Of cannon and commas and other misdirection

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that when I read QoA, I didn't realize that the cannon the Eddisians took with them on their way to steal the queen were wooden until Eugenides told Attolia so. I am comforted by the belief that this was deliberate misdirection by the author rather than me being egregiously stupid. I was just re-reading that part again, and noticed how tricky a comma can be.

The book says, "Those in the rear struggled with block and tackle, roughly squared wooden beams, wooden carriages and cannon." Which of course means "wooden carriages and wooden cannon." If it had said "wooden carriages, and cannon," it wouldn't have. But when reading through it for the first time I didn't even notice the absence of the comma, and automatically assumed that cannon = metal. Brilliant writing! Brilliant, sneaky, writing!

Speaking of misdirection: Since I read QoA last of the three, I knew what happened. Somebody who read the books in the proper order, please tell me: in the scene where Eugenides proposes stealing the Queen of Attolia, did you get the idea through most of the discussion that what he was planning was to kill her? Until the very end when Eddis said, "All right, go and steal the queen of Attolia? (And I still can't quite figure out if he announced in open Council, "By the way, I want to marry her because I love her." Or did Eddis just figure it out for herself?)

I spend a lot of my re-reading time smacking myself in the head and saying, "Well, of course! How obvious! How could I have missed that?"

Leslie

Comments

[jyms.livejournal.com]

mm a comma can make a lot of difference. like the 'eats shoots and leaves' thing.

i read QoA, then KoA, then Thief. well i wasn't really thinking very hard when reading QoA, i was just reading. so i never pondered over what Gen wanted to do to Attolia. it didn't help that i couldn't resist the temptation and read the ending first of all... ;)

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" = favorite nonfiction book EVER.

[(Anonymous)]

[I confess I read the ending of QoA first, too. Bad reader! But it didn't spoil anything, oddly. It made me begin by saying, "No! No! That can't possibly happen!" and then I had to read the book to find out how it had.]

One of my recent head-smacking moments was Attolia waking in the middle of the night, looking at the shadows in her room and realizing she's not sure she wants the shadows to be empty. I just don't remember that paragraph being there from the first ten readings... Or maybe it's Attolia who should be doing the head-smacking. Get with it, honey! You're in love with that guy that used to hide in your room!

-Philia

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

Psychiatrist escorts patient to couch. "Just lie down, Your Majesty, and relax. Now, you say you keep thinking about a broken amphora, ever since you whacked the hand off of a young man. Tell me about this amphora. Was it a good amphora? Oh, it was your *favorite* amphora. And you accidentally broke it? Ah. So it was your fault that it was broken. And now you keep thinking about it. Feeling guilty. Guilty feelings, about breaking, one might say, hurting, something that you loved."

Psychiatrist smacks patient one upside the head. "Get with it, honey! You're in love with the man! Now, while we're at it, you want to talk about this defensive mechanism where you keep dwelling on how young he is?"

Leslie, who suspects she's posting way too much but is having so much fun...

[ceecee44.livejournal.com]

I never understood why she didn't want the shadows to be empty, but I think it's clear now.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, this newly-discovered (for me) line set me thinking in a certain way about the whole business of Eugenides watching her all this time and how she feels about it. He loves her, and this "stalking" of his, leaving notes and gifts and letting her know she's there, is his desperate attempt to get through to her (behind those stone walls he describes later to Eddis). On the one hand (sorry, hands again, it seems to write itself), Attolia is furious, terrified, creeped out by this (as most of us would be in similar circumstances, even without state secrets to protect). On the other, in some weird way he actually does succeed in getting through. When she's looking at the empty shadows, she misses him. Some part of her understood that when he was lurking there she wasn't completely alone.
-Philia

[(Anonymous)]

Oops, I mean "letting her know he's there." Typo.
-P.

[peggy-2.livejournal.com]

Some part of her understood that when he was lurking there she wasn't completely alone.

That's an excellent observation! Wow. Very good :)

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

Philia wrote: "On the one hand (sorry, hands again, it seems to write itself)"

Hand written?

Bwahahahahaha!

