My contribution to The Broke And The Bookish Top 10 mania (I do it on Wednesdays because I work from home and I can brainstorm in front of my book shelf).
This week...Top 10 Most Unfortunately Named Characters In Literature
1-Malta & Creta Kano from Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicles: I know they are named after islands in the Mediterranean Sea, but I can't help remembering them as Moron & Cretin Kano. Too bad, they are amazing characters.
2-Babette Gladney from Don DeLillo's White Noise: That very name attacks my mouth as I say it. It sounds like an exotic type of wine more than a person: "I'll take a 1989 Babette Gladney please".
3-Piscine Molitor Patel from Yan Martel's Life Of Pi: No matter how great of a person you are, when you're named after a public pool, you start behind everybody else in life. Pi has a good reason to curse his parents.
4-Manfred Steiner from Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip: Great novel. Manfred Steiner is a handicapped kid...with a handicapped name. When I think Manfred Steiner I think orthopedic shoes and "Pizza Party".
5-Franz Biberkopf from Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: Never read this one. But Biberkopf means something like "beaver tail". And is remniscient of Justin Bieber. Enough to get him on the list.
6-Octave Parango from Frederic Beigbeder's 99 Francs: French authors always try to be hip and take weird, impossible character names. Like Octave Parango. It's ugly and it's hard to pronounce. Good book, awful character with an awful name.
7-Michael Martin Plunkett from James Ellroy's Killer On The Road: If my name was Michael Martn Plunkett, I would be prone to murder and carnage too. I'm pretty sure his name alone got his resume thrown to the garbage when job hunting.
8-Varg Veum from Gunnar Staalesen's many novels: I know it's conceptual and all, but since I'm not Norwegian, it just sounds very bad to me. It means like "wolf in the herd" or something. Sounds like a foreign way to say: "I think the yogurt is rancid" to me.
9-Stonecipher Lavache Beadsman from David Foster Wallace's Broom In The System: Every other name in this novel is bad ass. This one made me cringe. "Lavache" can be translated in french as "cow".
10-Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from Patrick Suskind's Perfume: First of all, Jean-Baptiste is the ugliest name someone can give their kids in attempts to honor a saint. And also. Grenouille is french for "frog". It's a total disaster of a name and a racial insult.
