Kristin's Book Blog

2011 Reading Year in Review

2012-01-09T22:14:00.001-05:00

This is a bit late but oh well.

The last few years, I have been caught up in lists. This year, I gave up. Well maybe not gave up, but went on a list hiatus. And it has been very, very freeing. Suddenly, I’m able to pull a book off a shelf and just read it. Because I wanted to. And not have a list to cross it off at the end. Wow.

The year started out with a whiz bang from Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The Shipping News was something of a disappointment. The Piano Teacher shocked me, but the questions about power play still remains. New York Trilogy left me cold and wondering. Wittgenstein’s Mistress was a comfort and along with Noel Coward’s play Still Life got me through a rough time. Anagrams – what a beautiful, beautiful piece. Naïve.Super made me want to buy a wooden peg board and set it on my desk. Enduring Love started out fabulous, but ended like a deflated balloon. The Hound of the Baskervilles reminded me what good writing could achieve. The Shining reminded me what bad writing can’t achieve. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reminded that bad writing isn’t always a death knell.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2011-12-27T16:53:00.001-05:00

What exactly made me jump on the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo bandwagon, I'm not entirely sure. People around me have been reading it for quite some time, but as you know I'm deathly afraid of anything popular.

But something made me finally buy it (probably the trailors for the movie), and when I couldn't latch on to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I picked up Larsson's novel.

Here are some things to keep in mind throughout the rest of the review.

FACT: The book is not well written. Or at least not well translated into English. I'll leave it at that.

FACT: I agree with THIS article that Larsson never figured out the "show, don't tell" part of novel writing.

FACT: There are some pretty thin plot points. I've known some very religious people in my life, and I doubt that they would pick up that five sets of five digit numbers were references to bible verses. It's messy…in quite a lot of places.

FACT: Everyone knows that Mikael is a very thin veil for Stieg. Which makes his animalistic attraction for women a bit weird and narcissistic. That is unless Stiegl really does look like Daniel Craig - then it is understandable. But he doesn't.

I'm sure you know where this is going, right?

There are many elements that make up a novel. Plot, prose, character development, voice, etc. I focus on prose…that's what I enjoy in reading. So if a novel is lacking in prose, it better damn well be really strong in at least one of the other elements in order to distract me. Otherwise, I just end up picking it apart piece by piece.

You are now expecting me, dear reader, to go on my usual diatribe against popular fiction. But wait. Listen to this: this book held my attention so much that I once sat for four hours in one night – until after one in the morning – reading this book. I could not put it down. Do you remember the last time I did that? Maybe never.

I can't put my finger on exactly I became so engrossed in this novel. I just wanted to know what was going to happen! But one thing made the novel worthwhile: Lisbeth Salander. Without her, I'm sure I would have detested this novel. She was such a fabulous character that I immediately latched on to her…and what's so surprising about it is that she came out of a novel written by a male that is so obviously smitten with himself – it makes me wonder if Salander was all accident.

I'm not sure when I'll pick up the other books in this series. Maybe soon. Maybe never. I'd bet money that I'll read them before summer though. It's just a hunch.

The Shining

2011-11-09T16:31:00.001-05:00

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to read in the next forty to fifty years. I'm sure that sounds strange. But I've been an obsessive-compulsive list person for the last decade or so, utilizing the top 100, or top 1,001 as guides and checklists. This has sometimes felt constraining, leaving me missing a lot of new and contemporary fiction, as well as non-fiction entirely, in pursuit of a specific goal. On top of that, it has "forced" me to read a lot of books that simply weren't worth my time investment. It's "forced" me to read some books that weren't worth the paper they were printed on. Yes, there have been triumphs as well, being "forced" also to read books that I ended up thoroughly enjoying, but never would have picked up on my own. But there have been real stinkers.

This problem, the stifling nature of the lists was brought home to me by what I will call my Crash problem. I have Ballard's Crash. I've picked it up a few times intending to read it, getting a few pages into it and putting it away. It makes me sick. I don't want to read it. But if I ever want to finish this one particular list, I have to read it. So I've been asking myself: is the goal worth the torture and the wasted time?

Which brings me Stephen King's The Shining. I've read Carrie, which wasn't bad. I've read quite a lot of his short stories, which to be honest I didn't like. I've tried to read The Green Mile, but didn't like it. I've tried to read The Stand but didn't like it. And I'm someone who once enjoyed, to some extent, a number of the movies that were based off his books. I've always said that King has great ideas, can create great atmosphere and suspense, but is a terrible writer. The Shining confirmed that, and then some.

I'm not sure where to start about my dislike for this book. Jack Torrance is despicable; I had absolutely no sympathy for him. The idea that these ghosts have to drive Jack insane to kill his son, but at the same time they need him to keep the boiler in check…not really logical. And the fact that this wonderful hotel, obviously making plenty of money, can't afford to upgrade their boiler? If your hotel could go sky high because a few hours go past without someone checking the boiler…maybe it's time just to get a new one? And by the way, there aren't caribou in Colorado.

Perhaps I wouldn't have had time to consider these things, but I was bored through the majority of the novel. The Shining is teaming with unnecessary information and poorly executed exposition – so much so that by the last quarter of the novel I was skimming whole pages. It's not that I don't like wordiness. I love wordiness. But I want it matter; I want it to be essential. Probably 100 pages of this novel could have been axed by a good editor without negatively affecting the story. I believe it would have enhanced it.

There were good points about the novel. It was creepy. The hedge animals that moved (but come to life, just too weird). The woman in 217. The elevator. The seclusion. The atmosphere of the novel. Those were good. But all of that did not add up to enough to make the novel worth it. I recently finished Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was just as atmospheric, creepy, otherworldly. But technically much better executed, and much more enjoyable to read. It has always felt sacrilegious to say this, to disparage Stephen King, but I'm not alone. In 1977, the New York Times review of The Shining said that King, "is a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap….Mr. King is a natural, but he lacks control; he simply rears back and lets fly with the fireball, and a lot of wild pitches result." I concur.

Perhaps all this is because I'm a parent now. Perhaps it's because I've grown more sensitive in my "old age." I think mostly I've just gotten impatient and have decided that my reading time is too precious to be spending it on books that I don't like. Which brings me back to my Crash problem. Immediately upon closing The Shining for the last time, I put on my discard pile. Then I went to my bookshelf, picked up Crash (along with a few others) and put them on the discard pile as well. My experience with The Shining answered my question. The goal of finishing a list is not worth the wasted time.

Comedy in a Minor Key

2011-10-16T16:42:00.000-04:00

How do you do dispose of a body you aren’t supposed to have in the first place?

That is the central problem for Wim and Marie, an average young Dutch couple who agree to hide a Jewish man, Nico, during the Nazi occupation. And then he dies.

Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key is a slim, somewhat simple novel that easily shows the anxiety and issues arising from having someone in your house that you aren’t supposed to have in your house. At first they think that they can do it without anyone knowing, including family and the cleaning lady. But slowly – purposefully and accidently – a lot of people end up knowing. Through it, they come to learn that many of their own circle that they thought they knew well were also concealing secrets – which end up helping them in the end.

What I liked most about this novel is the averageness of its characters. Wim and Marie don’t take Nico in out of some high purpose…there isn’t any moralizing about “the right thing to do,” or Schindler’s breakdown (“I could have done so much more!”). They do it because it has to be done, out of some vague sense of duty to their country. Someone asks them and they say, well sure. And Nico is so ordinary himself…a single perfume salesman, parents are dead, and no real relatives or importance. As much, I suppose, as any person could be said to be unimportant.

That Nico died in such an ordinary way underscores this. There is a sense that he didn’t need to go into hiding just to die from an illness; he went into hiding so he could live - so the three of them could come out the other side. That comedic irony, as well as the simple way in which his disposal is bungled (a mere oversight of a monogram and a laundry tag on a pair of pajamas) is what makes this novel almost humorous. It has a slapstick, Waiting for Godot quality about it. One review I came across called the novel’s subject the “goofy, quotidian kindness that is one possible response to violence.” The everyday-ness of the novel, the, “yeah, sure we’ll do that” is what’s amazing. There aren’t many light-hearted novels on this subject.

Comedy in a Minor Key is a small novel that doesn’t deal with any of the larger issues that I have come to expect in a story of occupied Europe. It’s about muddling through and figuring it out as you go along. But perhaps its publication in 1947 is a reason for that – it takes decades to truly process the totality of such a disaster. At this point I could start to go on angrily about our expectations of the 9/11 novel by extension, but I’ll save that for another post. It’s perhaps the ordinary stories that often come first, the stories that would be familiar to most people. The overarching epics that make us proud to be humans – in spite of what we humans sometimes do to one another – seem to come later.

Dreaming Henry James

2011-10-15T18:10:00.002-04:00

Last night I had a dream that I had to go to Georgia to find my mom's cousin, who had run off with someone, and bring him hom.

I woke up and realized this was essentially the plot of Henry James's The Ambassadors. Strange.

Do any American authors deserve the Nobel Prize?

2011-10-06T19:15:00.000-04:00

This is very, very interesting.

Making Executive Decisions

2011-09-26T22:27:00.004-04:00

Those of you who regularly read this blog know I love lists. I have something of a goal to read most of the novels on the 1,001 Books list. I say most because I know it is an impossible task given that at least one of the novels was published in Korea 30 years ago and has yet to be translated into English.

But I am coming to think that I need to narrow my focus a bit. After all, many of the books on this list are unnecessary...maybe I'll get to the eleven Coetzee on here (I only have nine to go) but maybe I won't.

What has prompted this is that I have made yet another attempt to read JG Ballard's Crash and simply cannot stomach it. I had enough of this with American Psycho. So my question is, what is the point of continuing? Am I going to miss something glorious by shedding this books, making the executive decision to not return?

If not, I think the book will go on the "shed" pile very quickly. I'm reaching critical mass, and there are likely many, many other books that I won't have to squirm through.

10 Best Songs Based on Books

2011-09-26T20:43:00.000-04:00

The Guardian has a list of the 10 best songs based on books. I have always loved "Killing an Arab," and "Venus in Furs" is one of my all time favorite songs. But I certainly didn't know that Scentless Apprentice was based on Perfume, or that there even was a song called "Wuthering Heights." I am going to look it up now...

Enduring Love

2011-09-25T16:06:00.001-04:00

Sometimes in my life, I get feelings about things. I don’t mean everyday coincidences, such as the fact that today I e-mailed a consultant about grass (my life is so exciting, I know), and it turns out he was on the job site at that moment looking at the grass. That’s a coincidence.

By feelings, I mean connections between people, often before they are aware of it themselves. I often am able to pick up when a person likes someone else…not obvious flirtations, but those secret things we don’t always like to admit. The way they throw a snowball, or the slight, so easy to miss twinkle in their eye at the mention of the person’s name.

Once, I don’t remember the situation, but I shared a very personal story with a friend of mine. There was some subtle something in the way she reacted to the story, and I thought, I think she (yes she) is in love with me. Months later…maybe four or five months later, she tells me that she is in love with me. Here was the rest of the conversation:

“I know.”
“You know?”
“I’ve known since November.”
“But I didn’t realize it until March.”
“I’ve known since November.”

I usually try to keep these feelings at arms lengths, especially when there is a desire for them to be correct. So I try to ignore them, and let things go where they go. And also because every now and then I seem to be off.

In Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, Jed Parry gets it very, very wrong.

I loved the first few paragraphs, setting up the story:

The beginning is simple to mark. We were in sunlight under a turkey oak, partly protected from a strong, gusty wind. I was kneeling on the grass with a corkscrew in my hand, and Clarissa was passing me the bottle – a 1987 Daumas Gassac. This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man’s shout. We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running toward it. The transformation was absolute: I don’t recall dropping the corkscrew, or getting to my feet, or making a decision, or hearing the caution Clarissa called after me. What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak. There was a shout again, and a child’s cry, enfeebled by the wind that roared in the tall trees along the hedgerows. I ran faster. And there, suddenly, from different points around the field, four other men were converging on the scene, running like me.

…I’m holding back, delaying the information. I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible; the convergence of six figures in a flat green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzard’s perspective, the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table. The initial conditions, the force and the direction of the force, define all the consequent pathways, all the angles of collision and return, and the glow of the overhead light bathes the field, the baize and all its moving bodies, in reassuring clarity. I think that while we were still converging, before we made contact, we were in a state of mathematical grace. I linger on our dispositions, the relative distances and the compass point- because as far as these occurrences were concerned, this was the last time I understood anything clearly at all.

What were we running toward? I don’t think any of us would ever know fully…it was an enormous balloon filled with helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including our selves and our thoughts.

We were running toward a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes.

One of the men running was Jed Parry. Our narrator, Joe Rose, has an odd encounter with him when one of the people trying to hold down the balloon is lifted up and eventually falls to his death. Jed asks Joe to pray with him there over the body. Joe refuses, disgusted at this reaction and leaves. In the middle of the night, Joe receives a phone call from Jed: he knows that Joe is in love with him, and he just wanted to call and let him know that he was in love too. So it begins.

Jed follows him – staking out his apartment, interpreting the movement of curtains for signals from Joe. And Joe’s wife Clarissa misses all of this. Jed hides when he sees her coming, and his handwriting is close enough to Joe’s that Clarissa thinks Joe is making it all up. Until he tries to kill them.

I thought the book got off track when Joe goes to find Jean (widow of the man who fell), and she asks him to find the girl that must have been in the car with her husband. She believes he must have been having an affair with whoever left the scarf behind. This plot line was then seemingly forgotten about to return to the original plot – so wholly forgotten that I had to go back and make sure I didn’t skip a chapter. It is introduced again at the very end for what seemed like no purpose. After thinking about it, the purpose obviously was to give a non-psychotic twist on the case of getting it wrong. Jean believes – based on evidence she interprets – that he husband was having an affair. In actuality, he had picked up an illicit hitchhiking couple who flee the scene when it takes its deadly turn.

In the end, I don’t think that I particularly cared for Enduring Love. I think I really enjoyed the Jed Parry/Joe Rose story…maybe “enjoyed” isn’t the word. I was freaked out, kept interested. But the other portions of it seemed superfluous. I thought for certain that when Rose looked into the mysterious scarf left in the car, he would find another reason to fear Parry. Instead, he found what amounted to a strange and unnecessary feel good ending – or at least feel good in context. The end, generally, all neatly tied up, was really just feel good in context. And I suppose that that is where my disappointment lies. Not because I didn’t want it to end well for Joe and Clarissa, or anyone else, but it seemed both rushed and dragged out at the same time. I found myself skimming through conversations on Keats to find out what Parry was going to do next.

So, something like The Mustache is happening here with my reaction to the book. It was, as a whole, just ho-hum...the ending like a deflating balloon (pun intended). The ideas that the novel presented and explored, however, were interesting and disturbing. McEwan writes, “No one could agree on anything. We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favor, and we persuaded ourselves along the way….believing is seeing.” How much do we see about the world, and our relationships, simply because we believe it? How much of the stuff we see as symbolic, or “meaning something” is just coincidence? What’s disturbing here is to see those pattern-seeking tendencies we have as humans blown up into something deadly. And where is the line between generally reading evidence and drawing a wrong conclusion, and just being certifiable? Probably somewhere around the time you start following someone around. Creepy.

The Mustache & The Class Trip

2011-09-03T16:57:00.003-04:00

I've been taking a lot of recommendations from The Millions these days. The description of Emmanuel Carrere's The Mustache and Class Trip in this article was too much for me to resist.

Imagine Rod Sterling's voice here. Meet ____ (we don't know his name). About to set out for a dinner party, he decides to shave off his mustache. In this ordinary act, something extraordinary occurs. When he walks out of the bathroom, he will be entering - The Twilight Zone.

Ok, that was lame. But imagine you had a mustache for years. And you decide to get rid of it, just to see. But no one notices - not your wife, not your friends, not your coworkers. Your mustache, you thought, was such an obvious feature of your appearance that someone would comment on its disappearance...especially since some, like you wife, have never seen you without it. But no one notices. You begin to suspect they are all playing a trick on you, an elaborate joke. One night you ask your wife (named Agnes) why she hasn't said anything. And she informs you that you never had a mustache. !

You call some friends, and they say you never had a mustache either. ! You produce some photos from a trip to Java you and Agnes took, with your mustache, and Agnes dismisses them. In the morning, the photos are gone, and she informs you that you never went to Java, with or without mustache. The friends you visited the night before - Agnes tells you that you not only spent the night at home but that she never heard of these friends. !

Through all this, you find out that your father died the year before, but you don't remember...you thought he was alive and well. !

So...what do you do? Are you insane? Is Agnes insane? Is Agnes trying to convince you that you are insane for some reason?

___ runs away - hopping on a plane to Hong Kong, where he spends a few days riding a ferry back and forth and shaving over and over and over and over again. He moves on to Macao, and one night coming back to his hotel - there is Agnes, talking about going to the casino again, as if she had been along on the entire trip. He goes into the bathroom, and cuts off his face. There. All better.

