumsnet and no doubt similar venues for other Anglo countries - like live-in male partners' role in housework and life admin, husbands' time-consuming hobbies, extra cooking when a household member becomes vegetarian, the drawbacks and merits of settling down and having kids early, and a couple of things that would be spoilers. It's noticeable now how in a lot of these she is either passive and resigned, and doesn't really imagine doing them differently (despite her and Jimmy being old punks), or thinks contrary to present-day received wisdom. For me, this highlights how internet discussion has changed a lot of mores and expectations about family life in the intervening years, sometimes for the better, but has also created overly rigid formulae and harshness, at least potentially for those who read a lot of such content and don't naturally bring flexibility and imagination to these situations. The novel is also aware of class issues in Buddhism (some of which are also marked as Glasgow/Edinburgh or Scottish/English culture issues) but doesn't go anywhere much with that. I don't have the background to comment with any certainty on how Jimmy was portrayed (and of course there are people with varying personalities and aptitudes in every class) but I did wonder if the narrative sometimes patronised him and/or working class men in general via things like his finding it hard to verbalise experiences to other characters, or not thinking more for himself, or getting carried away. However, variations on these, especially the latter two, are common with newbies to spiritual disciplines like Buddhism. I thought Donovan seemed to be going along with the common idea of how spirituality, therapy or similar can disrupt relationships and others' idea of a person - without considering more carefully how that would manifest with a couple who already felt they were good at talking about things. These things are most often disruptive when the other party is emotionally articulate or otherwise dysfunctional. I wasn't sure that it would happen like this to these people given their prior relationship. The personalities, backstory and story didn't quite gel, I thought. I was left wondering what the point of the book was - it may be one of the interesting things about it, that that's not obvious. It's unsatisfying for the soapy predictability of the ending. Yet it also refuses the tidy solutions and moral lessons that readers of popular fiction often demand, and along the way illustrates how everyday experiences can be mindful. By the end there's a curious mixture of living in the moment, combined with an old-fashioned not-talking-about things which reverses the parents' pre-existing healthy belief in talking about everything with each other and their daughter. (And that silence looks set to be steamrollered by a couple of developments of the 2010s - in spoiler tag in comments.) Issues of sexism - in Buddhism and in the practicalities and the 'mental load' of running a family household - are raised but not substantially discussed or resolved. It now seems like these issues were culturally left hanging, in this novel set in 1999-2000 and published in 2003, to be confronted head-on in the activism of the second half of the 2010s. Liz's opposition to gender-stereotyping of children will still be well received now. (Even if the age gap between her and Jimmy when they first met as teenagers won't be.) It had been a few years since I'd read a book in Scots and I was apprehensive that I'd be rusty, that it would be a mistake to have kept this on a 'light reads' shelf, but no. It seemed as quick as reading in Standard English, and it actually kept my attention better and made the story more interesting than the same plot and characters would have been in Standard. (Not unlike the way I found capitalisations of nouns in Tom Jones kept me alert.) There were only about ten words I didn't think I'd seen before, all more or less understandable from context. Rather my problem was temporary accent acquisition; even when I wrote comments and emails I was hearing them in my head in a Scottish accent, and using some slightly different sentence structures from usual. Needless to say the setting feels totally authentic. I spent a fair bit of time in Glasgow myself during the year or so this book is set, due to a relationship, and Liz's frequent mentions of the then-new Buchanan Galleries shopping centre, its atmosphere and marvelling how late everything opened, were spot on. (Shops starting to open late on multiple evenings always feels redolent of the Blair boom years.) That place was so shiny and new and surprisingly big and expensive-looking, especially to an outsider, given Glasgow's traditional image. And weirdly I learnt more from this book about the context and joke of being a Partick Thistle supporter than I did from having one as a partner. But it was very odd that despite the attention to the year by talking about data backups due to Millennium Bug concerns, and all the hype about new year celebrations, there wasn't a single mention of the Scottish Parliament having been established that year. (I had read so little of Buddha Da before that I had no idea it was set that year; I'd just assumed it would have been 2002, the year before it was published.) Culturally, the novel is kind of prescient, written at a time when Buddhism and meditation were already becoming more popular, though the mindfulness trend of the 2010s had not yet emerged. But I'm glad I didn't read Buddha Da before I explored Buddhism myself. Not only because I wouldn't have been able to critique the book as much (aside from the Buddhism, it's also more interesting now looking at the points about gender relations it raises than it would have been c.2005) but because I think that, as an introduction, the novel could easily induce someone to take Buddhism even less seriously. This is a strange novel, as some things are really excellent about it and others lazy and probably inaccurate. There is genuinely useful info about Buddhism here alongside what seem to be some rather daft and unhelpful portrayals. It is, or was, well-enough thought of in Scotland that - as I accidentally discovered the other day during a GR search - a study guide was published in 2010. (Other work by Anne Donovan is on a current exam curriculum.) In some respects I really don't think Buddha Da is good enough for a set text - though for the great dialect writing, initial characterisation and overall portrayal of the younger characters I can see the point, and it's still kind of interesting simply because it covers an unusual subject for contemporary UK fiction.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-07 00:00:00 Janet Harrison The world is about the same size, but we are definitely all closer to other cultures than we have ever been before. What happens when part of one culture fits an individual better than his own culture? "Ma Da's a nutter...He'd dae anthin for a laugh so he wid...but that wis daft stuff compared tae whit he's went and done noo. He's turnt intae a Buddhist. At first Ma thought it was anther wanny his jokes." And life for Jimmy gets a tad more complicated after that. This is one of those stories with no villains. It is just that life is complicated enough just as it is.