fanik uiam: It's me...^_^

fanik uiam: It's me...^_^

It's me...^_^

Hopefully all of you enjoy this blog..if there some alleviate , i'm directly to apologize(handshaking) to all of you..i've made this blog is just wanna to share with you about what's the activities that we do together since we are here..you know, uiam is the best place that we are studying right now, it has a islamic environment compare to others univercity..so, insyaallah..if we're gone by our own way soon..hopefully, our relationship as a friends will be going on exist in our soul as a iium students and muslimic persons..^_^

NoveL : ~A Lion Among Men..~

Among many other books, he of course has written the bestseller that became the blockbuster musical "Wicked." But Maguire's prose has more in common with a lurching Tom Waits ballad than with a show tune -- unless Lisa Germano has done a version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" I haven't heard. Maguire's work is melodic, symphonic and beautiful; it is dejected and biting and brave. How great that people flock to these magical novels. Maguire takes us back to the roots of fairy tales (which, with their child abandonment, incest and poverty were hardly sweet stories for children).

"A Lion Among Men" is the third volume in Maguire's Wicked Years series, and like the first two, the book is complex. Nonlinear and constructed, in fairy-tale fashion, of multiple stories-within-stories, the novel belongs to the Cowardly Lion named Brrr. (At birth, he said, "Brrr," instead of "Grrr" because he was chilly.) Abandoned when young, Brrr is alone and has no sense of self; he longs for home. Employed as a court reporter by the Emerald City, he sets out to unearth answers about Elphaba, the Wicked Witch, and her child, Liir, the protagonists, respectively, of "Wicked" and the second Wicked Years volume, "Son of a Witch." Along the way Brrr befriends a dying soldier; falls in love with a tiger; and interviews Yackle, the most poignant talking corpse ever to haunt an American novel.

Here Maguire is exploring a deep, ecological position that humans are a terrible species as well as the history of Oz. References to changing regimes appear as quickly as pink and puce toadstools in an old growth forest. Never fear! There's no time to get lost in these woods. Maguire is a fantastic stylist, and the novel contains wonderful motifs from a glass cat to a sweet bear to chanting ghosts to a tome from which people emerge.

"A Lion Among Men" represents an innovative departure from the traditional form of the serial novel, which often offers closure in the third volume. There are no answers here -- only more and more riddles and worry. This allows Maguire to draw the most attention to the book's existential ruminations on luck. (Opening the book for the first time, I was elated to discover that one of its epigraphs about luck comes from a book I edited, to which Maguire himself contributed; I have never met Maguire, only corresponded with him over the ether, which keeps things mysterious and Oz-like.)

Back to the images! In fabulous details and self-mocking language, Maguire displays his gift for whimsical portrayals of the broken, the powerless, the hopeless, the bad. "Whimsy is fate too, just less knowable," the book tells us. All the charisma in Oz lies with the characters who accept this intuitive logic of fairy tales. In its contemporary play with a very traditional form, "A Lion Among Men" offers a poetic meditation on isolation.