The Mustache certainly isn't for everyone. I wasn't sure it was for me, given my New York Trilogy problem. But I actually really, really liked it. Sometimes I apparently have trouble relating to people who think differently than I do, to the point where it seems there are two different realities. So the concept of The Mustache - that what we feel constitutes our life, our reality - could be very, very wrong is extremely creepy. What if reality as I perceive it is as it is for the unnamed narrator? Not that I actually think it is - I'm not that crazy (I don't think!) but it is eerie nonetheless. There are tracts of Sartre and Nausea here.

The Class Trip, on the other hand, is very very different. No need to just go with it here, no need to suspend disbelief. Nicholas is a shy, outcast kid whose dad (a prosthesis salesman) insists on driving him to ski camp instead of letting Nicholas go on the bus with the other kids. He forgets Nicholas's bag in his trunk, but doesn't return to drop it off. A boy is found murdered in a neighboring village. What did Nicholas's father have to do with it?

This novel is understated almost to a fault. It's a horror story without suspense, with barely building any tension. It's a horror story that, 20 pages from the end, I thought of just abandoning. I knew what had happened and there was no need to see how it resolved itself. The reader is never given any perspective other than Nicholas's, so the story is really about a boy who comes to see that is father is a child murderer and not a hero as opposed to a story about the actual crime. It was interesting, but not compelling.

I could have skipped The Class Trip and not missed anything. But the concepts in The Mustache will stay with me.

Summer 2011 Soundtrack

2011-09-01T21:40:00.002-04:00

It's been a crazy summer. Here are the lyrics:

--Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before

--Check this hand cause I'm marvelous

--I don’t know what you mean to me, but I want to turn you on, turn you up, figure you out, I want to take you on

--You’re standing in the places…that bring to mind traces of a girl that I knew somewhere/I just can’t put my finger on what it is that says to me watch out, don’t believe her…And if your love was not a game, I’d only have myself to blame…

--Is it my turn to wish you were lying here...

--I see your lips moving but I don't hear nothing/Everybody talking like they really wanna know about us

--Do you feel what I feel? Can we make it so that’s part of the deal?

--What if you could smile? What if I could make your heart ignite just for a while?

--You might think that I’m crazy but you know I’m just your type…if I said my heart was beating loud...

--Give me everything tonight, for all we know we might not get tomorrow (Is it weird that I think this song is sooo incredibly sad?)

--I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you...

--There ain’t no reason you and me should be alone tonight/I need a man who thinks it’s right when it’s so wrong…

--And now I know just why she keeps me hanging around/she needs someone to walk on, so her feet don’t touch the ground/but I love her…

--He’s a wolf in disguise, but I can’t stop staring in those evil eyes

--You’re so hypnotizing/could you be the devil/could you be an angel? You’re not like the others…

--Can’t believe you’re taking my heart to pieces

--At night you hang about the house and weep your heart out, and cry your eyes out, and wrack your brain…you sit and wonder how anyone as wonderful as he could cause you such misery and pain

--Child of the wilderness, born into emptiness, learn to be lonely…learn to find your way in darkness

--One begins to read between the pages of a look...I saw you coming back to me.

--In this world, if you read the papers, you know everybody’s fighting with each other…so if someone comes along who’ll give you some love and affection, I say get it while you can

Billiards at Half Past Nine

2011-09-01T14:21:00.000-04:00

I’m really not sure what to say about Heinrich Boll’s Billiards at Half Past Nine.

I’ve sat with that sentence now for quite some time, and haven’t been able to come up with anything else.

Firstly, I took too long to read this novel. It wasn’t anything against it, anything I didn’t like. There were even periods in the last two months when I was really into it. But then I would see something shiny. This is very different to the other Boll novel I’ve read, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, which I finished in two days.

Secondly, it wasn’t anything like I was expecting. But on the other hand, I’m not sure I was expecting anything. Which, I suppose, is strange. I didn’t know anything about this book other than what was written on the back cover. Boll is not particularly fashionable, as far as I can tell, so not many people are talking about him.

Billiards at Half Past Nine is a day in the life of a family of architects in 1958 Germany still dealing with the aftermath of Nazis. Strange thing about this book – Nazis are never mentioned. Instead, everyone is divided up into those who partook of the Host of the Beast and those who didn’t (also called lambs). But the beast imagery also continues into their present. Every chapter is told from the point of view of a different family member. I sometimes had difficulty figuring out who I was following.

I feel like I’m getting nowhere with this.

The writing was good, but nothing jumped out at me enough to underline. The plot was mildly interesting, but not enough for me to even explain any bit of it here beyond what I already did. I don’t know what else to say about Billiards, and I have nothing to say about Boll other than I want to like him but I just keep being left cold. I liked Katharina Blum better than this one.

Here ends my useless review.

Naive.Super

2011-08-15T12:51:00.001-04:00

It’s funny how a casual mention of a novel in an article can lead one to a very creepy reading experience.

I saw this article on The Millions two weeks ago, which notes Erlend Loe’s Naïve.Super. After noticing the shipping time on amazon, I marched myself to the library and filled out the interlibrary loan request. Book came on Thursday, I started to read it yesterday and finished it this morning.

My first impression of the novel – as I was reading it walking through the library parking lot – was that it would be cute; right up my alley. As I started to read it seriously, though, it began to feel a bit derivative – a little too much like a combination of Wittgenstein’s Mistress (in structure), and a hero from the Jonathan Safran Foer/Jonthan Letham/Mark Haddon mold. Though that really isn’t fair, since Naïve.Super was published in 1996, and the quirky, neurotic and/or autistic characters were all created (or published) in the decade after. So maybe they are the derivative work. Don’t know. I just feel like I’ve been encountering this voice quite a lot.

But then on Sunday came the moment where I had to put the book down. This feeling had been slowly creeping up on me, but I didn’t catch it – identify it – until this moment:

TV is a good thing. I ought to watch TV more often. I get pleasantly diverted. I can’t quite tell whether the thoughts I’m having are my own or if they’re coming from the TV. Animal programmes are the best. David Attenborough explaining that nature is intricate and that it all fits together. Wasps that navigate according to the sun. they know what they’re doing, the wasps. They know a lot better than I do.

OMG this person is just like me.

Yes Yes Yes on David Attenborough. Does anyone else do this – watch nature documentaries for perspective – to feel that everything is just part of the grand parade of life? Or is it just me and this unnamed character? Is that where the feeling of derivation came from – not from Foer or Lethem or Haddon, but from my own head? I think, really, it’s a combination. Still. FREAKY.

This character is having something of a quarter life crisis. He quits college and moves into his brother’s apartment while his brother is in New York. He’s going somewhat crazy, and finds comfort in throwing a ball against a wall, playing with a hammer-and-peg set, and reading about the universe. I do that too – read about the universe that is – when I’m feeling out of sorts. Nothing, really, is more comforting for me than the stars and string theory. Have you seen the Google Sky Map app? These last few months I’ve been looking at it a lot, just moving my phone around and seeing what I’m surrounded by whether I can see them or not. Does this sound strange? Maybe. But you should try it sometime.

This is that feeling that was creeping up on me. I have never encountered myself in a novel as much as I have here. And that’s really, really freaky.

II.

“I think he’s got problems with time himself, but that he still hasn’t found out. One day he’ll be the one who hits the wall.”

Things have been weird for me the last few months, though they are working themselves out. I’ve learned a lot about myself, and a lot about how I deal with other people, and how my own limits and suspicions both protect me and hinder me.

I think quite a lot. I have very few waking moments during which I’m not thinking about anything; and usually those few moments of “quiet” are interrupted by someone asking, “what are you thinking about?” Perhaps I’m most deep in thought when I look like I’m not thinking. And vice versa. Sometimes this is a problem – when I need that quiet and am unable to get it within my own brain, or when the constant din goes off the rails and the only respite is to listen to AM radio from Quebec – the more static the better. Perhaps that makes me sound crazy.

It’s taken me most of my life to understand that not everyone thinks as much – or about the same things – as I do. That not everyone is as concerned about what the universe is expanding into, or if hell is a state of mind can you think yourself out of it? And what is color and does it exist objectively? (I don’t believe that it does – I’m a color subjectivist...there are others out there with me on this one. People smarter than me and you.) When I talk about these things which genuinely interest me and sometimes keep me awake at night people mostly just stare at me. Or tell me I think too much.

Well, damn it (here’s where my frustration of the last three months comes out…) maybe I think just the right amount. I should start telling people, “Maybe you don’t think enough.” Maybe the world would grind to a screeching halt if it were filled with people who think as much as I do, but most people could probably use a little more sincere reflection on themselves and the universe and their place in it.

So in this little crazy tornado, I came to realize that thinking too much isn’t necessarily a problem. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. I’m not an extrovert. I never will be, and it’s silly of me to try to pretend that I am or could be - or even that I understand extroverts. I don’t. I’ve given up. But by giving up on trying to be what I’m not, I’ve accepted (at least a little bit) what I am. My personality certainly has its downsides, but it also has its upsides. And I wouldn’t give one inch of my ocean of contemplation for one more extra of extroversion. Somehow Naïve.Super brought that home.

A parting thought from Loe’s too-familiar-for-comfort novel:

“There is no time. There is a life and a death. There are people and animals. Our thoughts exist. And the world. The universe, too. But there is no time. You might as well take it easy. Do you feel better now? I feel better. This is going to work out. Have a nice day.”

:-)

Alfred and Emily

2011-08-11T01:12:00.001-04:00

I first heard about Doris Lessing’s Alfred and Emily at the time she won the Nobel Prize in 2008; she was working on a story about her parents, giving them a new life in which World War I did not interfere. Though I remember that, I do not recall what recently put it at the top of my TBR list. I’ve been reading a lot about marriages lately, so that must have been it, partially. I must have seen a brief reference to it someplace else as well, though I don’t know where. That’s the best insight I can offer.

Alfred and Emily is really one novella and one memoir. In the first part, Lessing gives her parents the life they didn’t have…a life they may have had if England had not entered the Great War. Oddly enough, though they know each other, they don’t end up together.

Somewhere I read a review of the book that essentially stated, why bother to give these people new lives if those lives are not compelling. But what was expected? Swashbuckling? Alfred wasn’t going to become the Scarlet Pimpernel. Yes, I was a little surprised that the lives she gave them were so conventional. But if any of us had been thrown off our trajectory, we would likely have ended up somewhere similar to where we are now. Character is fate, after all. Lessing could have given them more happiness, more flowers and sunshine. But she didn’t, and I don’t know why.

The second half of the book is memoir – Lessing expounding upon her childhood and her parents. When I was reading the first have of the book, the fiction, I thought it was decent. When I got to the second half, I realized how strong Lessing’s writing could be, and the novella paled in comparison. I ended up having mixed feelings about the second half, enjoying it mostly when it focused on her parents, her attempts to get out from under her mother’s influence, and must less so when she discussed insects. The structure was rather informal and conversational – I’m not sure if that’s characteristic of Lessing’s writing generally or not.

I know this isn’t Lessing’s best work; I knew going in that it hadn’t been very well received. But I seem to have a knack for entering into these relationships with writers at the most bizarre places (Coetzee’s Foe, anyone?)...don't know why. But, if this is representative of her not-so-good work, I'm really, really excited to read her good stuff. Maybe I'll have to get to The Golden Notebook much sooner...

Anagrams

2011-08-01T16:51:00.002-04:00

"Life is sad. Here is someone."

I've said before that things are weird. I don't know how else to describe my life right now. Just weird. (Getting better, though, a bit.) I'm always particular about what books I read when, in what mood, but when things are like they are now, that selectivity is heightened. I cannot read just any book, and I will flit between ten or more books until I find the one that feels just right. For that reason, in times like this, I find myself going back to my happy places: Kerouac, Ondaatje, The Virgin Suicides,The Great Gatsby. The English Patient has been calling to me like a siren in the last few months, but I have had to resist the temptation. I know what happens when I read that book...despite what some may believe, sometimes I really do know what's best for myself. I'm not always into self-sabotage.

Anagrams was a test for me. I would pick it up, read a few pages, and put it back: "Not now." A few days later, I would pick it up again and read a few more pages, and put it back. "Not now." Well why not now, damn it? Because it's too upbeat? I want to say, yes, too upbeat, but to call this book upbeat is, well, to be Kristin I suppose. Turns out, I needed this book.

I'll admit, at first I thought I got this book. I became slightly more confused with each chapter…ok, so Benna teaches geriatric aerobics, AND teaches art history at a community college, AND is a nightclub singer. And Gerard teaches aerobics to kids AND is a nightclub singer AND in a rock opera version of Dido and Aeneas...hard economic times, you know? (FYI...Dido and Aeneas are EVERYWHERE for me right now.) It all, sort of, made sense in my mind...first Gerard must have been Benna's student, married with a daughter, then gotten divorced and started up with Benna, and eventually moved into her apartment house. Then they broke it off, but still drink near beer together every morning. But then I get to the second part, and Benna says that her friend Eleanor is imaginary. Wait – what? And where did this daughter – who is also imaginary – come from? At first I thought this was one of Benna's witticisms, because it seemed the type of quip she would make. But I kept going, and it was clear she was serious. So, I had to look it up. Duh! Sometimes I read into things too much ("I'm cool? What does that mean?") and sometimes I accept too much at face value. There must be a middle ground somewhere that I just cannot seem to find.

So here's what's really going on: Benna teaches poetry at a community college. She makes friends with Gerard. She has an affair with one of her students. She has an imaginary friend Eleanor, and an imaginary daughter. This is all learned in the second half of the book. The first half of the book is a series of short stories, really, about people named Benna and Gerard and Eleanor, etc. in parallel lives, essentially. It's derivative of reality, or nonreality since Eleanor is imaginary anyway.

The writing was amazing. Yes, this story is desperately bleak. Benna is so lonely and isolated that she makes up imaginary children. But it's funny as hell. I get this humor. I could have written this. Well, not really, but three quarters of it is stuff that would come out of my own mouth. Even in the depths of despair, sometimes, I cannot help but be sarcastically funny. Here are some examples that I underlined. (I underlined a lot in Anagrams.)

"Yes, well," said Gerard, attempting something lighthearted. "I guess that's why they call it work. I guess that's why they don't call it table tennis."

Eleanor and I around this time founded The Quit-Calling-Me-Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making despairing pronouncements about life and love which always began, "But surely…" It entailed what Eleanor called, "The Great White Whine": whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining.

"I think a few well-considered and prominently displayed uncertainties are always in order."

"...Remember: It's important not to be afraid of looking like an idiot." This was my motto in life.

Aeneas shouldered his guitar and riffed and whined after Dido throughout the entire show: "Don't you see why I have to go to Europe?/I must ignore the sentiment you stir up." Actually it was awful. But nonetheless I sniffled at her suicide, and when she sang at Aeneas, "Just go then! Go if you must! My heart will surely turn to dust," and Aeneas indeed left, I sat in my seat, thinking "You ass, Aeneas, you don't have to be so literal."

Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.

No idiocy was too undignified for me.

I didn't want my life to show.

He also has a cold, and has pulled the hood of his sweat shirt up over his head and tied it. "You look like the Little League version of The Seventh Seal"

...feel my heart fluttering. It's a Tennessee Williams heart. A bad Tennessee Williams heart. I don't know what to say. The music urges love on you like food.

"I've never put much store by honesty. I mean, how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce?"

It is as if our separate pasts were greeting each other, as if we were saying, This is how I have been with other people, this is how I would love you. If I loved you. Everything always seemed to boil down to boil down to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Off you would go in the mist of day and all that.

You have a choice," she told her class. "The whorish emptiness of lies or the straight-laced horrors of truth."

"You made her up? You made up an imaginary daughter?"
"Of course not," I say. "What, you think I'm an idiot? I made up a real daughter...I don't go around making up imaginary daughters...That would be too abstract. Even for me."

Shawn has been showing more of an interest in what I'm reading; I know why he's doing it and I really appreciate it. And he's asking me about this book that I will not put down, and why it's called Anagrams, and what it's about. As I'm trying to describe it, and how it's a bunch of stories about the same people, but not the same people, etc., and he says, "like Mulholland Drive?" YES. THANK YOU. EXACTLY LIKE MULHOLLAND DRIVE. Except funnier. But the basic idea of doppelgangers living tangential lives is the same.

So, why did I need this book? I can't explain it. I love Benna. I love Gerard. I love Eleanor. I want a friend like Eleanor, who would yell out of cars at joggers, "Hey, go home and read Middlemarch." In college I had a friend who would have done something like that, but it wouldn't have been about Middlemarch. No, seriously, I need someone in my life who will yet at random people at George Eliot. Who will know who George Eliot is to begin with. That is why I needed this book. Thank you, Lorrie Moore.

A conversation on The Great Gatsby

2011-08-01T14:44:00.001-04:00

SHAWN: what is the Great Gatsby was about?

KRISTIN: A guy named Gatsby, but that wasn't really his name.

