It's wrong! The code is all wrong!
Jan. 3rd, 2012 02:53 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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kippurcritiquesbadbooksChapter twenty five is a page. Barely. It's not even a chapter. It's a scene. Scenes are not chapters... or at least, scenes that are chapters are usually longer than a couple of paragraphs. The chapter is supposed to significantly move the story forward, there should be characters taking actions that result in something happening, or there should be character development or something should be revealed to the reader. None of this happens.
In this "Chapter" Fache learns that Langdon didn't call the Embassy and instead called Sophie. Also, we learn that "The [U.S. Embassy] is considered U.S. Soil, meaning all those who stand on it are subject to the same laws and protections as they would encounter standing in the United States." Which is wrong. The soil is still considered part of the foreign country, but the outside government has to ask permission to come in and retrieve people. \~/
Anyway, that was chapter twenty five.
Twenty six, we go back to the Mona Lisa, finally. Brown tells us that since its been in the Louvre she's been stolen twice, most recently in 1911. Unfortunately, I've been able to find no information in regards to this first theft. Also he says, "Parisians wept in the streets and wrote newspaper articles begging the thieves for the painting's return. Two years later, the Mona Lisa was discovered hidden in the false bottom of a trunk in a Florence hotel room." A Time magazine article says, however, "Then the Louvre received word from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Italian officials said they had arrested a man named Vincenzo Perugia, who had brought the Mona Lisa to a local antiques dealer in order to sell it and restore it to Italy." Time article So, that's two things blatantly wrong. \~/, \~/
Langdon then goes on a monologue \~/ about the Mona Lisa and how Da Vinci's reverence for the picture has nothing to do with it's artistic Mastery but instead about how it is a joke about the Sacred Feminine \~/, he does this in a flash back to a class with in a prison, \~/. Brown also has Langdon mention that the Mona Lisa may be Da Vinci in drag. And that he was gay (which has not been proven) \~/ \~/ and that the Mona Lisa was supposed to be androgynous because her name is an anagram of Amon (The Egyptian god of male fertility)and his counterpart Isis who's ancient pictogram was once called, L'isa. \~/ \~/, which is impossible because Da Vinci never named the painting. It was named by other people. \~/
So, in this extremely long discussion of the painting which should be about whatever it is on the painting... everything discussed is wrong. And is all about Brown trying to be clever about his puzzles and things. One would think that a professor of Langdon's supposed intelligence and learning, would know that the Mona Lisa wasn't named until much later and therefor couldn't be part of his feminine mystique. \~/
The big problem with this is that an average reader isn't going to know much about this stuff (And indeed I've been having to do a lot of research on it) and so they're going to be trusting Brown to be giving them correct information because he says that everything he talks about is true in the very beginning of the book. This, I feel, is a violation of the reader's trust. The reader has certain expectations when the read a book. Sure, they don't expect everything to be accurate, that's what the suspension of disbelief is all about. Most of the time they want to go along for the ride. The anagrams and puzzling clues would be very interesting, if they were presented in a way that the reader could puzzle along with the characters. But the fact that Brown has I want to say deliberately put in miss-information, betrays the reader's trust. The author has a certain responsibility to their readers to take them through the story and give the information that is relevant and true for that story. This is what every writer has to do. If the horses in a world are always yellow, then the author is obliged to the reader that in some fashion. If the United States lost the War of Independence, again the author is obliged to tell their readers that. If the author tells the reader that things in the book are true then the things in the book better be true, because the reader is trusting the author on this.
This is different than the idea of the unreliable narrator which is, "A narrator who, for some reason, cannot or does not fully comprehend the world about him or her and whose conclusions and judgments the reader thus mistrusts. An author who uses an unreliable narrator generally provides clues indicating the narrator's fallibility and expects the reader to be wary of the narrator reports. Some authors, however, may purposely fail to provide the reader with the means to correct the narrator's false perceptions; others even intentionally fail to give the reader adequate clues to determine whether a narrator is unreliable in the first place" (page 413 the Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms). Some may say that then Langdon might be the unreliable narrator, but again the unreliability happens even when Langdon isn't narrating and the things that end up wrong are, according to BROWN and not any of his characters, true. Brown wants us to trust his characters. He wants us to see how awesome and intelligent they are. He's not going to make them fallible by making them unreliable. That would ruin their hero status.
That aside after our digression onto the Mona Lisa, we finally see something on the painting itself! Or at least the glass. Six words. So, apparently, Grandpa had enough time to walk into the Mona Lisa's room write on it, walk back out without leaving a blood trail, walk to the back of the gallery, write a message in the invisible ink, undress, fold his clothes up neatly, draw something in his blood and position himself in a specific placement before dying of a gunshot wound. And all of this without bleeding all over the place.
