There is an early renaissance work called The Decameron, by one Italian bloke named Boccaccio. The book is a thinly veiled excuse to collect a bunch of smutty stories under a thinly veiled excuse for a framing plot (ten young men and women escape to the hills outside plague-ridden Florence, and behave themselves with remarkable propriety while telling the dirtiest anecdotes over the fire). I had to read it in college. The concept of gathering anecdotes like this is one of those early european ideas (maybe harking back to Herotodus?) which I rather like; Cervantes did it, as did Chaucer, who probably borrowed from The Decameron, BUT I was not that impressed by The Decameron itself. As an anthropological collection of otherwise censored narrative, sure. As literature: eh.So I suppose I wasn't entirely predisposed to like Ten Days in the Hills, Jane Smiley's "re-visioning" of the 14th century Italian work. All the same, a certain charm and involvement overtook me, and I enjoyed it, maybe despite myself.The book is set in the Hills of LA, right at the onset of the war in Iraq, in (I think) March 2003. The participants are the friends, family, and other acquaintance of a semi-retired film-maker. And they tell a lot of stories. Most are not smutty. Instead, the author adds a bunch of sex between the characters. So the frame narrative is better contrived, and the stories are more interesting. Ultimately, I found the sex... well, gratuitous. The book is literature. It's not porn. You wouldn't read it for that, there's too much of stuff like people talking and doing other things. And in my opinion, the author's attempt at making a mature (I mean both about older people and less juvenile) take on sex doesn't really pan out. The focus on sex feels unwarranted, and drags the natural movement of the work out of proportion. For instance, there are several parent/child relationships. One of the key ones, a father-daughter relationship, gets almost no "air-time," so that the narrator's assertions that they are so close feels unwarranted.Generally speaking, every since college (where I both read a lot of medieval lit and Joyce's Ulysses), I've been fascinated by the premise of adapting earlier works. In this case, I'm not enthusiastic about the choice of adaptation, and even then I don't think that aspect was particularly successful.But the characters *are* interesting; their interactions and relations are also compelling. The dialog is remarkably flat and unnatural (this was accentuated by the fact that I listened to it as an audiobook), but if you can get past that, I think you'd ultimately get sucked into the lives and preoccupations of the characters in the book.So while I couldn't say the book was perfect, I can say you will probably enjoy it, and not regret having read it.
Sometimes it's a blessing to have such a bad mobile phone service provider.No, wait, hear me out!I was in my local city library, and this book caught my eye & fancy. Author Jane Smiley had already impressed me greatly this year with her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Thousand Acres. Now normally, I would have flipped open my Goodreads app there & then and checked the reviews on the unheard of book. Typically though, my phone provider was denying me coverage. Checking reviews of Smiley's latest offering would likely have repelled me, as Ten Days in the Hills rates in here at only two stars, with plenty of abysmal reviews heading the list. As it was then, I had only a promising book blurb and the reputation of a wonderful writer to go on - and I took a chance. Glad I did. Ten Days in the Hills was a surprisingly thought-provoking, hefty, lascivious, thrilling, sexy, intellectual read. I couldn't put it down!When I was a young girl, I loved sitting up at the dinner table, eavesdropping on my parents and their friends deep in conversations far beyond the scope of my own understanding. I hung on their every word, trying to make sense of it, and in doing so - of my own place in the world. Ten Days in the Hills made me feel as little girl listening in to conversations again, following what I could of the banter, and locating my own viewpoint within all of it.Ten Days in the Hills is a contemporary and clever re-imagining of The Decameron, the 14th-century medieval allegory by Boccaccio, in which ten nobles flee plague-ridden Florence to an empty countryside villa for two weeks and then spend that time telling bawdry tales of love, wit, practical jokes and life lessons. In Ten Days in the Hills, we find ourselves in the wake of the 2003 Oscars just as the US is beginning its invasion of Iraq. Here, ten people (including a legendary director, a famous movie star and a yogi) "run for the hills" - the Hollywood hills, to be precise - in avoidance of the Iraq War media coverage. Over the next ten days, they re-watch & discuss old movies, gossip, have plenty of gratuitous sex, repair old relationships and begin new ones, and share their comic, disturbing, tragic, buoyant, vapid, fascinating tales. It is such an interesting time in history in which to set a fly-on-the-wall novel, very easy for the reader to recall those media-saturated days as the invasion of Iraq began. I myself was a journalism student at university at the time, and we were studying the media coverage of the war intensively. Reading this novel then, I found it very easy to place myself back in that period, amid the fear, judgement and dismay. Ten Days in the Hills was smart and scintillating read.
What do You think about Ten Days In The Hills (2007)?
I'm a huge fan of Smiley's writing and regard The Greenlanders and A Thousand Acres as two of the best books I've ever read, so I was slightly surprised to get stuck with this book twice before I started again and read it all the way through. One of the things that is notable and enjoyable about Smiley's work is her constant play with literary form, with a very explicit consideration of the fit the between genre and subject matter. This works particularly well in the coupling of Norse chronicle with the tale of the demise of the C13 Greenland colony and the blend of picaresque and confessional novel form with the The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. Ten Days in the Hills is modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron with each day of the ten day a mosaic of the past and present stories of the characters, with the Iraq war occupying the narrative place of the Black Death. Somehow, whilst the individual parts are at turns, delightful, engaging and though-provoking, there is an sense in which the elements don't reconcile into a meaningful whole, even after reading and leave the reader with a heightened sense of the complexity of life, where exquisite art, natural beauty, love and love-making sit alongside war, greed and suffering. This is no doubt intentional, but it means we too, as readers, are denied the pleasure we get from sense-making function art can provide in a complex and contradictory world.
—Stephanie
I didn't dig this book. I found it boring, and, because of that, it took a long time for me to slog through. It was essentially a modern-day retelling of The Decameron, set in Hollywood. The one part I did enjoy was the discussion of movies, both real and imagined, that the characters participated in. And the book did make me want to go and rent some classic movies I've never seen. There is just something about Smiley's style, I guess, that I don't like. I didn't care for A Thousand Acres, either.
—Gretchen
Having not been able to get through "The Greenlanders" but having memories of having enjoyed "Moo" long ago, I was ready for this to go in either direction. Moo had struck a chord because I also have experience with being a faculty member at a land-grant school in the Upper Midwest. "Ten Days" resonates with me because I grew up in the Hollywood Hills. (Hm, maybe my problem with "The Greenlanders" is that I've never spent ten years huddling around a fire saying things like, "Bah! Woman! Tell Grimkorn and Høffelstådsdottir it is time for our evening meat.") Ethnographically, she is eerily accurate, even down to the incessant talking about fitness regimens, performative orthorexia, alternative religions, and the ritual recitation of one's exact driving routes (just like in the Saturday Night Live skit "The Californians," incidentally). I enjoyed it quite a bit, but, as in "Moo," I didn't feel that she really was getting behind any of the characters. Not that one has to do so—far from it; in fact, the best comic novels resolutely refuse to—but there was not that lusty amorality either that the best comedies of manners have. I even felt, perhaps, that Smiley was tossing this book out there hoping that someone would turn it into a movie? If so, let's hope she didn't offend any possible suitors by portraying them too realistically in this book.Also, the set-up was contrived but self-consciously so: a disparate group of people, including uneasy in-laws, steps, and other semi-kin, tossed together in an isolated mansion for ten days. Their hosts, for part of it, are some elusive, mysterious Russian billionaires. I kept waiting for the dénouement, when one finally finds out what the Russians' deal is, but instead they simply evaporate one day. Which is fine, though. Life is like that. Some Russians just evaporate.
—Christopher Roth