SHAWN: What happened to him?

KRISTIN: He died.

SHAWN: How did he die?

KRISTIN: He got shot.

SHAWN: Who shot him?

KRISTIN: His mistress's husband's mistress's husband. He thought Gatsby was having an affair with his wife; but it was Gatsby's mistress's husband that was having the affair with his wife.

SHAWN: That's complicated.

Last Temptation of Christ

2011-07-19T16:48:00.004-04:00

Sometimes reviews require disclaimers, due to existing prejudices regarding the subject matter. Reading is not an objective sport, as our own values and beliefs color what we encounter. And so, a disclaimer. Consider this my coming out of the closet moment. I do not believe that Jesus was the son of God. In fact, I don’t believe in a god at all. I am, in truth, an atheist, and have been more or less for the last 11 years. I bring this up only because Nikos Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ has a reputation as blasphemy, and I wanted to be up front about where I approached this book from. Someone with a certain rigid belief system would likely be challenged, and perhaps offended by this novel. So, be forewarned.

When we first meet Jesus, he’s making a cross. Mary, his mother (obviously) cannot really remember what happened when the thunderbolt hit her, which also paralyzed Joseph for life. And Jesus has been somewhat of the bane of her existence – always running off somewhere, and just generally being strange. She wanted him to have a nice life – a wife, children – but instead he makes crosses. While Joseph sits and drools in a corner. This is not really the Mary of the Pieta.

Jesus is tormented by God. He wants a normal life, too, but every time he is about to give in to something, is about to do what God doesn't want him to, he is grabbed - I think it is described like a bird of prey's talons - and suffers seizure like symptoms. He wants to marry Mary Magdalene, who was his childhood companion. But he cannot, and he is tormented by that too. Jesus makes crosses for the Romans hoping that God will give up and leave him alone.

Over time - after visits to John the Baptist and a stint in the desert - he comes to accept God's mission for him, though he is constantly in doubt as to what exactly that means. He is slowly joined by his disciples, who are quite a ragtag bunch; the only one who is any use to Jesus is Judas, who becomes his confidant. As Jesus realizes that the only way to fulfill this plan of God's is for him to die, he asks Judas to turn him in. He wants it over with.

In the end (well, not quite the end) Jesus finds himself on the cross. Yeah, I know - who would have expected that? (Just kidding, folks). And suddenly, someone- his "guardian angel" but we all know who it really is - comes to him and tells him to get down, that it was all a dream. He proved himself to God, and now he can go live the life he wanted all along. He takes Mary Magdalene as his wife, but then she dies and he goes to Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, and has many, many children and happy days.

But other people start to show up: first Simon of Cyrene, Paul (in a very, very bizarre scene), and finally the disciples. The disciples accuse him of being a traitor and a deserter, recalling to him that he truly must die on the cross...he chooses to do so over the life that he always longed for. Jesus, seeing now fully that this is so, returns to the cross and finally dies.

Ok- so I get why people would be upset over this, in the same way they were upset by The Da Vinci Code, though LToC is so much better written they really aren't comparable. Kazantzakis's Jesus is very, very human. He's weary of his duty, and genuinely freaked out by the miracles he is able to perform. Obviously Judas as the secondary hero, not betraying Jesus but following orders, ruffles feathers. And people always get their undies in a knot over the idea of Jesus being married and having children, dream sequence or not. I get it. Kazantzakis was excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church for the novel, and in the mid-1980s Marin Scorsese received death threats over the film...Roger Ebert describes having to go to a specific pay phone and call a specific number to get directions to Scorsese's hiding place to interview him about the film...where he is greated by a security guard. People were severely injured in France from molotov cocktails thrown into a theater showing the film. This part I don't understand...but I don't take any of my own beliefs so seriously that I can't be on the same planet with people who don't share them. I think that's really just silly.

But I didn't come at the novel from a position of faith. It really doesn't matter to me if Jesus loved or kissed or married or did whatever with Mary Magdalene, or the other Mary, or Martha for that matter. I've always been interested in unique retelling of familiar stories. And to be honest, I always wondered about the vilification of Judas, even when I did believe Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected to save humankind from our sins. So, that's what this was for me, no different than other reimagining of the tales we collectively have decided are myths, and therefore not to be taken seriously...though a lot of people once did take them seriously. And I must say, from that perspective, LToC made me think about certain elements of the story in a new light, and I found myself thinking, "I get this...I get this picture of Jesus" in ways I haven't gotten Jesus since I stopped suspending my disbelief 11 years ago.

One reviewer (a Catholic, I believe) said of the dim, "throw out the objectionable parts, and there’s virtually nothing left." That is his perspective. I didn't find anything objectionable...but that's mine. My grandma always says its good we don't all like the same things, but I'm sure she'd be highly offended by Last Temptation. All I can suggest dear reader, is for you to read it yourself. Because it's much more objectionable to be offended by something you haven't read than by something you have.

Best books on booze

2011-07-19T15:31:00.000-04:00

Best books on booze. Robby V. have you seen this?

Poetry Friday

2011-07-15T21:49:00.005-04:00

I've been thinking about Dido and Aeneas today, so here's some lyrics from Purcell's Dido's Lament.

When I am Laid In Earth

When I am laid, am laid in earth,
may my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in, in thy breast.
Remember me, remember me, but ah!
Forget my fate.

Still Life

2011-07-08T21:38:00.006-04:00

Maybe two months ago, I saw the film Brief Encounter. I was devastated. But i've been feeling devastated a lot lately. Things are weird. But Brief Encounter...I haven't been able to get away from it. Last week, I think it was, I couldn't take it anymore and bought the Noel Coward play it was based on - Still Life. It arrived today and I couldn't not just sit down and read it. Which I did immediately, ignoring everyone.

This is a play of restraint. Alec and Laura meet when she gets something in her eye at the train station and he (a doctor) helps her get it out. One accidental meeting, and then another. And before long they are in love. But they're both married with children. (In the movie Laura says, "I was happily married until I met you" or something like that.). In the end, he and Laura agree it's best if Alec moves with his family to a new job in Africa. At their last meeting, a silly gossip friend of Laura's shows up, and Alec and Laura can only shake hands.

There were many parts that got me...one in particular that is so personal right now I won't quote it just so I can keep it to myself. But here is one that I'm willing to share:

ALEC: ...Please know that you'll be with me for ages and ages yet - far away into the future. Time will wear down the agony of not seeing you, bit by bit the pain will go-but the loving you and the memory of you won't ever go- please know that...I love you with all my heart and soul.

LAURA: I want to die - if only I could die.

ALEC: If you died you'd forget me - I want to be remembered.

LAURA: Yes, I know.

This play is a comfort to me right now- there's so much going on. I will carry this around with me for awhile...physically and emotionally.

For those of you who want to watch the film:

Poetry Friday

2011-07-08T00:01:00.001-04:00

I said this was coming back, and here it is! Listening to Britney Spears "Hold It Against Me" and posting poetry...I can't make this stuff up.

To Mark Anthony in Heaven
by William Carlos Williams

This quiet morning light
reflected how many times
from grass and trees and clouds
enters my north room
touching the walls with
grass and clouds and trees.
Anthony,
trees and grass and clouds.
Why did you follow
that beloved body
with your ships at Actium?
I hope it was because
you knew her inch by inch
from slanting feet upward
To the roots of her hair
and down again and that
you saw her
above the battle's fury-
clouds and trees and grass-

For then you are
listening in heaven.

Poetry Friday

2011-07-04T12:48:00.002-04:00

A long time ago, I was doing a series called "Poetry Friday." I've been thinking about starting it up again. While going through my blog files and drafts and things, I came across the following post I never published from 2008. I've been thinking about this poem lately, so I figure what the heck - I'll post it now. Without further ado, the reinstitution of Poetry Friday...on a Monday.

I know I said that I wouldn't often post my own poems (which I don't write anymore), but today I am going to again. I happened to catch "The Universe: Parallel Worlds" or whatever it was called on the History Channel on Tuesday night. I wish I understood physics/astrophysics/ cosmology. But what they were talking about reminded me of a poem I wrote 8 years ago. The basic premise is here described by Max Tegmark in a 2003 article for Scientific American:

"Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who
lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and
sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this
person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now
decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.

"The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelgänger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices."

Here's the poem:

Infinite Amount of Chances
"If you accept that the universe is infinite, then that means there's an infitite amount of chances for things to happen...if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen - no matter how small the likelihood." - Alex Garland

Am I with you now?
Can you feel me kiss you goodnight?
Sleepwalking I stumble into your bedroom

Infinately we are together - you and I
In the darkness of every star's a sun with planets
Makes you feel small

Out there you are holding my hand thru periodic sadnesses
Somewhere at sometime you were or will be allowed to love me -
I will be allowed to love you

Infinity is a button on my calculator
And tonight I am lost and alone
Knowing one day you will find me
No matter how small the likelihood

Professor Unrat

2011-07-03T15:29:00.002-04:00

Lately, I seem to be knee deep in German or German-related books. Bust be something in the German literary psyche that's calling to me lately. Don't know what else it could be. So, for that unknown reason, I recently lighted on Heinrich Mann's 1905 Professor Unrat, made famous by Marlene Dietrich's breakout performance in the film adaptation, The Blue Angel.

Unrat, which translates into something close to "garbage" - my version translated it as "mud" - is a tyrannical professor, vilified by his students and former students who insist on tormenting him constantly. He hates - HATES!!!! - being called by his nickname, and will seek out everyone that calls him that and mete out whatever punishment he can. They shout at him in the street, mocking him everywhere.

His arch nemesis is a student named Lohmann, who actually makes a point never to call him "mud" - he's above it somehow. One day, Lohmann turns in his notebook after an exam and Unrat notices a poem tin it addressed to an actress, Rosa Frohlich. Boys in the school are not supposed to be dilly dallying at theaters, and so Unrat sets out to catch Lohmann and his two accomplices. Unrat searches the town for where this infamous Rosa may be, and he eventually finds her at the Blue Angel. His goal is simple: bring down Lohmann by catching him in after-hours dalliances with a woman of low-repute. But that's not what happens. Rosa, instead, catches Unrat.

The students know what's up, and because of it Unrat completely loses control. He eventually is forced to leave his post and uses all his money catering to Rosa. Lohmann resurfaces, Unrat tries to kill him and really just ends up stealing his wallet. As he runs down the street, he is like always tormented with insults. Unrat's unwavering righteousness - his need to ruin those who have mocked him - is excellently portrayed. A very powerful story.

Though I love The Blue Angel (which is why I cannot help posting the clip at the bottom - her expressions in the German version are much better than the English), the motivation behind Unrat is completely different between film and novel. Though at first he really is interested and flattered by Rosa (called Lola Lola in the film), in the novel his undoing is his absolute desire to ruin everyone and he is able to do so via his relations with Rosa. In the film, it's his devotion to Rosa/Lola herself that is his undoing without mention of his overriding obession. That just gets him into her dressing room. Both work and both knock your socks off, but for different reasons.

With that, here you go:

Willard and His Bowling Trophies

2011-07-03T14:34:00.001-04:00

A few years ago there was a movie called Willard, which was a remake of one sort or another of the 1970's movie Willard. I never saw either of them, but I do know that (1) they involved rats; (2) Michael Jackson sang a very nice theme song to the earlier version's sequel, Ben; and (3) the movies were based on a novel.

On the 1,001 books list there is a Richard Brautigan novel called Willard and His Bowling Trophies. Somehow - probably because they both involve a Willard - the Brautigan book and the rat movies got mixed up in my mind. However, the Brautigan novel, to my disappointment, was not about rats.

Instead, Brautigan's Willard is about two couples living in an apartment house - one is sadly and half heartedly outing out The Story of O; the other seems relatively normal other than the fact that they have a room filled with bowling trophies and a papier mache bird named Willard. This pile of loot was found in abandoned car they came across and decided to keep (the loot, not the car). Because, of course, that's normal, right? Maybe comparatively.

The true owners of Willard & Co - three brother from whom they were stolen - are on a murderous cross country rampage in search of their lost property. They get a tip that Willard and the trophies are in Apartment No. 1 at a house in San Francisco. Problem is, as a joke the normal couple had long ago switched the apartment numbers. When the brothers reach the apartment house, they kill the Story of O couple instead. The End.

For those of you who know me, you should expect that this ending would annoy me. It did. Did the normal couple hear the gun shots and rush upstairs? Did the brothers give up and leave when the trophies weren't in Apartment 1 (which was really Apartment 2)? And why am I unable to tolerate unanswered questions in books, but it's ok in movies!?!?!?! (See, for reference, my New York Trilogy problem.)

When I was in high school, everyone kept trying to get me to watch this show called The X-Files. I would love love love it since it was about aliens and ghosts and other weird things that everyone knew I was into, because, of course, I was the weird kid. But I have always resisted the popular, even if it seemed made just for me. One Sunday night I broke down - ok, ok, I'll watch it. It happened to be the episode Home. I was so disgusted I didn't watch the X-Files again for a few years. (On a side note, this lead me to miss The Field Where I Died episode two or three weeks later, which is now one of my favorite...the reading of Browning's Paracelsus brings tears to my eyes.) Something about Willard and His Bowling Trophies reminded me too much of the Home episode.

The book wasn't badly written; in fact, if it had been about something else, (like rats?) I would have enjoyed it. My one consolation was that the book was so short I read it in about three hours.

And for those who are wondering, the movies are based on Ratman's Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert.

Wittgenstein's Mistress

2011-05-31T16:43:00.001-04:00

I'll be honest. This abandonment of the reading desert is not without its catalysts. By far not. It's been spurred by a whirlwind in my head, the kind that makes me want to shut myself off from the rest of the world and listen to AM stations out of Quebec with a lot of static. It's been part injuries and illnesses and potential illnesses – my own and others –overbooking myself, and living with a toddler who is intent on driving me absolutely bonkers for an hour and a half about eating breakfast (or, really, pretending to eat breakfast…and dinner, and every other time I try to feed him), and then asking for a bear hug and a kiss. Maybe also that for a month or two, my part of the world suddenly assumed Seattle's climate, without the perks of a really great scene and coffee shops on every block, and now suddenly it's Louisiana. It's part other stuff too.

Usually I feel this way in the fall and early winter even numbered years, but for some reason here I am in spring of an odd numbered year. Which is disorienting in itself. I always look to books for bearings, but strangely, the books I look for are fractured themselves. Now is not the time for funny, or upbeat. (Do I ever do upbeat, though?)

I tried to read Wittgenstein's Mistress last year (of course, in the fall/early winter of an even numbered year), but it didn't work for me at the time. Sometimes you have these things. So I've been flitting from one book to the next lately (literally with piles stacked next to my bed of maybe 15 books), but this time WM stuck. It's fractured, too, and feels like a cocoon. Which is what I really need right now.

Kate, the narrator, contends that she is the last person alive – or at least as far as she can tell. We have to take her at her word for it, because she's all we've got. Every review I read for the novel said we are "lead to believe" that Kate was the last person, leaving me to expect some clues in the end that she really was just insane. Yes, some devastating things happened to Kate (the death of her child, etc.) and some of these reviews suggested that with that devastation, Kate lost it and therefore we cannot take her word for the state of the world. It's possible, of course, but there isn't anything particular hinting one way or the other. We can take her at her word, or not.

WM doesn't have a plot. The idea that she's the last person alive is just the starting point for Kate's thoughts. This isn't a story about she is became the last person alive, or how she has dealt with being the last person alive. It's Kate, alone, in a house on the beach perhaps a decade or more after she stopped looking for other people, typing her disjointed thoughts, which are not about her life but about philosophy, art, music and the Trojan War. This may seem odd, but I thought it was perfectly normal. When you're disjointed – as one might be if one were the last person alive, or, of course, if one is crazy enough to think one were the last person alive when really one isn't – these are the types of things that may come up. Sometimes, in such situations, it's much, much easier – and more soothing, more calming – to think of facts, to think of things completely unrelated to anything, independent of you, the feeler, instead of focusing on what is happening in that moment that has made one feel disjointed. Here, Markson perfectly captures what happens to our brains when we – ok, I – feel isolated and alone. It's perfect pitch.

What's most amazing about WM is that it works even if you don't know anything about Wittgenstein (though it works much better if you do). Though I read The Odyssey, I haven't read The Iliad, or many of the other ancient Greek works that are referenced here – that would have heightened my understanding, but it worked even without it. This novel made me want to put away Arabian Nights and get my Bulfinch's Mythology out again.

I loved this book. It was everything I expected it to be, which is often not the case. I'm sure that when once again I get to another fall/winter of an even numbered year, I will pick it up to find my bearings in the color of the cat Kate saw at the Coliseum.

