Ceci n'est pas un blog

It's been great having the dogs here. Even with the constant rain and the muddy paws/dirty floors that result. We walk to the center of the park which is only a couple blocks away but maybe the equivalent of 8 to 10 stories up. Everytime they see a duck they want to give chase. They met a black chow mix and exchanged business cards. An American colleague is headed back to Seattle this weekend and will return in January with his dog - hopefully we can arrange some play dates.

In between all this excitement, I managed to finish Transmission by Hari Kunzru whose first book, The Impressionist, was well received.

This book is an easy read, quick and clever. It's about an Indian IT worker in America, a Bollywood rising starlet on location in Scotland, and a marketing executive who talks in a sort of extreme bullshit bingo version of marketing-speak. It's about a computer virus unleashed to do a small but perceptable amount of damage that ends up affecting the lives not just of these characters but of the businesses and services and more all around the world.

What's good about this book is that is a quick read, moving back and forth among an increasingly large cast of characters fluidly. There is a lot of humor and satire and I think does a decent job of talking about the software issues with enough detail to be credible but not so much that it's dated or anyone in the industry would just laugh at the technobabble. One thing I particularly liked was that all sorts of ancillary characters get their own story and point of view across. The marketing exec's attractive but cold girlfriend with a job in PR becomes a major character about whom we end up knowing more than Leela, the actress at the center of the book.

What's frustrating about the book is that he doesn't really commit to it being a humor/satire piece and so the more charicatured people end up not quite fitting in with the more realistic people. Arjun's boss at a Redmond anti-virus company is clearly overblown for comic effect but his tattooed, bi-sexual, casual drug user colleague, Christine, is actually not so far off the mark from some people I've known. I found myself wishing he had gone all-out extreme satire or reined in these fringe characters to a slightly more real-world plausibility. The other problem is that the IT culture is a tad out of date. In 1998, I think this would have really rung true. It seems to be taking place right at that moment when opportunities started to change from "we'll fund anything" to "you ought to go start generating some revenue before calling a venture capital company". Things haven't quite gone bust across the board but there's an nasty sucking sound approaching and lots of people are caught along the way that might have felt more convincing if he had just explicitly set the book a few years earlier.

Overall: a fun quick read with some genuinely great moments and a fair amount of humor (mostly at the expense of the all-spin-and-no-substance global brand imagineers) and some real pathos in the plight of a high-tech immigrant worker whose dreams of silicon valley riches are dashed on the jagged rocks of visa requirements and the near indentured servitude of the body-shop who brings him to the States. At his best Kunzru captures these disparate worlds and the vast context differences between them in a quick witty sketches and clever turns of phrase. At it's weakest, he goes for the easy charicature instead of shading in the personalities with more unique detail and ambiguity. I genuinely liked how the cast seemed to grow and minor characters that I expected to learn nothing about suddenly had a backstory and a motivation and a connection to someone else.