But, he can't sit around, hold his insides and wait for help to come.
Right.
\~/, \~/ That one deserves two drinks there.
Do we get to know what these six words are? No.
I believe they might be "I'm dying and I'm an idiot!" \~/
Drinks: 14
In this "Chapter" Fache learns that Langdon didn't call the Embassy and instead called Sophie. Also, we learn that "The [U.S. Embassy] is considered U.S. Soil, meaning all those who stand on it are subject to the same laws and protections as they would encounter standing in the United States." Which is wrong. The soil is still considered part of the foreign country, but the outside government has to ask permission to come in and retrieve people. \~/
Anyway, that was chapter twenty five.
Twenty six, we go back to the Mona Lisa, finally. Brown tells us that since its been in the Louvre she's been stolen twice, most recently in 1911. Unfortunately, I've been able to find no information in regards to this first theft. Also he says, "Parisians wept in the streets and wrote newspaper articles begging the thieves for the painting's return. Two years later, the Mona Lisa was discovered hidden in the false bottom of a trunk in a Florence hotel room." A Time magazine article says, however, "Then the Louvre received word from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Italian officials said they had arrested a man named Vincenzo Perugia, who had brought the Mona Lisa to a local antiques dealer in order to sell it and restore it to Italy." Time article So, that's two things blatantly wrong. \~/, \~/
Langdon then goes on a monologue \~/ about the Mona Lisa and how Da Vinci's reverence for the picture has nothing to do with it's artistic Mastery but instead about how it is a joke about the Sacred Feminine \~/, he does this in a flash back to a class with in a prison, \~/. Brown also has Langdon mention that the Mona Lisa may be Da Vinci in drag. And that he was gay (which has not been proven) \~/ \~/ and that the Mona Lisa was supposed to be androgynous because her name is an anagram of Amon (The Egyptian god of male fertility)and his counterpart Isis who's ancient pictogram was once called, L'isa. \~/ \~/, which is impossible because Da Vinci never named the painting. It was named by other people. \~/
So, in this extremely long discussion of the painting which should be about whatever it is on the painting... everything discussed is wrong. And is all about Brown trying to be clever about his puzzles and things. One would think that a professor of Langdon's supposed intelligence and learning, would know that the Mona Lisa wasn't named until much later and therefor couldn't be part of his feminine mystique. \~/
The big problem with this is that an average reader isn't going to know much about this stuff (And indeed I've been having to do a lot of research on it) and so they're going to be trusting Brown to be giving them correct information because he says that everything he talks about is true in the very beginning of the book. This, I feel, is a violation of the reader's trust. The reader has certain expectations when the read a book. Sure, they don't expect everything to be accurate, that's what the suspension of disbelief is all about. Most of the time they want to go along for the ride. The anagrams and puzzling clues would be very interesting, if they were presented in a way that the reader could puzzle along with the characters. But the fact that Brown has I want to say deliberately put in miss-information, betrays the reader's trust. The author has a certain responsibility to their readers to take them through the story and give the information that is relevant and true for that story. This is what every writer has to do. If the horses in a world are always yellow, then the author is obliged to the reader that in some fashion. If the United States lost the War of Independence, again the author is obliged to tell their readers that. If the author tells the reader that things in the book are true then the things in the book better be true, because the reader is trusting the author on this.
This is different than the idea of the unreliable narrator which is, "A narrator who, for some reason, cannot or does not fully comprehend the world about him or her and whose conclusions and judgments the reader thus mistrusts. An author who uses an unreliable narrator generally provides clues indicating the narrator's fallibility and expects the reader to be wary of the narrator reports. Some authors, however, may purposely fail to provide the reader with the means to correct the narrator's false perceptions; others even intentionally fail to give the reader adequate clues to determine whether a narrator is unreliable in the first place" (page 413 the Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms). Some may say that then Langdon might be the unreliable narrator, but again the unreliability happens even when Langdon isn't narrating and the things that end up wrong are, according to BROWN and not any of his characters, true. Brown wants us to trust his characters. He wants us to see how awesome and intelligent they are. He's not going to make them fallible by making them unreliable. That would ruin their hero status.
That aside after our digression onto the Mona Lisa, we finally see something on the painting itself! Or at least the glass. Six words. So, apparently, Grandpa had enough time to walk into the Mona Lisa's room write on it, walk back out without leaving a blood trail, walk to the back of the gallery, write a message in the invisible ink, undress, fold his clothes up neatly, draw something in his blood and position himself in a specific placement before dying of a gunshot wound. And all of this without bleeding all over the place.
But, he can't sit around, hold his insides and wait for help to come.
Right.
\~/, \~/ That one deserves two drinks there.
Do we get to know what these six words are? No.
I believe they might be "I'm dying and I'm an idiot!" \~/
Drinks: 14
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