A Pale View of the Hills

2011-05-23T11:37:00.003-04:00

I didn't have any expectations for Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of the Hills. I picked it up at the library because it was slim and because I had enjoyed Never Let Me Go. The description on the back of the novel led me to believe it was mostly about a woman dealing with the suicide of her eldest daughter. Because I’ve been in a somewhat weird place lately, I was a bit hesitant about the book. Additionally, I’ve often had difficulty with Japanese novels – really Asian novels in general. I don’t know why, and I hate to characterize a novel as an “Asian novel” based the ethnicity of the author, but there it is. I’ve just always found them difficult. Perhaps it’s a cultural barrier that is hard for me to cross.

Turns out, the novel is not particularly about a woman dealing with the suicide of her eldest daughter. Though that is certainly a fair description of the situation, the novel focuses its efforts on that woman’s (Etsuko) memories of living in post-war (and of course post-bomb) Nagasaki while pregnant with the child that would eventually commit suicide.

The novel revolves around Etsuko and a strange woman that moves into her neighborhood, Sachiko and her troubled daughter, Mariko. There are many pieces missing in Etsuko's story, which are - oddly enough - filled in by Sachiko's story. So - is Sachiko really Etsuko disguised? It's never even explicitly hinted at in the text, but there are enough clues to make me wonder before I consulted the wiki article. The novel itself is ambiguous, so it's up to the reader to decide.

Within the first few pages - maybe even the first 40 or 50, I wasn't expecting to like APVotH. Maybe it had too many similiarities to those other "asian novels" that I didn't understand. Maybe it was because of the familial undercurrents that I didn't want to deal with. By in the end, I finished it in a long, 100-pages-in-one-day binge, which is a big deal for me. This novel definiately won me over, and I'm looking forward to more Ishiguro to come...

Elizabeth Costello

2011-05-15T15:30:00.002-04:00

Eh.

A few years ago I read J.M. Coetzee's Foe, which is supposed to some kind of metafiction about Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. So I've been leary about reading anything more by Coetzee since. For some reason, Elizabeth Costello recently came onto my radar, and it seemed like a good place to get reacquainted with Coetzee.

And all I can really say about it is "eh."

It's another metanovel, this time incorporating a series of talks/articles that Coetzee really did. There were some interesting parts, some interesting discussions. But beyond that, the book was a bit of a yawn. That's really all I can say about it.

Coetzee and I will likely run into each other again in the years to come, but I can only hope our "relationship" improves.

New York Trilogy

2011-05-08T10:23:00.001-04:00

The City of Glass

At first, I really enjoyed this novel. Daniel Quinn, a writer of cheap detective novels, gets a phone call in the middle of the night. The phone call is for Paul Auster (someone Quinn doesn’t know – how clever, no?), but it’s so intriguing, Quinn pretends he’s Auster and thus gets mixed up in the strange affair. The call was from Peter Stillman. Peter had been locked in a basement by his father for years; his father was trying to get him to speak the original language of god, or something like that. After a fire, Peter was discovered and Stillman Sr (also named Peter) went to prison. The deal with the phone call to Quinn/Auster was that Stillman Sr was getting out of prison, and Stillman Jr and wife thought he was going to come and kill Jr. Quinn was to pick up Sr’s trail at the train station and keep him from getting to Jr.

Quinn follows Sr all over New York, day after day, to no avail. Nothing happens. The guy just walks. Turns out, though, that he was spelling something on his walks that had to do with his thesis on language (total bull so I won’t elaborate). Quinn finally tries to talk to the guy, which he succeeds at doing, but Sr is a total nut job, and every time Quinn meets him, he gives him a different name and Sr. doesn’t seem to notice. Or does he notice and pretend not to? Turns out it doesn’t really matter.

And then one day Quinn loses him. Sr. doesn’t appear outside his hotel one morning, and it turns out he had checked out the night before. So Quinn is stuck. He looks up Auster in the phone book and goes to see him. Turns out he’s a writer and is a complete dead end. Quinn tries to call the Stillmans, but their line is constantly busy. For days. Finally (rather, you know, than going to see what is up), he sets himself outside the Stillman Jr apartment building and waits. After literally months, he runs out of money and so calls up Auster. Who tells him that when Quinn lost Sr, the guy had jumped into the Hudson and died. He goes back to his own apartment, to find all his stuff gone and someone else living there. So Quinn finally goes to see the Jr, and guess what – the apartment is completely vacant.

So what does he do? He strips naked and hangs out there for quite a long time (days? weeks? months?). Eventually Auster goes to find Quinn, and he isn’t there – just his notebook.

My favorite comedian, the late Mitch Hedberg, used to do the following bit:

You know when you go into a restaurant, and it gets busy and they start a waiting list, and they start calling out names, "DuFresnes, party of two." They say again, "DuFresnes, party of two." But then if no one answers, they'll just go to the next name, "Bush, party of three." Yeah, but what happened to the DuFresnes? No one seems to care. Who can eat at a time like this? People are missing! And they're hungry! That's a double whammy! "Bush, search party of three!" You can eat once you find the DuFresnes!

I kept thinking about that when I got to the last 30 pages or so, when Stillman Jr disappeared. Why was their line busy? Where did they go? And then Quinn disappears. Where did he go? The novel ends with the suggestion of, “well, he’s out there somewhere.” Yeah – naked. Clearly I was very disappointed in this.

Ghosts

This second story in the collection was why I bought the novel in the first place. Blue is a private detective, hired by White to trail Black. White pays for an apartment with a view of Black’s apartment, and Blue commences watching. But nothing really happens. He has no direction in terms of why he’s watching Black. The end was bizarre and like City of Glass, disappointing.

The Locked Room

The third and final part of the Trilogy centered around an unknown narrator (who is supposedly the author of the other two novels) who is contacted by his childhood friend’s wife when the friend disappears. He is tasked with going through the friend’s (Fanshawe) papers and novels to see if anything is publishable. It is, and in the meantime the narrator ends up marrying Fanshawe’s wife and adopting his son. But Fanshawe isn’t really dead, and the narrator knows it, and goes on a hunt to track him down. Names that appear in the other stories – Peter Stillman, Quinn – appear here as well, but I’m not sure if they are supposed to be the same people, or if they are just another play on names and mistaken or interchangeable identities. The writing of this section was markedly different (as in, not as good) from the previous sections, and was a little annoying. Unlike in The Piano Teacher, I found myself rolling eyes a few times.

I don’t know why I was so disappointed in these stories. My first reaction is that I didn’t like the ambiguity, the unanswered questions. But that can’t entirely be true. For years, I’ve been searching for novels that are like David Lynch’s films. In New York Trilogy, I recognize this long sought after novel. My central question, though, is how can I love love love Mulholland Drive and hate New York Trilogy when the central themes of identity and doppelgangers, puzzles and locked rooms or objects, etc. are so similar?

Reading some scholarly reports on New York Trilogy, (as well as some help from Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, which I started this weekend), I’m beginning to see my problem.

In Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous character (appropriately a sort of stand-in for Coetzee himself) is giving a lecture on realism, in which she states, (paraphrasing here) if I say there is a table in the hall, I mean there is a table in the hall. I think for some reason I’m stuck there in realism when reading. Perhaps it’s because I have problems processing information that I read, which is why I read so slowly – that’s the explanation that makes the most sense. It’s easy for me to see symbolism when I know it’s symbolism (The Metamorphosis for example), but less so when it’s subtle, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to take things at the author’s word or not. But then again, I loved The Trial. Where does that fit in, since it’s certainly more subtle than Gregor Samsa becoming a bug? I don’t know…this is an evolving theory on myself.

But in the end, I suppose, my reaction to both is the same. When I first saw Mulholland Drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about it to the point where I bought the movie and started to watch it over and over again. I didn’t expect to figure it out, but its puzzles wouldn’t leave me alone, and that feeling in Club Silencio when Diane/Betty finds the key in her purse still gives me the chills. In the same sense, I am pestered by this sense that I inherently didn’t get these stories – I know that there are layers there that I just didn’t delve into – perhaps because I was too distracted by the image of Quinn wandering New York naked. Maybe it comes down to expectations. I was not expecting a typical novel here, but I wasn’t expecting what New York Trilogy actually offered. So I wasn’t prepared for it, like I was with The Trial. I’m sure, in years to come, I will come back to this book, hopefully after I’ve read more Auster so I get all, or at least some of, the self referential stuff. This return won’t be any time soon. Unless, like Mulholland Drive, it really begins to bug me. In which case, I may be back reading it next week.

The Great Gatsby

2011-05-06T15:48:00.004-04:00

There are some books that it’s difficult to write about, not for lack of things to actually say about it, but because writing about it feels like exposing the innermost reaches of one’s core. There are a handful of books that make me feel this way, The Great Gatsby being one of them. I’m not sure that there is a book that I feel more connected to – that I feel is more personal to me and my own story; only The English Patient comes close. The Great Gatsby feels like a road map of my own heart – and heartache. It’s hard to know where to begin in this review, because it is so intertwined with my life, I don’t know how to tell the story of The Great Gatsby without telling my own. This isn’t a “review” of the novel. This is my story of The Great Gatsby.

I have to take a big breath just to begin.

Gatsby came to me in 10th grade Honors English. I was 15. A romantic 15. I had already been in love twice. The third time came when I was 15…it had probably already arrived by the time we got to Fitzgerald (though #3 was really just trying to recapture #1). Perhaps you may think I’m being melodramatic, to say that three (out of four!) of the times I have been in love with someone occurred by the time I was 15, but looking back even now, as I approach 30, it’s true. There were two other times – at 18 and at 21 – when I thought I was in love, but in hindsight I know that I wasn’t. But if those first two times I fell in love were not love, than I don’t know what love is. (Do not cue Foreigner here). This was the lens through which I was reading Fitzgerald – three unrequited loves, and only 15 years old!

When I was 12, I fell in love for the first time. The person I fell in love with was much older than me. I don’t know if he ever even knew I existed, though I made every attempt possible (in the pre-internet days when I couldn’t cyber-stalk him) to make myself noticed. I was a non-entity, as 12-year-olds tend to. That whole situation has colored my entire life since. I will go no further into details. But I was an incredible fool (“colossal vitality of his illusion”). I was reading Romeo & Juliet for god’s sake. I believed that if only I had enough faith, if only I tried hard enough, IF ONLY, we would be together. I believed we were “meant to be” in a way that only an innocent child can believe such a thing and not be incredibly creepy. And you cannot argue with a 12 year old who is convinced of something, especially one as stubborn as me. (“It was an extraordinary gift for hope…”)

When I realized it wasn’t going to work out the way I had planned, there I was – Gatsby reaching out to the green dock light across the Sound. There I was, setting up my entire life so that this person would happen to someday show up at my party. That is where Gatsby really began for me, where he entered my life. I was Jay Gatsby before I ever knew of him.

I’ve been revisiting the novel in the last few weeks, reading it to Brendan at night as he falls asleep. This might be close to the tenth time I’ve read this novel. I find myself tearing up at certain passages. Though this book has always moved me, something about reading it out loud, 17 years down the road, has brought tears to my eyes more than once. I can feel Gatsby’s longing over the years…I can feel his heartbreak that hot afternoon at the Plaza. I mean that I can literally feel it. My heart is breaking for him as I write this. And in a sense, breaking for myself at 12 at the same time. The images from The Great Gatsby have become part of my own personal mythology.

Here are some of the quotes I’ve underlined in the book over the years. Some are fabulous sentences, some evocative images and some have just spoken to me as if Fitzgerald just got it. It’s the best I can do in terms of a review.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

A pause; it endured horribly.

He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity.

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. (My.favorite.line.from.a.novel.ever.)

But the rest offended her–and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village–appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated three years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house–just as if it were five years ago.

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”

He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . .

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.

"You always look so cool,” she repeated.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

”An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.

He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.

I appreciate a good book, a well written book. A book that sucks you in with its language and paints for you a world that you know, or don’t know; gives you a new light, or illuminates an old one. But then there are books that speak to you – that feel as if they were plucked secretly out of your heart. In Gatsby, it seemed as though Fitzgerald had beautifully rendered in poetry my own experience. To feel that someone gets what you’re going through so much that they can turn such pain and despair into something as magnificent as Gatsby is an amazing, amazing feeling. When I was younger, Gatsby was a comfort, providing a kindred spirit – a story, a despair, a drive, that I was intimately familiar with. Now it serves as a reminder of and connection to some core self that has been wrapped and buried under layers and layers of years and experiences I once never could have conceived of.

Once upon a time, when I was 12, I had a nightmare that I still vividly recall 17 years later. This person I was in love with was visiting – not visiting me, but back in the area. This person was “20 minutes away,” and I couldn’t get to him. No one would drive me to where he was. There was my chance – if I could only get there – and I couldn’t. It’s a feeling of complete and utter helplessness…one’s future is waiting just out of reach, and you just cannot get to it.

Last year I heard through the grapevine that this person was coming back – literally 20 minutes away. And I could have easily found my way back into that situation, once again seeking out the opportunity to say, “Does my name mean anything to you? Did you ever know that my life revolved around you, and that its trajectory is entirely because of you?”

Inside of me, my 12 year old self is always tugging at my sleeve, still looking for answers that at 29, I know will never come (“He’s afraid, he’s waited so long”). And to some extent, I don’t know that I want to know the answer. The likely truth would no longer be helpful. But she – the little lost girl still cowering inside me – still seeks those answers.

I thought about taking that next chance to find answers, if only for her, in honor of who I once was. But my life is at a good place now and I do not want the emotional implosion that always comes along with these questions – from opening up these old wounds again. At some point, I had to take Gatsby as a lesson rather than a reflection. At some point, I had to learn to ignore the green light. The light will always be there, since it’s myself – my past, the life I once believed I would have but never did – that is glowing across the Sound. But I have learned that I don’t need to stand at night and reach out to it. At some point, I had to just turn around.

Gatsby pursued Daisy, believing he could go back into the past and fix it, only to have reality shoved in his face at the Plaza that hot, hot day. (A day that feels more palpable, more real to me than any day I’ve ever read of in fiction.) For me, in the end I decided not to try once again to find answers, since I know what they will likely be. All of this is kept in a tightly closed box inside me, and I now prefer to keep it that way. That chapter of my life is best not reopened.

I found out that he had a baby girl recently (and gave her a dumb, dumb name). I felt nothing. At last, I realize, it’s behind me.

The Piano Teacher

2011-05-02T18:33:00.004-04:00

So. The Piano Teacher was not AT ALL what I expected. What I thought was going to a teacher/pupil love affair story turned into something much darker, much stranger than I ever imagined.

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher in her mid-30s. She’s drab, maybe frumpy, exacting and particular. She has no friends, she has no life besides music. She was trained to be a successful concert pianist, but was never much more than mediocre and so became an instructor at a conservatory in Vienna. From the outside, she is a picture of respectability. But after work, she roams the seedy districts, visits peep shows, and engages in a variety of other voyeuristic activities.

Erika lives at home with her creepy, domineering mother with whom she often has hair-pulling fist fights over what time she came home and what dress she bought. Did I mention Erika is approaching 40? And that she and her mother sleep in the same bed, despite the fact that Erika has her own room? Mrs. Kohut has always believed her daughter was the best – or at least did everything she could to convince Erika of it – and has constantly been disappointed with her daughter’s inability to realize her full potential. She wants to keep her daughter all to herself.

And then along comes Walter Kelmmer, a handsome, blonde engineering student who is also a talented pianist and taking lessons with Erika. Walter sees a challenge in Erika and begins to pursue her. He thought he bargained for a woman who was just waiting for someone like him to come along and help her loosen up, I suppose. He didn’t want anyone to know of his affection for his teacher for fear it might hurt his reputation with the other ladies – especially those his own age. But he had no idea what he was in for.

Erika catches on that Walter is interested, and while at first it sort of serves as a joke between her and her mother, she eventually begins to see the possibilities. In a moment of jealousy, she puts shattered glass in the pocket of someone she thinks Walter is also interested in (another student). Because, you know, that’s what normal people do, right? After a good start in a bathroom, the “relationship” gets on a strange trajectory when Erika writes Walter a letter detailing all the, ah, peculiarities she has been saving up for.

Walter reads the letter and keeps asking, “Are you serious?” But oh yes, she is – she shows him the box of accoutrements.

I don't want to give the rest away, because I was pretty surprised by the ending, and by what lead up to the ending. I didn't see any of that coming. Nor had I seen Erika's box coming. Nor, I suppose, had I seen The Piano Teacher coming.

The novel to me to revolved around power – who had the power. Mrs. Kohut wants to maintain absolute power over her daughter, but isn’t able to. As the authority figure in the relationship, one would typically conclude that Erika has the power in her “relationship” with Walter. As the male, Walter feels he has the power. Erika believes that by allowing Walter to believe he is in the power position, it will really be her. She tries to set the rules of the relationship with her letter, giving him the physical power but on her terms. And Walter does what she asks, but of course it doesn’t turn out to be what she wanted. Walter knew that would be the case, and of course with that knowledge, and with his act, he felt that he was in control. And with her final act, Erika has put herself back in control. Sort of.

