Roundabout Question about Mythago Wood [spoilery]

[marydell]

Here are some things that annoy me when I encounter them in my travels:

1. stories in which the narrator/protagonist is a boring person, who encounters people who are interesting, and ponders their interestingness and is perhaps mildly changed by the encounter, but is still a boring person.  This is a popular thing in lit-fic and old-school modernism (Fitzgerald, sheesh) but it also wanders into genres I actually like, too. 

2. stories in which unlikeable people fall in love with each other and we learn all about their boring awful romance despite not liking them enough to give a rip about it.  I really loved Little, Big until I had to wade through 12 thousand pages of Auberon and Sylvie's incredibly tedious relationship.  (I realize this is blasphemy and Little, Big is the bestest most wonderful novel ever. I even thought so myself, for the first half of it).

3. stories in which a man falls in love with a woman he created or dreamed, unless the point of the story is to explore what a narcissistic douchebag that makes him.  I deeply, deeply hate this, because the idea that an actual woman can be contained within the imagination of a man is...grrr.

So. I'm 100 pages into Mythago Wood and I'm finding the narrator verrry passive and hovering on the edge of dull, although the prose is so good I'm still pretty interested in the Wood.  And then there's a burgeoning romance that's just...no.  So my question for those who have read it is, should I keep reading? Or is it just going to piss me off more and more and make me wish I'd moved along to some other book?

Comments

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I loved it when I read it (and I seem to recall the second half being favoured), but that was so many years ago I genuinely can't remember enough plot to answer your question.

(And an actual woman couldn't be encompassed in a dream, naturally, but plenty of people fall in love rather before they meet all the dimensions of a person. So I can see ways to explore that concept that don't end with narcissistic douchebag. But not ones that don't prove that the imagination failed to cover everything.)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I don't mean dreaming about an actual person and then meeting her; I mean dreaming about an imaginary woman and then having some magic whoosis make her real. Pygmalion stories. Which seems to be what he's setting up in MW. I like the way Solaris (recentish movie version; haven't read yet) handles a similar trope--she challenges his perception of her, and complains about what his imagination & memory are making her into.

I'm loving the prose and the basic concept a lot, so I'm forging on, but I'm increasingly squicked by the narrator's fascination with Guiwenneth, whereas I think I'm supposed to be rooting for him.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I think the "romance" gets worse, and I haven"t been able to finish, despite the good writing. YMMV

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I couldn't finish _Big, Little_ for the same reasons, and the sexism of _Mythago Wood_ annoyed me incredibly.

That said, worth the slog. Lovely to read a man who's done his research and understands the differences between British, Celtic, Saxon, and Norman stuff.

Also, the plot picks up.

[redrose3125.livejournal.com]

I didn't like this book at all, but I don't remember/ never articulated why.