The Amazing Mrs Pritchard
British tv series are usually very good. Even some comedies can be good, though there’s no guarantee. Some are very strange, looking at them from a Swedish point of view. One that I appreciated a lot while it was still on, was The Vicar of Dibley. It’s about a female vicar in a horrid little village in England. The vicar is played by hysterically funny Dawn French.
That was quite a few years ago, but more recently, there was another, newer series – The Amazing Mrs Pritchard. Here’s another incredibly funny woman. The main character is played by Jane Horrocks who’s been in several other sitcoms. In this one, she plays the manager of a shop, who by accident gets into politics and ends up suddenly becoming the Prime Minister of Britain.
It’s really hard to keep from laughing, but it’s not only a comedy. I think the writers have been able to get in a couple of digs against the political system and all stupid old customs in it.
Unfortunately for Mrs Pritchard, she hadn’t quite realized how thoroughly a politician, and worst of all, her family, get vetted. Her husband has a skeleton in the closet and her eldest daughter screws up too. Among other things, she poses in the nude, which gets blown up out of proportion, literally. One morning there’s a giant image of her projected against the House of Parliament.
Her dad has made a bigger mistake, and unfortunately, he can’t stop himself from telling his daughter, who ends up telling her mother, and that’s the end of a brief success story. Mr Pritchard is played by Steven Mackintosh, who’s been in several tv-series and movies. A very good actor. The girl who plays the youngest daughter is very funny. The older one is pretty funny too, but I can’t help thinking she was picked mainly because of her looks.
Several minor roles are interesting too. You get to see many familiar faces. Mostly women, but there’s also a really cute young man, who has an affair with a considerably older woman.
In any case, this is a short series of few episodes, that most people should be able to follow.
Ursula Le Guin 2
I thought I’d get round to commenting on Ursula LeGuin’s other three books in the Earthsea series. For years no one thought that there would be any more. The Farthest Shore seemed to end the way you’d expect a ‘final book’ in a series would end. No particular loose ends left.
Still, many years later suddenly there was another book in the series – Tehanu. That time around, it was supposed to be the very last book in the series. In this book, as I mentioned before, the question of the women’s position in Earthsea society is addressed in more detail.
Tenar from The Tombs of Atuan appears in this book again. Now she’s older and as a widow she’s more or less invisible. She is thrown out of her house by her son who returns unexpectedly after many years of absence at sea. An old wizard has left her his house so she moves there to live on her own.
She’s learned from this wizard so she’s quite a good healer and one day she’s called out to see to a little girl who’s been badly burnt. It turns out she’s also been sexually assaulted and abandoned by her family. Actually, the men who assaulted her seem to have been members of her family, but really, her origins are quite different.
Tehanu – the little girl – survives and stays with Tenar, but is very shy and quiet.
I realize that I don’t remember the whole story very well. It’s been a while since I last read it. I do know that Tenar is cursed and so is Ged, who comes to live with her, after he’s lost his powers. Unfortunately, that means he can’t help Tenar.
Help comes from an unexpected source. In the end, Tenar and Ged learn about Tehanu’s true nature.
The next book – Tales from Earthsea – is a collection of stories, as the name implies. One story is longer than the others and it’s about a girl who wants to break the male monopoly for studies in magic. She’s not allowed to, but by then, everything in the world seems to have changed drastically. You get the impression more is to come. A major revolution.
That’s what you get in the very last book – The Other Wind. There you get an explanation of where the dragons went – though there were at least some when Ged became a Dragon Master, meaning someone the dragons will talk to.
As I mentioned before, Ged’s culture is based on magic – other cultures may be too, in Earthsea, but theirs is special in one important way. It’s connected to their gruesome afterlife. A long time ago, a pact was made, but now that isn’t working anymore. Besides, who would want to face that sort of afterlife?