Something about the text was a bit odd, with its drawn out and sometimes awkward metaphors; at times I wasn’t sure if that was the fault of the translation or the original text. Things like that can get extremely annoying and distracting, but I didn’t find it so in this case. The descriptions are lengthy, though there wasn’t a point where I wanted Jelinek to get on with it, and despite the graphic depictions of everything, I never found myself rolling my eyes. In 1988, the New York Times reviewer saw Erika’s violent fantasies as having been concocted by the author just for the shock value. I didn’t get that at all. Nothing seemed out of place, and I never thought to myself that something seemed contrived to get a reaction, in the way that American Psycho did.
What struck me, at least for the first two-thirds or so of the book was how little happened, without it seeming like nothing was happening. The bathroom scene isn’t until more than half-way through, and it isn’t until the last 50 pages that any action really gets going. It reminded me of real life - the fact that the overarching story of ourselves and the events that make up those stories are really few and far between. That the majority of our lives are mundane and average. Perhaps that's why I didn't feel that the long descriptions or the lack of action for most of the novel was out of place. It felt like reality.

I’m still not sure what to think about The Piano Teacher – as in I’m not sure if I liked it or not. I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed it, but I found myself not wanting to put it down, which should say something. I was surprised by the ending; I was surprised by lead up to the ending; I was surprised by Erika, which again is saying something. The novel was made into a film in the last decade, which won a number of international awards. I don’t think that I want to see this novel visually, though. Reading it was enough for me.

Red Harvest

2011-04-24T08:46:00.001-04:00

I seem to be on a roll lately...at least comparatively.

Every now and then, I get a hankering for a detective novel. Detective novels and spy novels seem to be my go-to "easy read" - really, the only kind of easy read I bother with.

So, in my recent reading slump, I've been looking for anything I can sink my teeth into. In such slumps, I have two choices - keep reading something, which generally means the light stuff. Or else delve into something extremely contemplative and deep. Not Finnegan's Wake, but something French or Eastern European. In this particular slump, I just don't have the patience for the contemplative and deep. So, fluff it is. Enter the detective novel.

Red Harvest has been on my TBR list for a bit. Something about the title was intriguing, and I suppose I was hoping the protangonist would be picking up communists. It started out with a communist - or at least a labor organizer (what's the difference, right? j/k), but that plot line didn't get very far. I think the "red" referred to all the blood. Because there was an awful lot of dead people.

Generally I did not like RH as much as I recall liking The Maltese Falcon (or did I only like that because it gave me time to think about Humphrey Bogart?), nor as much as I liked some of the works by Chandler and others that I’ve read in the past. Red Harvest was too complicated – too man similar characters shifting loyalties, such that in the I end I couldn’t tell you who killed whom. It also felt a bit amateurish - it was Hammett's first novel, so hopefully that is his excuse. I finished the book about a week and a half ago and I don't even remember any of the character's names. I tried to follow it up with Hammett's The Glass Key, but quickly realized I had had enough for now.

Whatever it was about the novel, though, it seems to have worked as a tonic for my non-reading disease. I think I've been cured!

Breath, Eyes, Memory

2011-04-05T08:27:00.004-04:00

When spring comes along - or at least when spring is expected to come along, since here on the East Coast it still seems a long way away - I want to read "hot" books. By hot, I mean books about Africa, the South, the Caribbean. I suspect that that was one component of my Shipping News problem. It was a great January book, which was when I started it. But by March, I didn't want to be reading about Newfoundland. I want to be transported to some place warm.

I had found Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory a few years ago at a library sale, and I'm not entirely sure why I was compelled to get it. Maybe because I knew it would be a good Spring book someday. The novel was easy to read, quick moving, and despite my reading desert, I was able to finish it in about a week. It felt, in some way, exactly what I needed to kick-start my reading again. But on the other hand, that's what I thought about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and that didn't get me very far.

Regarding the novel, I was at first a little taken aback by the simplicity and straight-forwardness of the language; later I saw BEM characterized as a young adult novel, which made sense, though I'm not sure if it really is a YA or not. The story was also all over the place, covering miles and miles of ground, and I do not mean just spatially but time and subject matter. Some of the elements, such as Sophie's bulimia seem to come out of nowhere, and do not partiuclarly lend anything to the novel as a whole, other than to drive home the mental destruction that the characters face due to the actions of one another. But, in a poorly written novel, these things would bother me. Here, they didn't, which speaks somewhat to Danticat's success.

I'm not sure what else to say about it...this isn't a novel that inspired a long post, or an analysis of any points in particular. No deep thoughts here on my part.

I also want to thank those of you who posted or e-mailed specifically in response to my Shipping News post. Don't worry - I'm not reading because I'm depressed (actually that causes me to read more), it's because I'm busy with work and family, as well as occupied with other pursuits. Reading time has been cut down significantly, and since in the last six months I haven't been able to attach myself to a book, the little time that I am able to find gets used by something more attention-grabbing. Last weekend, though, I think I might have found my cure - a used bookstore has opened up in town! I picked up Pat Barker's Regeneration and have stuck to it thus far. I also got some Dashiell Hammet books from the library, and have been reading Red Harvest to my son at night. Perhaps not the best subject matter for a bed-time story, but it certainly seems to put him to sleep!

The Shipping News

2011-03-22T10:32:00.002-04:00

I’m in a reading desert. Since October, I have had the desire to read, but just cannot bring myself around to doing it. I pick up a book here, a book there, but cannot find anything to really grab my attention.

I picked up The Shipping News way back in mid-January after finishing The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I thought I would be able to get through it fairly quickly. Nope – took me two months. I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t care about the characters. I liked them, they were interesting, the writing was excellent, but it just wasn’t there. Or I wasn’t there.

After two months, I couldn’t even give you any real opinion on the book. It was good, I suppose. I probably won’t read it again. The only time I felt emotionally involved was when Bunny pushed her teacher because she was mean to Herry. I’m really disappointed by something, but I couldn’t tell you what. It’s not Proulx’s fault, certainly. It’s my own. It was everything I should have liked – fabulous writing, quirky characters, depressing yet light hearted. Might I have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t taken so long to read it? I can’t say. I don’t know what’s up with me lately. All I can do is blame The Magus.

Next up, I’m attempting Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory as well as Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point in an attempt to get back on track with the Modern Library list. Only seven left - the end is finally in sight, and I just don't care anymore!

Low-Brow Reading

2011-01-08T12:27:00.001-05:00

It’s been a loooong time since I last posted. There have been many reasons for that – work and family being the two main ones. But really, I just haven’t been reading. Things have picked up a bit since I put the Modern Library aside for a while. I’ve been working on this post, in many variations, since September, so hopefully it was worth the wait.

Way back in August or September, there was a little controversy in the literary world. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was released to much fanfare, including double reviews in the New York Times. Two popular authors, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, started a twitter frenzy that was dubbed Franzenfreude, complaining that female authors get put in the category of popular/commercial fiction or chick lit and are thereby ignored by the literary establishment. As a chick-lit and popular fiction ignorer, and a fan of decidedly high-brow literature, I had wanted to do a long post on the subject taking up the torch for literary fiction as clearly superior (and therefore more deserving of any reviews). But by late September, a post no longer seemed relevant as the controversy died down, and I also didn't feel like I had all the information. I had never read anything by Picoult and Weiner - in fact, I had purposely avoided them. All of the charges being thrown from Picoult and Weiner could easily (and justly) be thrown at me. I do look down on commercial fiction, and women’s commercial fiction specifically. I do lump all books marketed “for women” as chick lit and mean it in all its derogatory ugliness, failing to distinguish between so-called “shoe porn” of the Candace Bushnell variety, and other more general fiction that just happens to be written by women. And looking at the list of books I have read over the past few years, very few have been women, though I have my own excuse for that (blame the Modern Library).

So, before slinging insults at Picoult and Weiner, and other commercial women’s fiction, I wanted to be in a better position to judge. So I did the unthinkable and read a book by Jodi Picoult.

I did a little research prior to selecting which to read. I could have selected any one of the dozen or more Picoult books, letting the chips fall where they may. But believe it or not, I really didn’t want to embark upon this project just to be insulting or snarky. In order to make all attempts possible to avoid that, I sought out the one that I felt would interest me the most. I settled on her 2000 novel, Plain Truth for two reasons: (1) familiarity with the subject matter and proximity to the setting; and (2) I saw the made-for-tv adaptation of the novel a few years ago (the only Lifetime movie I believe I ever watched) and I found it entertaining – for a Lifetime movie, that is.

I wouldn’t say that I was particularly “into” the novel. There were certain points where I felt compelled to keep reading, and points where I would go weeks without even thinking of it. Which is why it took me four months to finish. The prose was often clunky, the dialog awkward. “Jacob, I stopped trying to figure out American juries around the same time Adam Sandler movies started raking in millions at the box office” or “Questioning Coop as a witness rated high on my scale of discomfort – somewhere, say, between suffering a bikini wax and braving bamboo slivers under the nails.” It’s not high-art. At some point I became immune to it, for the most part, and able to focus on the story, which is what people read Picoult for. As far as I can tell, at least. And the plot had many twists and turns, as should be expected from courtroom drama. But the end of the trail really got to me. The jury is out deliberating, day after day. Will the prosecution win, and sentence a poor Amish girl to prison, or will the defense win, and a no one be punished for the baby’s death? We’re waiting and waiting, and suddenly, they decide on a plea bargain, Katie gets to wear a monitoring bracelet, and everything is good. This felt to me like Picoult’s jury got away from her, or she couldn’t decide what to do – Katie couldn’t go to jail, but perhaps she didn’t want to come back that she was innocent, though I believe that that would have been just a fine outcome in itself. It felt like Picoult gave up waiting, wanting to wrap everything up without too much mess, and so took the plea bargain way out.

Though I think this novel was likely the best pick I could have made, I often wished it wasn’t so close to home, literally, because I found myself picking a lot of details apart. There were a number of geographical mistakes, the most obvious of which is that there is not an Amtrak station within 30 miles of State College, and a number of glaring issues with the depiction of the Amish. Now, I’m not an expert on the topic by any means, and though my own interaction tends to be with Wenger Mennonite than the Amish, I’m also not unknowledgable. I mostly resented the depiction of the Amish in Lancaster County as country bumpkins who don’t know what traffic is. Yes, parts of Lancaster County are very rural, and I suppose there could be some Amish in those parts of the county that never ventured out of their township into the metropolis of Lancaster City. But I would imagine that is the exception, not the rule. Drive along Route 30 sometimes, including through Paradise, a community mentioned several times in the novel, and you will know what I mean. Many Amish are business owners that serve the non-Amish community, often in urban areas. They even shop at Walmart. This isn’t to say that the Amish aren’t sheltered to some extent from the world – they certainly are. Picoult defiantly did her research on many of the details of Amish life, but the portrayal of the so-called English world as completely foreign and unfamiliar to them felt disingenuous. It served its purpose within the plot of Plain Truth, but I did not feel it was an entirely accurate characterization.

So, in the end, what can I say? I know why people read this type of novel. And by “this type of novel,” I don’t mean novels written by women, or marketed to women, or novels that a lot of people purchase. I mean a novel in which everything is surface. And that, I believe, is the distinction between literary fiction and commercial fiction. There is no subtlety here. In other words, I didn’t have to think about anything. Oh sure, I could have wondered what really did happen to Katie’s baby, whether she really did kill it or not. But that’s not really the same type of thinking that is invoked by say, novels by Jeanette Winterson or Margaret Atwood – two contemporary female novelists who (1) get reviewed by respected establishments and (2) sell far fewer novels than Picoult or Weiner.

People read these types of novels for pleasure, for escape. To be entertained. I suppose I never really approached reading for simple entertainment or escape, and I never understood the drive to do so. That’s me, though. Plain Truth wasn’t bad. It is easily consumed, like fast food – quickly churned out for the Pertinent Topic of the year. But it wasn’t high-art, as I mentioned before. And that, perhaps, is what frustrated me about the Franzenfreude hullaballoo. Picoult and Weiner write, I suppose, for the masses. They make a lot of money doing that, because there are a lot of people in the world who want to escape for a bit with reading, such writers provide them with satisfaction, and that’s perfectly fine. Adam Sandler makes a lot of money doing the same thing with movies (to use Picoult’s own example, quoted above). But in 100 years, people (hopefully) won’t be talking about Big Daddy in the same way we talk about Citizen Kane, or even The Wizard of Oz. In the same way, look at the bestsellers from the early 20th century. Other than one or two every decade, we’re not reading the popular fiction of yesteryear. They were reading The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol and The Rosary by Florence Barclay, not Gertrude Stein or Thomas Mann. Sometimes good fiction happens to be popular. But popular fiction isn’t always good fiction, as in, fiction that will still be relevant in some way in 2110. And I doubt that Picoult & co. will be amongst those that are.

I’m not going to comment at all on the merits of Jonathan Franzen. Having never read anything he’s written I am as equally unqualified to evaluate his work as brilliant or not as I was to evaluate Picoult. But I’m going to way in a bit here on the controversy that got me reading Picoult to begin with.

There are two aspects to the debate. The first color, which is where Picoult and Jennifer Wiener specifically steered the ship of Franzenfreude, is the coverage of female writers versus male writers. But what does that mean? Are serious books written by women reviewed less than serious books written by men? What is the cause of that? Are men writing superior books to their female counterparts? Or is serious fiction by men published more often than serious fiction by women? As in, if two-thirds of the serious fiction published is written by men, then two-thirds of the reviews of serious fiction should be reviews of books written by men. But there is a question beyond that which is, are women writing as many serious novels as men but getting published less often? What if fifty percent of all serious, really good books (by whose standard, of course?) are written by women, but only one-third of the serious, really good books published are written by women? I don’t know. And I’m not about to spend my time counting up reviews, as others have done.

It is here the Jennifer Wiener may have a point that I am certainly willing to concede: that there may be a gender bias here somewhere. Why aren’t there more prominent women writers of literary fiction? But I don’t know that it’s right to blame the NYT for that. Lionel Shriver, a serious writer of definitely not fluffy female stuff has stated she has had to fight her own publishers to keep her books from being marketed to the women-only reading public. Wiener also brought up the name Nick Hornby as a (semi?) commercial fiction author who gets much more respect that Wiener and Picoult. Is that the result of the gender bias? As someone who has read Hornby (High Fidelity), and thought it was decent, I will say no, it’s not. High Fidelity was quirky and interesting. Plain Truth was predictable and cheesy. Honestly, I feel Hornby would more likely be classed with the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, another on-the-margin-of-commercial-v.-lit, than Picoult, though I cannot speak for Wiener. This is just judging from the limited number (as in, one per) of novels by each that I’ve read so perhaps I’m judging prematurely? But regardless of the number of female v. male novelists, or published novelists, or reviewed novelists or respected novelists, I agree with C.E.Morgan’s assertion that we shouldn’t champion mediocre novels by females out of defensiveness. We should seek out good literary fiction by women, but we shouldn’t praise it just because of the gender of the writer.

The second aspect to the debate is commercial fiction versus literary fiction. Picoult and Wiener seemed quickly to distance themselves from this in favor of the gender angle. (Though at least Wiener acknowledged she knows she isn’t as good a writer as Jonathan “Genius” Franzen – with the snide remark about his intellectualism.)

This aspect of the debate can quickly devolves away from what books are “worthy” of reviews into questions about the place of genre fiction, including romance, and do graphic novels count here anywhere? People get defensive when you start comparing quality, because judgments about artistic talent or expression are really based on the observer’s individual taste. Or is it? I might not like a particular style of art, but can I make a value judgment on the artist’s talent even if it isn’t what I like? I think in many instances you can. Others disagree. And this is where I think Picoult and Weiner are wrong. Though there is a fuzzy area around the middle (in my opinion populated by those such as Oates and Hornby, as mentioned above), it is pretty clear what should count as commercial fiction and what should count as literary fiction, and why they are two very different things.

Wiener/Picoult tried to frame the debate surrounding the lack of respect for commercial fiction, particularly when geared toward females, in that Franzen and others like him get kudos for writing about the same subjects as “chick-lit” authors who are ghettoized for doing so (thus the gender bias angle). Picoult stated, “a lot of the same themes and wisdoms I find in commercial fiction are the same themes and wisdom as what I see lauded in literary fiction.” The majority of fiction books that are written are about “Family, Relationships and Love” (as one of their websites’ announces to potential readers). The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Handmaid’s Tale, Crime and Punishment, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Portnoy’s Complaint are all about family, relationships, and/or love. But that’s not the point. It’s not that Picoult and Company write about the same topics as their male counterparts and get less respect for it. There is a difference.

And that difference is the quality of the writing. Commercial fiction is much more predictable, more formulaic (how many Picoult novels include a crime or a trial?), and everything is wrapped up with a beautiful, Martha Stewart-esque bow. People who consistently read literary fiction over commercial fiction are looking for something beyond plot or character development. They want good writing. The kind of writing that demands you read with a pen or pencil in hand for underlining. Have you ever heard a commercial literature devotee say, “Well, that novel had a good plot, but I didn’t like the writing.” You won’t, because that’s not what they are reading for. And let’s be truthful. Commercial writing, especially in the vein of what Picoult writes, is not on the same level of those novels listed above. They are not on the same level as the many women authors who do write consistently about Family, Love and Relationships – whose writings are considered literature with a capital L. And the reason why isn’t because they are women, or because they commercial fiction writers, but because their writing isn’t as good. If it was, it would be literary fiction.