Leslie

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's it exactly. I LOVE that scene where she's trying to decide if she wants them to be empty. Gah. So much love for longingforlove!Attolia.

[rowana.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I read the book in order the first time, but this was years ago. I may have spoiled the ending of QoA for myself too, because I can't remember getting the impression that Gen was planning on killing Irene when I read that scene, though that would have been the obvious thing to think.

Hmm, thing is, I'm pretty sure we discussed this on the comm ages ago. I'll re-read and take a look in the archives and see if I can find the discussion. :)

[estarria.livejournal.com]

I didn't notice the cannon were wooden the first time through either (though I do remember wondering how they managed to put 12 cannon on one riverboat :P). And I've certainly never seen that missing comma...good grief, that was tricksy.

I don't remember ever thinking that Eugenides was going to kill her, but I wasn't expecting the marriage proposal either. (But I read QoA first, btw.) I guess I just assumed he'd take her to Eddis and there'd be a trial or something...whatever they did with queens they wanted to depose back then.

There was a discussion recently about when Eddis knew that Eugenides loved Attolia...I don't think anyone ever came to a final conclusion, but no one seemed to think that he told the whole council he loved Attolia. But Eddis knew right after that meeting, so either he told her after everyone left or she knew/figured it out a good deal earlier.

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

I don't remember being surprised that the cannon were wodden. They floated downriver when some got loose, and were found in a pool, and there is a line about them being at the bottom of the river, had they been made out of iron. At one point Xenophon called them "those worthless cannon of yours" and, as someone said, they all fit on one boat.

I did, however, think that Eugenides might be going to steal Attolia in order to kill her. I thought he was very changed and might no longer have qualms about killing when it was necessary to save his country. I was floored by the conversation in the boat. The entire book shifted for me then, the same way the ending in Thief probably did for most readers. I read QoA first.

[emerald-happy.livejournal.com]

"I don't remember being surprised that the cannon were wooden. They floated downriver when some got loose, and were found in a pool, and there is a line about them being at the bottom of the river, had they been made out of iron. At one point Xenophon called them "those worthless cannon of yours" and, as someone said, they all fit on one boat." Same here. I wasn't that surprised.

I read reviews of QoA first so i knew Gen was going to try to marry her. I didn't guess that he loved her.

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

I thought the cannon were on some sort of rafts that kept them afloat. And when it comes to the pool, the book says, "The cannon were found at the edge of the pool, "and Xenophon says "Thank the gods we don't have to dig them off the bottom." And then it talks about how deep the pool is, and "The bottom was invisible in the darkness, and retrieving cast-iron cannon from the depths would have been impossible." I just figured that it was just lucky that they had landed near the edge where they could be retrieved even though they were cast-iron. And when they put twelve cannon on the same riverboat and hoped nobody noticed, I wasn't thinking about the weight, I was thinking they hoped nobody had noticed that they were gathering so many cannon together in one place, and wondering why.

My shifting-of-view in KoA, the first I read, though I had had suspicions before, was when the wounded Eugenides pulled the Queen to him and kissed her. It was a sort of "Aha! My suspicions are confirmed!" moment, when I rethought a lot of the things that had happened.

Leslie the Mad Poster

[rain-ing.livejournal.com]

Leslie the Mad Poster

i think people here are generally mad :P

the part that clinched it for me was after he said he wanted to marry her and after her sharp comment he flushed in the dark. that was when i was like, OMG really!?

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

Leslie the Mad Poster

I see we have sucked you into the black hole that is LJ Sounis. More addicting than crack.

[rowana.livejournal.com]

More addicting than crack

*rubs hands together and cackles gleefully*

..Yup. It really is.

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

And yet, did I see any sort of warning anywhere on the page when I so innocently signed up? I did not.

Shame on you! Shame, I say!

Leslie

[willow-41z.livejournal.com]

I always liked when Attolia asked how they got the twelve cannon past the army, and Gen says they were wooden, and she calls him a bastard, and he gives her the archer-scoring smile and says, "Not that I know." I liked it because earlier in the chapter she had thought that he would not smile-- especially that particular smile-- even to gloat. She had misunderstood what he was there for.

