“Grim Fandango is in my soul,” I said.
That was high praise, because I don’t
use the word “soul” very often (like punch-lines, eyeliner, or eighties music, I find the word most powerful when kept in moderation).
And even if I did—even if I elucidated exactly which works of fiction I’ve held inside my heart of hearts—the list wouldn’t be very long.
Example: A List of Awesome Fiction According
to Danica.
1. Malcolm
Lowry’s Under the Volcano
2. Tanya
Huff’s Smoke series
3. Frasier
4. Everything
by Tamora Pierce: stories where girls struggle through the pitfalls of
chauvinistic societies to prove their worth.
5. The Left Hand of Darkness.
6. Avatar: The Last Airbender
7. Dealing with Dragons
8. Unfortunately,
The Animorphs. And don’t get me started on the
utter irresponsibility of K.A. Applegate toward her fans, with that
series. I mean, killing off the most
awesome character and making all the others suffer for years from PTSS? When did she forget, along the line, that
most of her readers were ten to fourteen years old, and would view the
character’s death as if it were a real-life tragedy? Grrrrr.
I may write unhappy endings, during my career as a novelist, but I swear
this now: I will never, never expose
child-readers to that kind of despair.
9. Okay,
sorry. I’m just really mad at K.A.
Applegate still.
Here’s another one, to clear the palate: the bumbling, moody,
good-hearted Schmendrick the Magician, from The
Last Unicorn.
10. Scott
Pilgrim vs. the World
That’s a pretty short list, considering
what a story-rich world we live in today.
Like I said, Grim Fandango is
in carefully-selected company. And yes,
I know: my tastes are peculiar, or at least specific…
Anyway, two weeks ago I wrote about my
end-of-high-school trip to Costa Rica.
I’d like to explain that Latin America—as a place and an idea—first got
under my skin many years earlier than that, with Grim Fandango. A computer
game produced in the late 90s by Lucas Arts (the studio that gave us classics
like Monkey Island), it was a witty
puzzle-based RPG that took place in limbo.
The storyline centered around the struggles of
Manny Calaveras, a grunt in the Department of Death. Manny’s problem: he’s stuck working off the
sins he committed in life (though he can’t remember what they were) by playing
grim reaper in the 1st Underworld.
His goal is to move on to the 9th Underworld, where he’ll get
to enter a new phase of existence—but his job is rigged by the mafia. Playing straight and square, he’ll never get
out of this lively, colorful, corrupt purgatory. We join him as he defects from the Department
of Death, helps a league of freedom fighters, buys a casino, sails to the end
of the Underworld, escapes from an underwater prison, finds true love, battles
demon beavers, and uses catchy one-liners to restore justice to the land of the
dead.
Every character in the game is a
skeleton, of course: reminiscent of the skull-candy that Mexican children collect
on El Dia de los Muertos. And since the
occupants of limbo are already dead, of course, the only people they’re really
afraid of are the florists—because the florists can plant them, and force their
bones to decompose.
Never trust a florist.
While I love Monkey Island, Sam and Max
Hit the Road, and other classics from LucasArts in the 90s (there really
aren’t any funny video games nowadays that compare), Grim
Fandango is the only one that’s in my soul.
The soundtrack is amazing, the characters are endearing, and I didn’t
see world-building as imaginative as that again until I watched Studio Ghibli’s
Spirited Away.
&
Speaking of Latin America (What can I
say? It’s under my skin), now I’m
reading Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,
by Mario Vargas Llosa. That’s the book
that won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.
Unlike most Nobel Prize winners (which tend to be heavy works about
disenfranchisement), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
is an absolute joy to read: it’s funny, sexy, culturally detailed, and has that
great Latin American style of symbolism which elaborates everyday events into tragi-comic
dramas. The novel is set in Lima, Peru,
during the heyday of the radio serials that preceded telenovelas. The protagonist is a young man who tells two interwoven
stories: first, how he makes friends with Pedro Camancho, the king of the radio
scriptwriters—a short, self-absorbed Bolivian who can spin up a murder or a
stirring taboo romance at the drop of a hat... and second, how he starts an
affair with his recently divorced Aunt Julia.
This book is wry, witty, and brimming
with useful advice for young writers.
Maybe that’s why I like it so much.
&
In one of the books I read as a kid (I
believe it was called “The Last Wizard”), the main character finds out that she
was created by seven goddesses.
When she sees herself in a mirror, she sees the goddesses’ faces instead
of her own. “Is there nothing left of me
without them?” she asks sadly.
Sometimes I wonder how much of me would
be left without all the books and movies and shows I love: who would I be if
I’d grown up in an igloo in Antarctica, no VHS player, no musty old copies of
Jane Eyre lying around? I’m sure there’d
be somebody left—but how would she talk? What kind of crackers would she eat? Would she wear hats?
Those are questions (ironically) that can be
answered in fiction, and nowhere else.
Good thing there's so much fiction around.
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