Commercial fiction is easily consumed, like wolfing down a hamburger and fries at a fast food joint. Literary fiction is much more like upscale dining. McDonald’s shouldn’t win culinary awards, and it shouldn’t expect to. A new McDonald’s opening down the street shouldn’t be reviewed by a food critic. Fast food/fine dining. Not consumed for the same reason. Shouldn’t be packaged the same way. Shouldn’t be expected to get the same coverage or praise from Great Restaurants Weekly. Both food. Not the same.

A female author on par with Jonathan Franzen (or any other “white male literary darling”) whose books are relegated to the chick-lit section due to some error on their publisher’s side has a right to be angry about that treatment. But the reviewers at the New York Times and other such establishments should not be expected to comb through the thousands of published novels every year hoping to find those one or two gems that were mislabeled. They have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is a category largely called literary fiction. Maybe reviewers miss something great by doing that, but there is only so much time in the world, and only so much space in the newspaper.

A review for the likes of Picoult and others like her would not be of consequence. Yes, it would give her a pat on the back, and maybe some feeling of acceptance by the literati (“you like me! You really like me!”), an article she could cut out and put in a scrapbook. And maybe it would move a few thousand more copies of her novels. But she’s already topping the best seller lists. Maybe I’m wrong about the other people in the world who read the NYT for recommendations, but I don’t think that they are looking to find out if they should read this week’s best seller. The job of the NYT, and what I look at it for, is to introduce me to writers and novels that I would likely not otherwise have heard of. People either will or will not pick up the mass market paperbacks at the airport, or Walmart or wherever. Franzen’s novels, and novels by writers like him, would never have the success they do without the New York Times, and even with two reviews, they will never have the mass popularity that Picoult or others do without critical adoration or even attention. And the good thing is, with the internet, there are hundreds and hundreds of reader review sites out there reviewing everything your heart could desire.

I searched the NYT and found four reviews for Jodi Picoult – none of which were for Plain Truth, so it gave me the opportunity to look at plots for her other novels and compare them to Plain Truth to see if that novel was truly representative, and I believe it was. Each of the reviews were written by Janet Maslin, who was described as “panning” Picoult’s works. While the reviews aren’t exactly positive – they are called “proficiently constructed” and described as having the “subtlety of a jackhammer”, Malin does say that Picoult is a “solid, lively storyteller.” I agree with all of those statements. But what struck me is how similar all of the plots sounded. I think Maslin sums up quite nicely (I’m combining two reviews here): “There are reasons why Ms. Picoult’s books are so widely read. However doggedly she belabors the obvious, she writes articulately and clearly, making her all too much of a rarity among popular authors. Her stories are more reassuring than disturbing, and their surprise twists pose no threats. These novels have soap opera momentum, and they guarantee comforting closure. When writers become this popular…they can coast in ways not possible for the up-and-coming. The opportunity to be long-winded yet perfunctory, paradoxically daring yet formulaic, is available to only proven hit makers at the top of the heap.”

What got on my nerves the most about the controversy was the strain of anti-intellectualism that pervaded it. When you wipe away the maybe-a-ploy-to-divert-attention-from-the-fact-that-we-are-jealous-of-Franzen’s-talent-not-his-reviews of calling it all gender-bias, there is a not-entirely subtle hint that it’s those “elites” who want to read books – or reviews – with big words that run the newspapers and shut out people who write for the masses – as in stuff without the word “lapidary”. The reviewers are condemned for not giving equal weight to empty-calorie airport novels (that are justly categorized as so) as they do to the tomes that actually make us think, or pick up a dictionary. To quote Picoult: “I think reviewers just like to look smart.” They also pull out Dickens and Austen as “popular” authors. Well, let’s be honest. Austen-as-popular-writer isn’t exactly historical truth, and Dickens was a damn good writer and created some of Western literature’s most enduring characters and literary moments (despite being popular). There is nothing wrong with a book being a best-seller or having mass appeal. But as I said before, being a best-seller does not make a book Literature. I can’t say if Franzen or any of the other (male) authors mentioned in the context of this controversy will be read a century from now, but I can venture one guess – Picoult likely won’t be.

I suppose in the end, when I pick a book, I want something that speaks to me. To quote Jonathan Frazen, via A.V. Club interview, “when I connect with a good book, they are telling me a story that seems true, and are telling me things about myself that I know are true, but I hadn’t been able to put together before.” And how books, or what books, speak to anyone is different from person to person. I suppose I look for complexity, subtlety, good writing, three-dimensional characters that I will remember forever. Sometimes this also includes giving me an opportunity to understand myself, or my life, or my relationships, or whatnot, in a new way. And that’s what the really important books in my life have done. And I know – instinctively, I didn’t have to actually read Picoult to know this – that commercial literature isn’t where it’s at for me.

The Magus

2010-11-05T00:38:00.001-04:00

WARNING: SPOILERS

Do you know the feeling when you’re watching a horror movie, and you know the killer is hiding in a room, and the innocent young girl is naively headed there? How you just want to shout at her not to go in there? Or the feeling when your friend decides to give her loser boyfriend just one more chance?

I had those feelings quite often while reading John Fowles’ The Magus - a novel that at first had me gripped in suspense. But slowly – we’ve got 650 pages here – that suspense turned to absolute frustration, then anger, then indifference. Let me explain.

The Magus begins with Nicholas Urfe in England. He ends up meeting this woman, Alison, and getting into a messy relationship with her. Eventually, she becomes a stewardess and he gets a teaching post at a boys school on a Greek island, both pursuing these paths partly to escape each other. Nicholas had inquired with some of the previous English teachers at this school, and had gotten rather cryptic information revolving around a rich old man (Conchis) who lived part-time in a mansion on the island.

So, Nicholas goes to Greece, and through curiosity he happens upon this mansion, and through a series of what turns out to be set-ups for him, he comes to meet Conchis, who is eccentric to say the least. I could not even fathom trying to explain the rest, but it involves twins Nicholas meets through Conchis. Are they actresses? Are they his prisoners? His lovers? His relatives? Are they on the side of Conchis, or on Nicholas’s side, or both? Then Alison comes back, then she kills herself. Or does she?

The first half or so of the novel was enthralling; or mostly so, and very engaging. I was interested – what was going to happen? Beyond that point, my feelings began to change towards the characters, and the novel in general.

Firstly, there were multiple times in the last 250(!) pages when it felt as if the action were winding down. Fowles was dusting his hands off, ready to wrap up. But then I would look at the vast amount of pages left and wonder how on earth this would drag out that long after the denoument. But then, of course, something else would happen – another crisis, another twist in Conchis’s game, and the process would repeat again over the next 50 or so pages. After this occurred twice, the feelings I described above began to surface. Nicholas would once again fall into their trap, get sucked back into their lies – knowing they were likely lying – and I wanted to scream at him: TELL THEM TO F---OFF AND GO BACK TO YOUR ROOM!

This reaction points to my first personal problem with the novel – a complete failure to understand the motivation behind the actions of any of the characters. I’m the type of person who hates surprises. I hate unnecessary mysteriousness. I am not Nicholas Urfe, and by the time June showed up at the gate with all her nonsense (if not long before), I would have said some nasty words and gone back to grading papers. So why Nicholas keeps falling into it again and again is beyond me. The motivation is presented that he is so head-over-heals in love with Lily or Julia or whatever her name, but I don’t buy it. Seriously – if someone cannot be straight with you about what their name is, what is the point? And why all these actors – or are they psychologists? – are involved is beyond me. Having a little fun is one thing, but to be involved in kidnapping and torturing someone just to show him about freedom, or that he’s a cad, or whatever their final motivation is supposed to be (it’s not clear) – well, I don’t get it. And what Alison does is absolutely beyond my comprehension. I get she was angry at him for dumping her – but to participate in a game by pretending that you’ve killed yourself is a bit overboard. Though it wasn’t the most overboard plot point in this novel, which should tell you something. Conchis – well, I won’t even pretend I understand one iota of motivation.

In the same vein of not understanding the motivations of the characters, I don’t understand Nicholas’s reaction to all the events that occur. After June (or is it Rose?) shows up at the gate, and pretends she doesn’t know about what happened with Alison (Nicholas, at this point, still believes that she killed herself), Nicholas essentially gets himself kidnapped by Conchis. They take him to an unknown location where he is drugged, questioned, and eventually lead through the silliest ceremony of either doctors and psychologists or actors in elaborate costume waxing Freudian about Nicholas, while he is positioned on a throne, half-naked, bound and gagged. They then drug him again and drop him off on some other Greek island, gets back to his school only to find out that he was fired from his position. While waiting to return to England, he glimpses Alison, and realizes that she never did kill herself – all that was part of the game as well. (I feel that I keep saying, “and THEN.”) Through all this, I was so angry for Nicholas. I came to hate all of these jerks. I wanted him to be able to get some kind of revenge on them. But he comes see some better purpose for all of this. The whole, Yes, I was kidnapped but it made me a better person. Well, maybe it did, but I certainly wouldn’t have any positive feelings towards the person that did it, or that participated in it. I was in an abusive relationship once. It made me a different person, not necessarily a better one. And trust me, I don’t have any tender feelings for that person. So Nick continuing to pursue it all, tracking everyone down, and waiting for Alison – not waiting to yell at Alison, but maybe to get back with her – well, I just cannot understand it.

So, I’ve got characters whose motivation and reactions I don’t understand. Plot twists out the wazzoo, to the point where I didn’t care anymore. In the end, I don’t know what the truth was. I don’t understand what the point of the experiment was. I don’t understand why I should believe in any sense such an elaborate expense of money, time and effort on international levels to tell some second-rate English teacher that he’s a cad. And I don’t care. I allowed myself to digest the novel for a few weeks before I finished this review, so that I had time to digest it and really consider my thoughts on it. But I still feel incredibly indifferent to it. Somewhere along the line, The Magus lost me and we weren’t able to get back on track. Overall, I was disappointed. Someday I will be coming back to Fowles, but I won’t likely be coming back to The Magus.

U.S.A. Trilogy

2010-09-28T18:14:00.000-04:00

“I always felt that it might not be any good as a novel, but that it would at least be useful to add to the record. ~John Dos Passos

In 1938, Jean Paul Sartre called John Dos Passos the “greatest living writer of our time.” A contemporary and sometimes frienemy of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, he was an obvious influence on Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow, Truman Capote, and Jack Kerouac. Sinclair Lewis said of one of Dos Passos’s first novels (Manhattan Transfer) that he had invented a whole new way of writing.

I had never heard of John Dos Passos, or any of his writings, prior to delving into all of these book lists. And on these lists his name, in connection with the epic U.S.A. Trilogy specifically, keeps popping up again and again. Eventually, I came around to the first book in the trilogy, 42nd Parallel and was completely blown away. (See my review here).

In U.S.A., Dos Passos merged a four unique styles in a manner that (as far as I am aware) had not been attempted before. In addition to the intertwined narratives of a dozen different characters, he incorporated poetic, staccato biographies, culled three decades worth of newspaper headlines and popular songs, and his own autobiographical, Joycean impressions in the section titled “Camera Eye.” All to give us a “picture” of America from the beginning of the 20th century to the stock market crash in ’29. It is truly an impressive undertaking – one that I found amazing in its technical aspect and moving in its emotional impact. My review for 42nd Parallel really could serve as a readers response to the entire novel, so I don’t want to rehash the effusive praise I gave the novel there…so this post is much less of a review than a discussion of additional relevant material.

Influence of Soviet Film

It’s hard now to conceive of what a revolution and revelation the advent of film. I – as I suspect most people reading this blog – have always had movies around. They have always been part of the landscape of my life, and in a set form, or sets of forms, such as documentary or narrative. But at the beginning of film, probably until at least the 1930s, by which time “talkies” had been developed, the medium was an entirely new art, and everybody was trying to figure out how film should “be” or what it should express.

This was also a time of great political and social unrest and experimentation and everybody was trying to find ways that this new medium could be used for their own purposes. One of those groups attempting to use film for societal and political purposes was the socialist and communist movements both in the United States and in Russia. Because of the camera’s ability to objectively capture the economic disparity of the world, the leftist political movements saw the documentary style as being an opportunity to bring their “revolutionary consciousness” to the people. There were things going on in the world that those with all the power (and all the money and the means of distribution) didn’t want the populace to see, but with the availability of the camera, now they could. Two chiefs filmmakers of this tradition are Eisenstein (famous for “The Battleship Potemkin”) and Dziga Vertov, whose Man with a Movie Camera could in some ways be seen as the cinematic precursor to U.S.A.

Dos Passos was directly involved in this cinematic movement. He co-founded in a group called the New Playwrights in the late 1920s which drew upon the ideas set forth by the leftist cinematic faction, specifically a group known as the Workers’ Film and Photo League. The League’s intent was to use the movie camera to document the disparity in the economic conditions of the proletariat versus the, well, Big Money. Vertov’s concept of the Camera Eye (or Kino Eye – here to distinguish it from the U.S.A. section) was very influential on this group. The Kino Eye was an experimental technique of filmmaking that used montage and other methods to explore the visible world.

The Film and Photo League created another organization called Nykino (New York Kino) in 1934. Dos Passos joined forces occasionally with Nykino and a later incarnation called Frontier Films by cowriting subtitles and commentary for their films. He was named as an advisory board member and consultant to Frontier Films in 1937, but shortly thereafter had an ideological falling out of sorts with the “official” left, and this shift in loyalty was a defining factor in Dos Passos’s subsequent falling out with the literary critics of whom he was once a darling.

Dos Passos is one of the first writers (that I know of) to integrate the methods used in filmmaking into literature. The concepts and techniques developed by Vertov and his contemporaries (specifically montage) are most evident in the Newsreel sections, and Dos Passos gives an upside-down nod to this influence in “Camera Eye” section. The interesting part of these “nods” is that neither are true depictions of what the workers’ cinema philosophy intended them for. I said the Camera Eye sections were upside-down since the intent behind the Soviet concept of the Kino Eye was pure documentary, but the Camera Eye in U.S.A. is the only part of the text that is subjective and not objective. (Dos Passos, in an interview with the Paris Review stated that the Camera Eye was the valve for his subjective feelings, allowing the rest of the novel to be approached objectively.) Newsreels in the workers’ cinema were used to show the relationship between the workers economic conditions to an overall worldwide class struggle. Dos Passos uses the newsreels to give public context to the private events in the narrative sections – tying together what is happening in the background – History with a capital H – while the lives of the characters march on (or not). Some have expressed frustration over the occasional puzzling nature of the Newsreels, but I felt they simply gave a general idea of the buzz, like a transcript of flipping through television stations.

************************

The U.S.A. Trilogy is not without its problems. The “Camera Eye” sections were the weakest in execution. A reader needs a good understanding of Dos Passos’s own biography to get anything out of them. Otherwise, it’s as disorienting as being thrown into Joyce’s Ulysses without a road map. The section was included to give the novel a personal perspective to counterbalance the documentary style, but it’s often confusing at best. I can’t say that the novel would be better without it, but I didn’t feel that these portions added something necessary to it.

Richard Gilman in the New York Times wrote, "U.S.A. isn’t tragic, which is precisely why so much of it feels cold and mechanical; tragedy implies personal destiny, moral choice, existential dilemma, and these conditions are almost wholly missing. Instead of fates we have personal disasters arising from involvements or confrontations with the vast, corrupting power of social reality, particularly economic reality… U.S.A. filled a need for a collective novel, whose real protagonist…was the entire nation. And bringing this off – at any level – called less for the talents of a true novelist than for those of a reporter, a sharp observer. This is why his biographies and Newsreels are the best parts of U.S.A. and the Camera Eyes and narratives, demanding invention, are the worst.”

I cannot argue with those criticisms, except that I did found the narratives much more on par with the rest of the novel (minus the Camera Eye) than Gilman gives Dos Passos credit for. But it’s true the narratives are cold – they are objective, and Dos Passos offers no redemption, no real crisis and no sympathy for the characters. Some he clearly views with contempt (Barrow, for instance). The author here simply records their lives, from the enthusiasm and brightsidedness of the dawn of the 20th century through the bitterness that culminated in the crash and the depression –all their triumphs which turn to failures, leading to the great failure, once again the personal reflecting the public and vice versa. There is no plot, really, other than the march of time. In this manner his style is much more journalistic than one might desire in a Great American Novel contender. But it's a condender nonetheless.