But really, I can see how some people thinking it would be easier to kill her than make her love him! Not knowing what was going on in both of their heads.

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

And yay for that smiling bit! Oh. Have I mentioned how much I adore these books?

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, and I think, on first reading, I really didn't WANT him to love her. Partly just remembering that delicious put-down from "Thief" (Something like,"Discretion prevented me from saying I thought she was a fiend from hell, and mountain lions couldn't persuade me to enter her service.")but also the hand-cutting-off. I kept thinking, "No, he can't be telling the truth here," and I had to go back later and pick up all the clues that he'd loved her all along, and that she loved him, too, without knowing it. I had a similar feeling just reading the beginning of KoA -- I didn't WANT Costis to be the POV character. I was thinking, "No, no, no, I don't want to see things from the eyes of some guard I don't even know."
Of course, I was over that in about half a page...
-Philia

[emerald-happy.livejournal.com]

That's exactly how I felt at first!

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

Me, too, Philia. I didn't want him to love her because I couldn't imagine that she could deserve him, or be loveable. I had to read QoA several times before I really felt comfortable with it and could see through Attolia's act.

[ceecee44.livejournal.com]

I felt the same about Costis POV. I wanted to be in Gen's head, but after reading the first couple of pages, I forgot about it completely.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

That comma that isn't there is a matter of style. Some people would write that sentence without the comma even if the cannon weren't of wood. (I am not among them.) So when you see a sentence without that serial comma, you might have to know the author's preferences in order to interpret it.

Here (http://mark.cracksandshards.com/Whom-peeves.html#serial_comma)'s my opinion on it.

Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, good doctor.

I was asking this in the conspiracy room earlier--is it LETH-ee-um, or LEETH-ee-um? The narcotic made from poppies, that is. Which do you think?

[(Anonymous)]

Surely this is up to the reader. If you assumed all these things actually were in ancient Greek (which, given that it's not ACTUALLY ancient Greece, would be inaccurate right there), that would be one thing, but this is an Anglicization/Americanization of the words and names, so I think you should go with whatever falls trippingly from the tongue. I prefer "Leeth" as that's how I first chose to pronounce "Lethe," but no, that's not what it would be in Greek.
-Philia

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I'd say LEETH-ee-um. It's obviously related to "Lethe", the river of forgetfulness in the Greek underworld. See these references in Encyclopædia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9047929/Lethe) and Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology (http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/gallery/lethe_c.html).

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

I know about the differences of opinion regarding the use of commas when listing things. I vaguely recall that in EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES (or is it EATS SHOOTS AND LEAVES? I can't remember), the author discusses it and points out that the British usage differs from the American.

However, while I agree that:
"hamburgers, hot dogs, and french fries" is the same as
"hamburgers, hot dogs and french fries,"
the sentence here seems different.

"block and tackle, roughly squared wooden beams, wooden carriages and cannon"

Maybe it's the repetition of "wooden." Or it might be the adjective in front of the penultimate noun. Let's see:

goldfish, compactly built fluffy guinea pigs, fluffy cats and dogs
goldfish, compactly built fluffy guinea pigs, fluffy cats, and dogs.

To me the first one indicates that both the cats and the dogs (as well as the guinea pigs, of course) are fluffy, but the second one indicates that the dogs aren't fluffy, or at least not necessarily.

I suppose that's it, actually: "wooden carriages and cannon" leaves the possibility that both the carriages and cannon are wooden, but "wooden carriages, and cannon" seems to divorce the cannon from the wooden. And since I didn't notice that the comma wasn't there, I was mentally separating the two, as well.

Leslie

[(Anonymous)]

I read QoA first, then The Thief, then KoA...I think it's interesting that only Thief is written in the first person. Even then, Gen still isn't giving any information away.

I didn't get that the cannons were wooden until Eugenides tells Attolia...

I love the part in QoA where Attolia has been kidnapped, and Eugenides comes into her tent...and she's totally not expecting him to kiss her and is furious when she does...

~Feir Dearig

[(Anonymous)]

when he does, I mean.

Oops.

~Feir Dearig