I’m not going to get into many details about this book. Read it yourself. What I can tell you is that this one is even darker and more ‘grownup’ than the other books put together, with the exception of Tehanu. I can’t imagine reading that at the age of 11 or so. Six-year-old girls raped because they’re different… It’s the stuff that nightmares are made of, and this book is pretty nightmarish too.
Like I mentioned before, even Ged is afraid of the afterlife. This time, he doesn’t have any hopes of getting out alive or even with his soul intact.
I can tell you that I hate books with unhappy endings and I can recommend this book, so draw your own conclusions. 🙂
Normally, when a series gets to be long – more than three or four books – I tend to be very suspicious. Fortunately, my fears were not realized. I definitely don’t regret reading this series of books, and I know I will keep re-reading it over the years. Anyone who likes well written fantasy should be able to appreciate the Earthsea series.
Just a word of warning. As I’ve mentioned a few times, some of the books are really dark and tragic. Despite that, I wouldn’t say they’re depressing.
I couldn’t stop reading, because I cared so much about Ged and Tenar and Tehanu and wanted to know what happened to them. Ursula LeGuin can be very happy about her achievement. I know I would be if it had been me. If you haven’t read these books yet, you have something to look forward to. Go on. I envy you. 🙂
Ursula Le Guin
One summer when I was a child, I was on the Swedish island Ă–land, in the Baltic sea. Being the voracious reader that I’ve always been and still am, I had to go to a library. It was a small library in a very small place, and it probably doesn’t exist anymore. In any case, there was a man, who might have been a librarian, or a teacher and he began to ask me about what books I usually liked to read. I told him, then he walked across to one of the bookshelves and picked out a few books.
They were part of the Earthsea trilogy (now there are a few more books in the series). It was almost like magic. That man had found books that suited me perfectly.
Soon, I bought the whole trilogy. I just had to own the books myself and I also wanted to read the first one, which must have been missing that day in the library.
Ursula LeGuin has created a fascinating world. She must have put a lot of work into it, because the whole world is so evolved.It’s easy to visualize the different islands with their diverse cultures.
The first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, is about a little goatherding boy, Ged, whose mother died when he was very young. Ged turns out to have a talent for magic and ends up helping the village witch. One day, enemies attack Ged’s island and with a mixture of cunning and a little magic he manages to save his village. This eventually leads to his being sent away to become the apprentice of a wizard.
There Ged meets a girl, who he tries to impress, and so ends up in trouble. The wizard he was apprenticed to sends him to Roke, the School of Magic. But the shadow Ged has released follows him everywhere. The rest of the book is about how Ged finally manages to ban the evil he set free, in his youthful folly.
The second book, The Tombs of Atuan, is about a young nameless priestess. She serves some nameless gods and leads a dull and somewhat frightening life. One day a man shows up. Until now, she’s only encountered eunuchs and seen the King’s warriors from afar. The priestess is immediately drawn to the stranger who has dared to penetrate into their sanctum.
She’s supposed to kill him, but finds herself reluctant to do so. Instead, she can’t resist going to see him and talk to him, though that’s the last thing she should do. Arha – the Eaten one – can’t forget him and eventually, it leads to a major change in her life. Ged – because it’s Ged who has shown up again, now as the Arch Mage of Roke – gives her back her name and takes her away from the Tombs where she’s spent all her life, at least as much as she can remember.
Ged was on a quest and he was able to conclude it sucessfully., while helping Tenar – the former Eaten One.
You get the impression Tenar has fallen in love with Ged, but a wizard has to be celibate, so he leaves her. She ends up in a relatively good situation, but overall women don’t count for much in Earthsea.
The third book, The Farthest Shore, is more mature and considerably darker. The magic is beginning to run out, in Earthsea. Since everything is based on magic, nothing else works very well in their society. Ged is accompanied by a young prince, who’s trying to save his realm. It doesn’t take very long for Ged to realize that what is happening, isn’t an accident. Someone’s caused the crisis. The trail leads him all the way into death. It’s a horrifying world, where mothers don’t care about their children and everything is barren and dusty. An endless torment. Even a wizard fears death.