********************************

There are so many different angles that someone could come to this text from. The influence of the Machine Age; the influence of the documentary movement generally (and not just in film) of the 1930s and its role in Dos Passos’s popularity as a writer of the public/political sphere versus Fitzgerald or Hemingway, who were writing about the private sphere and whose popularity did not gain critical success until decades later; the idea of the reclamation of language for the masses (“USA is the speech of the people”); the influence of Dadaism; the influence of the media, particularly as portrayed in the Newsreels and the life of J. Ward Moorehouse. This novel is ripe for term papers.

Which brings me to my final point. With American English literature courses so heavy on the Lost Generation, why has Dos Passos become, well, lost? Once a contender for the Great American Novel (at least of the 20th century), how has U.S.A. come to be forgotten? To quote the New York Times: “At the time of his death, at 74 (in 1970), some people were surprised to learn that he was still alive. In a literary sense, his death had been decreed by critics during the last two decades of his life. He was considered a museum piece, a totem admired behind glass but not to be touched. Three American writers of his generation – Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck – had received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dos Passos, once considered their equal, received only diminishing respect.” Dos Passos continued to write well beyond the 1930s, publishing eighteen books after The Big Money appeared in 1936. As mentioned earlier, within a few years of the publication of the final volume in the trilogy, Dos Passos broke with the radical left movement in America, and with that fell out of critical esteem within a decade as his political opinions moved farther and farther to the right. Some critics claimed his shift in political ideology came from a cowardly inability to follow through on his socialistic ideals once he became a literary celebrity, and of course had some money.

In that externally imposed fall from critical grace, he was banished from the canon, but would likely have fallen out of favor anyway along with other more naturalistic writers such as Dreiser and Lewis. Again to quote Gilman in the New York Times, “Dos Passos and the times changed; the communal air darkened and lightened, throwing up new criteria, as it always does…It has a permanent place in our histories, I think, but only a precarious one in our literature.” (As Dos Passos himself stated decades earlier.)

U.S.A. is tricky. It's history driven (as opposed to being plot or character driven). It's unique among its contemporaries. It is decidedly different than the personal narratives put forward by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It's part modernist and experimental in the style of James Joyce, though not entirely. It has many elements of naturalism in the style of Dreiser, or a Sinclair Lewis - particularly in the journalistic prose, though I felt Dos Passos was a better writer technically - certainly better than Dreiser. It internalizes cinematic devices and philosophies, the aesthetic appreciation of the machine, and melds it into something truly different, truly its own. What results from this amalgam of styles and influences, both literary and non-literary is the cadance of a modern age just dawning upon America.

I truly loved The U.S.A. Trilogy. I not only found it compelling in all aspects, it inspired me to look deeper, to find the story behind. It led me to seek out Vertov and Soviet film theory and all other sorts of obscure topics that I never would have bothered with otherwise. I want to learn more about other events that influenced or passed by the characters in the narratives, such as the workers strikes and Sacco & Vanetti. That said, without a basic understanding of the background – of what Dos Passos was doing with the structure of the trilogy, the average reader would likely be turned off or completely lost. Because what average reader wants to watch Russian montage films from the 1930s as research just to understand a novel? As literature itself, it has its legitimate criticisms. Nonetheless it contributed something very important to the 20th Century novel, and for that alone it deserves its spot among any top list. Personally, I really liked it despite its flaws. It’s experiences such as this that make my whole “reading a list” a worthwhile endeavor.

Illiteracy v. James Patterson

2010-09-20T12:09:00.004-04:00

I have just discovered the all-book related site, The Second Pass.

They recently published the factoid, via Forbes, that one out of every 17 novels bought in the U.S. are authored by James Patterson. Wow. The post goes on to state, "that’s almost more dispiriting than straight-up illiteracy stats."

Just for your information, those illiteracy stats include the following:

50%! of American adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level
20% of Americans are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level
3 out of 4 people on welfare can't read
3 out of 5 people in an American prison can't read
85% of juvenile offenders have problems reading

I know that this will shock you, but I've never read a book by James Patterson. I've never held a book by James Patterson. I couldn't name one book he wrote. Scratch that last sentence. Swimsuit. He wrote a book called Swimsuit. I only know this because I walked over to my office-mates desk and looked. She always has Patterson novels on her credenza.

I am often of two minds about what people read. On the one hand, I feel I should be a populist and say, Reading is Good, so if people are reading, that's good, regardless of what they're reading. I started to write "I'm only talking about fiction here. Nonfiction is another story," and then was going to give the following example: "I don't think that a disenfranchised white teenage male in a rural area with a growing non-white (non-English speaking?) population with access to a lot of guns, fertilizer and meth reading, say, Mein Kampf, the Turner Diaries and right-wingnut propaganda would necessarily be a good thing. Because that's kind of what got Tim McVey in trouble. I don't think he did meth though."

Then I was going to say, well - that's true except for fiction-as-propaganda, and use the illustration of Glenn Beck's The Overton Window (is that what it's called?), which from all accounts seems a fictionalization of his Obama is a Marxist, Beware the Future scare-tactics...in which case reading can equal bad. Then I realized the example of the Turner Diaries is the same thing (and many have been comparing Overton to Turner). I suppose it's all in the hands of the reader, though, since the non-propaganda-filled Catcher in the Rye obviously played a role in the murder of John Lennon, so there you go. (This may really shock you, but I've actually read The Turner Diaries.)

The other side of me feels sad about the state of our reading culture, where the likes of Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyers, Elizabeth f-ing Gilbert and other brands of medicore take center stage at the expense of struggling yet really good literary fiction writers. And maybe not so struggling good literary fiction writers like Foer and Eugenides. And dead authors who are frickin' amazing. But the whole numbing of America isn't just taking place in the literature world, it's taking place on TV where VH1 is on like season 17 of a dating show where poor black women (and some women of other races) dressed like hoochies vie for the love of never-weres "Real" and "Chance" - less than wanna-be rappers whose only so-called Claim to Fame is trying to date someone who tried to date Flavor Flav. Or is it Flava Flav? I even like Public Enemy and I don't know how to spell his frickin name. This is not even to mention the film industry where the biggest hits of the last five years appear to be remakes and sequels. And film versions of Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyers and Elizabeth f-ing Gilbert.

Back to the topic at hand...While statistics about how much money authors such as Patterson and Stephanie Meyers make annually, let alone how big of a chunk they make up of the book-buying in a single year, make me want to gag, and scream at the American public to pick up a frickin' book that might make you step out of your comfort zone - on the other hand I realize that 20% of Americans adults cannot read. They couldn't read Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown even if they wanted to. And that's not a good thing. Even if what they read, if they could, would be claptrap fluff, at least they would be able to read - which would be a very good thing. So despite how sad it makes me, I don't think that the fact that most people are reading Patterson is at all even close to being as despressing as the American illiteracy rate.

That is, of course, unless what they read - whatever it may be - inspires them to kill people.

The Kreuzter Sonata

2010-09-15T12:26:00.000-04:00

I’m sure that most people come to Tolstoy through one of two novels: Anna Karenina or War and Peace. Though both of these novels are on my TBR list followed by asterisk after asterisk, I haven’t gotten around to them. Nope – my first venture into Tolstoy is the bizarre novella, “The Kreutzer Sonata.”

My reaction to this story is easily summed up in four words: Tolstoy was messed up. It begins innocently enough: a few strangers in a compartment together on a train strike up a conversation that comes around to love and marriage. It quickly becomes obvious that one of the travelers is really odd and begins a diatribe against love and marriage.

His argument goes all over the place. We have set up marriage as an ideal, but really it is virginity and chastity that should the ideal – the ideal advocated in the New Testament – for all one’s life. We are told that men “need” women, which essentially turns all women into whores trained to believe that being the object of men’s desire and fulfilling those desires is the highest ideal. Marriage is legal prostitution. Women are able to rule over their husbands, making them “wear the petticoats” because of this desire to be object within marriage. Men are subject to many more corrupting influences than women, but they then corrupt the women by their own debauchery. The woman is pure when she gets marriage, the husband debased. By engaging with her in “marital relations” she becomes debased as well by drawing her into his own debauchery. Coming into marriage, the pure woman is superior to the man. And then, THEN! She has children! And when that occurs, a woman realizes that her job in rearing children is more important than the jobs in which men engage to earn money. But men think that they are superior, and this contention leads to hostility and hatred, which is exacerbated by the bodily desires for one another. Also, by entering into “relations” with one’s spouse, jealousy naturally arises, which causes further suffering. In summary, every problem within marriage revolves around the fact that they ever consummated the relationship – any relationship – in passion to begin with.

And to make everything worse, doctors give information to women about how to avoid having children. And this makes women like a “horse without a bridle!”

The people in the compartment are wondering, “Who is this guy?” Over the course of the conversation, a certain recent trial is mentioned, in which a husband murdered his wife in a jealous rage. The bizarre dude (Pozdnyshev) speaks up and say, “Oh, I see you have recognized me as the murderer.” Nobody recognized him as the murderer…the case was just mentioned because it was pertinent to the conversation, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the compartment occupants leave eventually (Run Away! Run Away!), leaving the strange man alone with our narrator.

The murderer starts the conversation back up saying, “I’m sure you wonder how I came to murder my wife.” No, we really didn’t, but if the narrator told Pozdnyshev that, we wouldn’t have a story, would we? So, he goes on to tell us what happened.

Of course, Pozdnyshev comes from a decent family. In his youth, like most men, he has his dalliances on the primrose path. Then he fell in love and got married, had children, etc. Then the doctor told his wife how to avoid having children, and this musician starts coming around to “play” with Pozdnyshev’s wife. Pozdnyshev has to go away for a bit to another city. While he is away, the musician comes to visit, and his wife casually tells him of the visit in a letter. Pozdnyshev comes home early and murders his wife in a jealous rage. After she dies, Pozdnyshev is put on trial (and is acquitted because his wife may have really been having an affair with the musician) and over the course of the time between the murder and the train ride he came to realize that the concept of love, and marriage for any reason other than to have children for manual labor was the source of all his problems, including his jealous rage that caused him to murder his wife. The end.

Seriously – that’s where the story ends.

Authorities around the world found “The Kreutzer Sonata” offensive and banned its distribution. (What? Ban Tolstoy? Yes.) It was so maligned that Tolstoy had to write an explanation of its message. Which is that love is bad and we should follow the New Testament in its prescriptions for relations between men and women. Love stands in the way of men attaining the only aim worthy of attaining, which is service to God, because love of a woman is a distraction. “A Christian…cannot view the marriage relation otherwise than as a deviation from the doctrine of Christ, - as a sin. This is clearly laid down in Matt. V. 28…A Christian will never, therefore, desire marriage, but will always avoid it…If the light of truth dawns upon a Christian when he is already married, or if, being a Christian, from weakness he enters into marital relations…he has no other altnerative than to abide with his wife (and the wife with her husband, if it is she who is a Christian) and to aspire together with her to free themselves of their sin.” I’ll let those of you who believe the Bible to be the authoritative word on how we should act in the world duke it out over whether Tolstoy was right.

What gets me about this whole thing is that Tolstoy was married when he wrote “The Kreutzer Sonata.” I don’t know anything of his life, but I know if my husband wrote something like this, I would be very very worried. I might have to start sleeping some place else, armed. Just bizarre.

The Age of Innocence

2010-09-08T12:07:00.002-04:00

EACH TIME YOU HAPPEN TO ME ALL OVER AGAIN.

The Age of Innocence is my second – no, third – foray into the world of Edith Wharton. I wasn’t particularly thrilled with either The House of Mirth or Ethan Frome. The Age of Innocence covers much the same ground as those other novels: men and women who are trapped within the conventions of society and who are left unable to pursue the life that would truly make them happy. With The Age of Innocence, however, I immediately felt settled into it, much like I felt with Lord Jim. Just coming out of my year-and-a-half with The Alexandria Quartet and the pseudo-philosophical hilarious poppycock that is Women in Love, and staring in the face of the remaining 10 novels on the Modern Library list, none of which are under 450 pages, perhaps The Age of Innocence was just what I needed: short and light. Not light in terms of subject matter, because I found it to be heart wrenching (more on that below), but because there isn’t any hidden meaning, no subtext. It’s straight-forward, conventional storytelling.

Newland Archer is a smart young lawyer and part of New York’s upper crust society. He has just been promised marriage to May Welland, a smart young lady of the same Old New York hoity-toities, though their engagement hasn’t been officially announced yet. Newland and May are the perfect couple. But a scandal erupts in the family when May’s cousin, Ellen arrives. She had married a European Count and had recently run away from her husband, with the Count’s secretary (as protector? as lover?) under suspicious circumstances. Not only is that the material for 1870s shock-and-awe, the family has dared – DARED, I tell you! – to allow Ellen out into the world of theater, opera, and balls, as if they had no sense of decorum. This requires Newland and May to announce their engagement earlier than anticipated – in order to add “backup” to the public outrage at this break from tradition.

Ellen and Newland were old child playmates, and in light of his connection to May’s family he feels it is his duty to some extent to help Ellen. Slowly they begin to spend a bit more time together than perhaps they should, and it becomes clear that they harbor feelings for each other.
Newland is torn between the life his “people” expect him to live – a life so expected that he probably never wondered if it really was the life that he truly wanted for himself – and the life he has now discovered his heart wants him to pursue. He tries – really he does – to let go of Ellen, but he keeps getting pulled back in. They should have been together – all their life they should have been together, but because of their own limitations and the rules and commitments of their own lives, they simply couldn’t be. The rest of their lives – or at least Newland’s – was going on with the life that was chosen for him, so to speak, by his not questioning it until Ellen came along – and wondering what might have been. And when, in the end, he has the chance to strike it back up again, when they are both older, Newland is a widower, he decides not to try. He has locked that time up in his heart, and to see Ellen again would be to shatter the place she held in his heart. Nothing would be as he had imagined it for decades. And Newland chooses to live with his dreams and illusions locked away rather than pursue a reality that would only be disappointing.

Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the scene of his return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, and he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska's life. Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....

I can see two factions of people arising over this novel: those who think Newland is scum for pursuing Ellen as much as he does both before and after (but mostly after) his marriage to May, and those who think Newland is a coward for not bucking the hoity-toities and running away with Ellen and living happily ever after, as he had planned to do many times. But I’m not mad at Newland – in fact, I completely understand, because to some extent I’ve been there. More than once, in more ways than one.

Let’s see…there was the time when I was engaged (not to Shawn),set to graduate college, get a job, get married, and live a conventional life. And then, during my final finals week, a German exchange student showed up on my doorstep for a party. In this case, it was the Ellen/Newland situation, and it ended like Ellen and Newland ended. He and I have kept in contact over the 8 years that have intervened since, have both gotten married, had children, etc. Though there have been mention of someday getting together, I don’t want to. I have that memory – of us in our early 20s, trying to navigate through our not-really-a-relationship-but-something, and I know that meeting his wife and his son would not be beneficial. It’s adding an unnecessary epilogue to our long ago completed story. I do hope our children become penpals, though.

"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.
He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

And then there was the time when I was married (not to Shawn), terribly unhappy because the situation was abusive in all ways except physical, and I know that wasn’t far behind, and then someone showed up in my life, well, emerged from the background more than showed up, that showed me that it didn’t have to be that way. It gave me the confidence to resist within my marriage, which lead to a complete breakdown and I got out of that nightmare. And that relationship ended up like Newland and Ellen should have. Well, should have by some people’s romantic notions.

And then there were the multiple times when I projected the Ellen/Newland situation onto various relationships of varying seriousness. Because I’m like that sometimes. I suppose this cynic really does have a romantic streak, but it’s always of the tragic nature.

But really, what Newland does is what most of us would do. Because it takes a lot of effort, courage, and money to go against what is expected of you, and it’s difficult to start your life over from scratch.

"For US? But there's no US in that sense! We're near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we're only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them."
"Ah, I'm beyond that," he groaned.
"No, you're not! You've never been beyond. And I have," she said, in a strange voice, "and I know what it looks like there."

And let’s face it, if Newland had left pregnant May to run away with Ellen, there would be few who sided with him, not only in the reality of the book, but in the reality of the readers. Here’s a man who did not follow his heart – he stood by his responsibility. Outside of romantic books, isn’t that what we always expect of people? Newland even says so himself:

Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance.

"And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ..."

Wharton published The Age of Innocence in 1920 – already at the dawn of the age of Fitzgerald, the roaring 20s, and “new money.” The world of Innocence, set in the 1870s, was long gone – the age of old money, ruled by long-standing Dutch and English families with strict rules of behavior, decorum, and honor. A world in which it was “daring” to live above a certain street. Now there was long-distance telephone, and the Met was no longer an out-of-the-way haunt that he and Ellen could have escaped to unnoticed for their clandestine meeting. Remember, this was only five years before the publication of The Great Gatsby.

Up until around Chapter 22 or 23, I enjoyed The Age of Innocence – much more than I thought that I would. I found the story compelling, captivating, interesting, the writing excellent. But then I got to, like I said, Chapter 22 or 23 and BAM. Wharton turns up the emotion – an emotion that totally hit home – and I was in love. There are certain novels that can just speak to you – it’s as if they know what’s in your heart and just grab it, reflect it back to you. Perhaps –no, probably- in the hands of a lesser wordsmith, I would have found the whole thing would be cheesy and passionless, and this would be a very different review. But The Age of Innocence worked for me – totally, completely. It’s now one of my favorites of all time.

