Errant Reader

I’ve decided to keep this post short. The fact that I’m on vacation has nothing to do with this decision.

Is anyone buying this? No? Ok, fair enough. Truth is, it has been so long since I’ve had a real vacation that I’m forcing myself to take it easy. There is a lot to dig into in this chapter, but I’m keeping it simple. Here are a couple quick points on this week’s chapter:

– I’ve turned into a softy since I first read this book. I found myself skimming Schoenmaker’s detailed description of the operation much as I would quickly excuse myself from hearing the details of gruesome injuries and other misplaced dinner conversation topics.

– I found most of my attention on Schoenmaker’s back-story. Admittedly, the fist thing I thought of was a desperate desire that Scheonmaker was a partial inspiration for the character Woodhouse on Archer. That may have influenced my reading for a little bit. After I got over the wished for connection, I started paying a bit more attention to the decay that corrupts Schoenmaker’s ostensibly pure designs for becoming a plastic surgeon. After seeing Godolphin’s die through his rejection of the inanimate materials used to rebuild his face after the war, Schoenmaker turns to medicine to counter the actions of doctors like the one that kills Godolphin. The narrator notes, “if alignment with the inanimate is the mark of a Bad Guy, Schoenmaker at least made a sympathetic beginning” (101). The emphasis on “bad guy” through the capitalization indicates that we’re not expected to read this as easy categorizations of good and evil. Schoenmaker’s turn is described specifically as a decay, which in turn is intriguing since decay and rejection were exactly what destroys Godolphin, Schoenmaker’s inspiration. That decay is itself a turn away from the natural – in the case of Schoenmaker this means destroying noses to create more appealing, if unnatural, shapes. For V. it suggests the insidious move away from the natural and towards the mechanical. As I recall, Profane’s stint at Yoyodyne will expand on this theme.