Since there will be more books in the series, you might be able to guess that Ged somehow survives. He doesn’t escape unscathed though. At the end of it all, his hair is grey and he’s lost all his powers. The young prince emerges as a new kind of ruler – the Mage King.
Ged is taken unconscious, to Tenar’s home. By now, she’s been married and had children and is now a widow. Since Ged’s lost his powers, he’s allowed to love a woman.
I’ll comment on the rest of the books in the series later.
If you like evolved fantasy worlds with an entire mythology and history and – an important detail – maps, I think you’ll appreciate Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series. The characters are memorable and easy to like.
The first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, is in many ways more of a book for children than the others.
The second book, The Tombs of Atuan, is among other things, a love story, very romantic and sad, but if you don’t like that, you’ll find many different layers to the story.
The third book is more grownup and, as I mentioned before, dark. Here, the fear of death is a constant subtext. You begin to understand what’s waiting for Ged and everyone else – but not Tenar – she’s from another culture, and for some reason it means she doesn’t have to fear the bitter afterlife.
It’s easy to get swept up in this world and be fascinated by the islands with their varied cultures. There’s even a people who live their entire lives on the open sea. It’s all described skillfully and vividly by LeGuin.
Perhaps I should mention something I see as negative.The entire world is rather mysgynist – a patriarchal world. Everything of value is owned by men. Women hardly count, except as bearers of heirs and as an unpaid workforce. To begin with the author doesn’t remark on this in any way. You get the impression that she takes it for granted. Perhaps it isn’t too surprising. She was born in the 1920’s.
Later in the series, it seems as if that problem’s caught her attention. You get some insight into the situation, from Tenar’s point of view and in a way, some comments on it. There will be more in the books I’ll go into later on.
This series of books belongs to my very favorites, so I can really recommend it. I hope you’re going to enjoy it as much as I have and as much as i still do.
Language – Swedish
Here’s the next installment in my little series of posts about my language studies.
First I’d like to mention Swedish. To someone who isn’t Swedish, or lives in Sweden, it might be difficult to explain what is so cool about it. It’s a small language, spoken only by about 9 -10 million people. But it’s an interesting, and, to some people’s ears, beautiful language. I can’t tell if Swedish is beautiful or not. If you’ve heard a language spoken since before you were born, it’s hard to think of it in terms of beautiful or ugly.
Many people here in Sweden tend to think of Swedish as ‘the worst language in the world’. That’s not true, but I’m afraid I thought something like that when I was younger. I was convinced that soon Swedish would die out, swallowed up by a flood of anglicisms. What’s the point of having different languages if they all sound like English, or rather Anglo?
Swedish is expressive, functional, and just as good as any other language in the world. It might be difficult to learn, but again, I can’t tell you how difficult it is. After all, I was born with it.
Swedish might not be spoken on several continents, but it is quite an important language on a smaller scale, around the Baltic sea. It’s spoken by 9 million people in Sweden and 300 000 in Finland. Apart from that, it’s used as a second or third language by the Finnish speaking Finns in Finland, and by many Estonians (that’s in Estonia, to the south of Finland).
Have you ever wondered what the difference is between a dialect and a language. Well, one definition I’ve read is that if you can understand what the other guys are saying (without study), then you’re speaking different dialects, and if not, different languages. And since we in Sweden understand the Norwegians (in Norway) and with some effort, the Danes (in Denmark), but not the Icelanders (in Iceland) or the Finns (in Finland), then in fact, we might be speaking different dialects of Nordic. Perhaps East Nordic.
What we call Swedish is not entirely made up of Ancient Nordic (which might have sounded a bit like Icelandic). In medieval times, Swedish was heavily influenced by German. In fact, back in those days, people in Iceland, Greenland, the British Isles, all of Scandinavia and at least the northern part of Germany understood each other, a bit like Swedes and Danes can understand each other with a bit of effort. I think that’s kind of cool.
Neither do I speak American, as spoken in the US, or Canadian (as spoken by Canadians, at least some of them). Hence Anglo. If you have a better suggestion, please get in touch and let me know.
Swedish, along with the other Nordic languages, other Germanic languages (like German, English and Dutch, Romance languages (like French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese) and even Greek, all belong to the Indo-European language group.
Languages like Finnish, Estonian, Samish (Lap) and Hungarian do not. They belong to the Fenno-Ugrian language group. There are several of these language groups, but I’ll only mention one more, just as an example – the Semitic-Hamitic language group (Arabic and Hebrew).
Language
I’m doing a complete reconstruction of an old site, and I decided to use some of the stuff from my ‘language’ site here instead. The content is more suitable for a blog anyway.
So here goes. If you’re interested in language study, you might find this interesting.
I thought I’d tell you a little about the languages I’ve studied and others that I find interesting. To me, learning languages has turned out to be habit forming. I like to, in a way, collect languages. Two or three isn’t enough. I want to know many. Of course I realize that I’m lucky not to find it too difficult, up to a point. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to become fluent in any language, other than my own – Swedish, and English, (or as I prefer to call it – Anglo).
It’s not just the language in itself that I think is fun. When you study a language, you learn a lot about the country or countries where the language is spoken. The literature, the art, the music, the history – all kinds of things are a part of the language studies.
New story
Late last night, I finished an original story I’d been working on. Actually, I finished the translation so now it’s in both languages. It turned out well, I think, but then I guess I’m partial. LOL
Caved…
I finally caved and got Twitter. It remains to be seen if I’ll have any use for it. Everyone else seems so worked up about it. I have to confess I still don’t see the point, but well, I might warm to it, once I get the hang of it.
Some do it in bed
I started thinking about where I write. The answer is, in bed. I might write at a desk – if I had a study of my own, away from others. At the moment, I’m sharing a house with my mom and my sister and unless I decided to write all night and sleep all day, I wouldn’t get any peace.
Actually, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to write in bed. Many published writers I know of, do this. I think it’s really common. But everyone’s different. Some people prefer to sit at a desk or other table. I guess some like sitting outdoors at a cafĂ© or somewhere else public.
Of course, a laptop (or in my case an iBook) is really a necessity if you want to write in bed. Once you have that all you need is an electric outlet and you’re set to go. Unless you have a rabbit who likes to chew on wires. If you do, I suggest you keep a constant eye on the cable and/or the rabbit. LOL. Be warned, as you might or might not know, some puppies and cats also like to chew on stuff, sometimes wires, so watch out.
Another thing – I prefer to write quite late in the evening or at night. First of all I’m an evening person/night owl. I feel more alert and creative later in the day. It’s also more peaceful around the house and probably, unless you live in a major city, your neigbhorhood too.
Where do you like to write? And at what time?
Gremlins on the web…
I don’t know what’s going on. My site, that’s actually been updated and had a makeover, like I told you about in an earlier blog post, has suddenly changed, seemingly completely by itself. The CSS isn’t working, pages aren’t visible anymore and tables are no longer centered.
It’s so weird. I have no idea how it happened. We weren’t hacked, at least I don’t think so. The web hotel hasn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.
Another thing – I’ve made up an entirely new system for ratings. It would be fun to get it online ‘live’ on the site, but so far my sister – the webmaster – and I haven’t been able to fix these problems.
Oh, well. I’m sure we’ll work it out somehow and then the world will get to see my invention. 🙂
I only just found out why some sites have switched to the FictionRatings system, instead of the movie ratings. The MPAA has threatened to take legal action against anyone using their ratings system.
So that’s the next step in the evolution of the site. New ratings, or rather a new system for the ratings.
There will also be some more useful links, to site with facts about fan fiction. I feel that the knowledge about fan fiction has deteriorated in the years I’ve been active in the fan fiction world. Hopefully, I’ll be able to contribute to restoring that knowledge.