A House for Mr. Biswas

2010-09-03T16:38:00.001-04:00

There were times when I felt that I would never finish V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. It wouldn’t be the worst novel I could imagine getting stuck in. In fact, I kind of liked Mr. Biswas.

The fact that I actually did enjoy it came as a surprise. Three summers ago I read A Bend in the River - also about Indian emigrants – and did not particularly care for it. There wasn’t anything specific that I didn’t like – it just did not resonate at all for me, and there wasn’t anything in particular that stood out. Biswas, however, was a delight - the complete opposite of A Bend in the River. The voice of the novel – distant yet engaged – was unique, the characters unforgettable, the entire 500+ pages – charming.

Poor Mr. Biswas could have been the mantra of this tragicomic clunker. After a sad beginning (his father drowns in a lake while trying to save Biswas – even though Biswas wasn’t in the lake – Biswas gets sucked into marriage to one of the Tulsi clan. And the Tulsi’s are a clan if I ever saw one. All Biswas wants is to get out from under the economic dependence on his in-laws and have a house of his own. And through many trials and tribulations, he finally does. It ends sadly for Mr. Biswas – we know within the first few pages that he does get his house, but dies shortly after – the story is essentially humorous, and only tragic when you are able to sit back and look at the bigger picture. Sort of like a Michael Moore documentary.

Mr. Biswas is sometimes belligerent, sometimes abusive, sometimes silly, a lot ridiculous. The guy writes a column for a newspaper called Deserving Destitutes, for goodness sakes. The give and take between him and his long-suffering wife is hilarious, sad, but they are clearly meant for each other. You are rooting for him against her family, but you have to love Shama despite the fact that she is a Tulsi. Except when she throws out the doll house. That’s when I didn’t love her. But oh well. They got over it, and so did i. There is also genuine affection between Mr. Biswas and his son, though the relationship becomes distant when Anand moves to England. Thinking about this group of characters, I feel genuine affection for them. And it’s rare that I come out of a novel feeling like that. The only other example that pops into my mind is the Finch family, though I’m sure there are others. The Joads as well.

In the end, A House for Mr. Biswas has left me confused about Naipaul. A number of his other novels, including The Enigma of Arrival show up on other lists, and even outside of my OCD-list obsession, I am sure to encounter him again in the coming decades. On one end of the Naipaul spectrum we have one novel considered to be his best, which I enjoyed and wouldn’t mind reading more like it. On the other end, the other contender for Naipaul’s best – a novel that left me lukewarm at best, just one of the crowd of many, many novels I feel indifferent about. So, I don’t know what to think, or what to expect. I suppose we’ll see – and maybe I’ll be surprised again.

Age of Innocence - A Brief Post

2010-08-23T18:48:00.001-04:00

There will be so much more to follow regarding Wharton's The Age of Innocence. I just finished it today, and I'm devastated. I just wanted to share that - DEVASTATED. I will need to digest this for a bit before my long post.

It's given me heavy boots.

Conditions under which I would reread The Ambassadors

2010-08-16T16:25:00.002-04:00

I had a lengthy discussion the other day about books, and what we read and why we read them. It was a thoroughly frustrating conversation in which the person I was talking to tried to coerce me into both reading the Twilight series and watching The Notebook by telling me that I should be open minded – and in which I actually admitted that I would rather reread Henry James’s The Ambassadors than reread Eat, Pray, Love. Yes, I said it, and yes, it’s true.

I am someone who knows what I like. And I know what I don’t like. My tastes are rather specific. I like classic literature. I like some contemporary literary fiction. I like some of the better written science fiction and a smattering of other genres here and there. There are very few instances in which I am surprised to like something. Maybe this makes me different than the general public. I don’t know. I doubt it though.

Once I attempted to be open minded about what I read. I participated in a book club for a bit, and that’s how I discovered Cormac McCarthy – though he and I were likely to meet at one time or another. I read the memoir The Glass Castle. It wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t boring. But I quickly discarded it after finishing it, and haven’t missed it since. I don’t even remember the author’s last name. It was expendable to me. Other people may like it, and they are free to do so, and I try not to knock them for it. I can understand why someone would enjoy it, but I did not in particular, so let’s stick to our respective niches and respect each other’s boundaries. Eat, Pray, Love was my last attempt at being open minded. Sorry.

I reason this way: I only have so much time in my life to read – both in terms of hours per day and years to live. And there are literally hundreds and hundreds of books I want to read currently in publication, not to mention those that haven’t been published yet. Why would – or should – I spend that precious time on books that I doubt I would enjoy as much as I would, say, read The Age of Innocence, which I’m absolutely loving, or even rereading The Great Gatsby? Why would I put them away and pick up the Twilight books just because someone who doesn’t know anything about me believes that I would just love them?

I tried to explain this in analogy after the straight-forward “I don’t want to read your book” approach didn’t work. I tried the following metaphor: if I had one pass to the movies, and could see a movie I wanted to see, or a movie I didn’t want to see, why would I ever go to see the one I didn’t want to see? If I hate cheesecake (which I do), should I be expected to eat it – to be “open minded” about this particular type of cheesecake - when there are other options – options I know I will enjoy? Like German chocolate cake? Or maybe an apple pie?

I was once accused of only reading depressing books. And that’s probably largely true. Or at least books that aren’t exactly a romp through the giggle forest. Some people read to escape their reality – to go to a world that is better, more ordered than our own. A world in which lovers reunite in the end and live happily ever after. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and I believe that I also read to escape reality, but I go to a world that is worse – less ordered than our own. Because it makes me feel better about reality. Because, after all, who wants to live in a Kafka novel? The funny things that I enjoy are often intelligent, absurd comedies. I just don’t do low-brow. Not because I’m to uppity, I just don’t like it. Even as a kid, I was disgusted by low-brow. You take your Sweet Valley High and R.L. Stine and Pee Wee’s Playhouse. I’ll be over here with my Jules Verne, thank you very much. One time, in high school, my friends insisted I watch Ace Venture, because it was SOOO FUNNY! I said ok – so long as we could watch Romeo & Juliet afterwards. The 1969 version. Needless to say, there were no more movies they insisted that I watch. Maybe it’s an inborn trait, somehow, what we like.

Typically I don’t recommend books to other people unless I’m pretty sure they will like what I suggest. Because I would be wasting their time otherwise. In a perfect world in which I was queen, maybe everyone would like what I like. But I’m not queen, so I have no right to assume that everyone should read what I like to read simply because, well, I like it. I’m sorry, but your enjoyment of a book is not a sufficient reason for me to want to read something.

It occurred to me later that I could have quickly put a stop to this, as I did back in high school. Instead of insisting for a half hour that I simply am not interested in “sparkling love-muffin vampires in abstinence metaphors” (as it was awesomely put recently in a blog post I read about an entirely different subject, which is why I haven’t linked to the quote), I should have responded, “Sure – I’ll read your Twilight book, if you read a book that I recommend,” and handed her Joyce’s Ulysses. I doubt she would have gotten much past “Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan” before asking for her Stephanie Meyers back.

Better Book Titles

2010-08-11T14:16:00.001-04:00

This is brilliant!

50 Best Novels for Political Junkies

2010-08-06T14:01:00.005-04:00

I was forwarded this link to a list of the 50 best novels for political junkies. It's a great list, and I should know, since I'm a list person :-) The only novel that stuck out as missing from this list is The Last Hurrah, but I’m pleased as punch that it’s been left off, since I abhorred that book when I had to read it in college for a government class.

Some comments on this list, because that’s one of the pleasures of my life:

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley: I read this one week during summer vacation before 10th grade. Or maybe it was 11th grade - I don't recall. I loved it, but don’t remember much more about it. There was also an excellent made-for-TV adaptation around the same time – 1996? – that I wish had been released on DVD. This novel is high up on my To Be Reread (TBRR) list.

1984 - George Orwell: See my “review” here

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury: I’ve never read this one, but I own a copy and hope to pick it up shortly after I finish my Modern Library project.

Blindness - Jose Saramago: I have long had Saramago’s The Double on my TBR list, which I have held off reading until I can get around to Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name. But perhaps I will have to pick up Blindless before then.

The Trial - Franz Kafka: One of the most awesome books ever. Kafka’s The Castle is on this list as well, which I have never read.

Animal Farm - George Orwell: I believe everyone in high school should be required to read, AND LIKE, Animal Farm. It feels like a rite of passage. Same goes for To Kill A Mockingbird, also on this list, which is definitely one of the best American books ever written, and likely in my top 5 of American books of the 20th century.

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand ooohhh oohhh! I have recently been chomping at the bit to read this, just so that I can more intelligently discuss its philosophical role in the recent economic disaster. It’s terrible to want to read such a thick book just to criticize it, but hell, that’s the type of person I am :-)

A Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood: As a female, this novel scared the crap out of me. The film adaptation was wonderful as well. Well, I don’t think wonderful is the right word to use.

Lord of the Flies - William Golding: Love it love it love it! Sucks to your assmar, Piggy.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: I have a copy of this novel that my mom gave me well over a decade ago, but it still sits on my shelf. In fact, I have a memory of sitting in middle school “industrial arts” class and trying to read it. I didn’t get very far. It’s been slowly making it’s way up the TBR pile, but it’s a big pile, and I can’t say when I’ll actually get around to reading it.

Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler: Definitely rivals the best of Orwell. Fabulous. I just picked up another novel by the author that looked like science fiction.

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy: Someday.

It Can’t Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis: A science blogger I frequently read posted a quote from this novel a few months ago, and I found a used copy while out of town at a conference.

All the King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren: I thought this was a great novel. It also contains the most tender, believable love scene I have ever read.

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne: I have to say, this was another instance of required reading in H.s. that I loved. I guess I’m just a nerd. So tragic, but an amazing love story.

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo I read this unabridged years ago. It was ok - I must say I enjoyed the musical much better. Hugo is very long winded, which I suppose is why it's so long.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick: I once owned this novel, long before I knew who Philip K. Dick was, or that I liked him. By the time I figured that out, I had lost the novel. I don’t know what happened to it.

The Plot Against America - Philip Roth: I just picked this one up at a used book sale.

I’m not going to touch the section on the Civil War, because frankly, I don’t care about the Civil War. I know many people do, and that’s part of the reason why I don’t care. Yes – I understand the sacrifice many made; in fact, a large number of the men in my family alive at that time fought for the North. But living within 2 hours of Gettsyburg, we get a lot of local Civil War nuts who probably borderline believe they are reincarnations of various famous fighters. This is all while ignoring our locally rich frontier/colonial history and the role our community played in the French & Indian War. People would rather see mock-fictional Civil War battles than learn about the Indian village and frontier fort that actually was located here. Ok – that’s my schpeal for the day, having nothing to do with this list ;-)

There were also a number of novels on this list that I am familiar – in some degree – with the film version, but was not aware they were based on novels. (Children of Men, Advise and Consent, Wag the Dog, Seven Days in May) I should have known, since Hollywood seems unable to develop original scripts these days. I have also added The Marrow of Tradition, and The Ghost to my ever-expanding TBR list.

Women in Love - Final Thoughts!

2010-07-27T12:39:00.000-04:00

Sons and Lovers bored me. Well, maybe not bored me exactly, but there is some reason why I cannot remember one – not one – thing about that novel, and the only explanation I can come up with is that it was so boring I slept through the entire book.

The Rainbow bored me. A 400 or 500 page book about egocentric women doing not much of anything except talking and talking and talking does not an exciting read make. And let me be clear – by “talking and talking” I don’t mean dialog. I mean waxing poetic about pseudo-philosophical claptrap for pages at a time.

Being 0/2 with D.H. Lawrence, I was not expecting much from Women in Love. But what I discovered is something entirely different, and probably something that Lawrence did not intend. Humor. Why should I be bored when 90% of the novel is just ridiculous?

Now, in the beginning, it really was tedious, and the entire plot appeared to be strapping, young, self-serving intellectual men and the women who they hung out with (sometimes upper crust, sometimes school teachers like Ursula and Gudrun, and sometimes women like Pussum – yes, there is a character named Pussum) sitting around, talking nonsense about the nature of life in the vein of “give me freedom or give me death” – by freedom here meaning the freedom to do whatever it is you want to do. All the pontificating (paragraph after paragraph after paragraph) is variations on that theme: the freedom to love, or not to love, to die for love, to die for lack of love, to run naked through a forest, for men to wrestle naked with other men. You know, all the important stuff.

Ursula is in love with Birkin. Birkin, at first, isn’t in love with her, but then decides he is and asks her to marry him. Then she isn’t sure she loves him, but decides she does and they get married. In there is Hermione, who unfortunately is only present in about half the novel. It seems that Birkin and Hermione had some form of relationship since childhood – you know the type, in which everyone assumes they will be together one day, but just never are officially. Hermione is unpleasant, and Lawrence knows it, and because of that she feels like one of the truly authentic characters. The only scene between Ursula and Birkin that felt real was when they fight about Hermione. Then they make up, and are ridiculous again.

Gudrun, Ursula’s sister, is in love with Gerald. Or something – maybe not love, but she is very attracted to him. Gerald is the son of the mine owner, and seems a class or two above the Brangwan sisters. Gerald is more in love with himself and his maleness than he is with anyone else. But since Ursula and Birkin are together, it made sense for Gerald and Gudrun to be together too. That doesn’t end well, especially for Gerald.

But the elephant in the room is the relationship between Gerald and Birkin. Birkin is very in love with him. Gerald appears to have some feelings for Birkin in return, though Gerald is really only concerned with himself. Birkin wants to be “blood brothers” with Gerald, and talks and talks and talks about a “different kind of love” that can exist between two men, and isn’t possible to have with a woman (an “eternal conjunction”). It appears, though, that Ursula and Birkin’s marriage is the wedge that drives them apart – they know it will never be the same when there are women involved with claims over them, and they part. Birkin’s reaction to Gerald’s death and final dialog with Ursual in the novel is perhaps the only other scene in which I felt there was genuine emotion involved.

”He should have loved me,” he said. “I offered him.”

“Aren’t I enough for you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You are enough for me as far as a woman is concerned…Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too, another kind of love,” he said.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity…you can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!”

It seems as if I can’t,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”

“You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,” she said.

“I don’t believe that,” he answered.

I imagine, if people like Ted Haggard were a bit more honest with themselves (but probably not entirely honest), this is the kind of discussion they would be having with their wives.

With Women in Love, Lawrence has built an entire novel around the celebration of maleness and male physicality, with Gerald as the ideal (Gerald being based on Katherine Mansfield's husband). It contains what might be the most graphic descriptions of the male body – as in “glistening, muscular thighs” – outside of romance novels with Fabio on the cover. It’s RIDICULOUS. Gerald’s blood is constantly being “penetrated.” Women’s passion for their men are always insatiable. Quotes like this illustrate my point:

How perfect and foreign he was—ah how dangerous! Her soul thrilled with complete knowledge. This was the glistening, forbidden apple, this face of a man. She kissed him, putting her fingers over his face, his eyes, his nostrils, over his brows and his ears, to his neck, to know him, to gather him in by touch. He was so firm, and shapely, with such satisfying, inconceivable shapeliness, strange, yet unutterably clear. He was such an unutterable enemy, yet glistening with uncanny white fire. She wanted to touch him and touch him and touch him, till she had him all in her hands, till she had strained him into her knowledge. Ah, if she could have the precious KNOWLEDGE of him, she would be filled, and nothing could deprive her of this.

Seriously – that text is from a novel that is considered one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature. Seriously.

But in the end, I understand the appeal this novel could have for people. I feel as if had read this when I was 12, or 14 years old, and the ideas about freedom that are espoused here was still pertinent to me, I would have enjoyed it more, gotten more out of it. But I’m a cynical-almost-30-year-old, and to me these themes feel run-of-the-mill. His ideas about love and relationships and personal freedoms that his characters pontificate on ad nauseum have been echoed by every writer, filmmaker, and musician throughout the 20th century.

While I don’t believe Lawrence should be considered the best wordsmith, or the best storyteller, or plot maker, he pushed the envelope of acceptability within Edwardian society. It may seem ho-hum today, when it’s no longer (in most instances) shocking to the general public to read about young folks hooking up before they’re married, or two men being in love, but I can see some old woman sitting in her parlor, in a bustle or shirtwaist or whatever it was women wore back then, and “tsk tsking” about Lawrence’s immorality. The 1960s eliminated a lot of what made Lawrence unacceptable.

But something struck me the other day as I was nearing the end of this novel, and thinking about Birkin and Gerald – mostly Birkin, though, since I have no sympathy for Gerald. Had I been a gay youth in Lawrence’s time, I would have felt comforted by Women in Love, knowing that there are others out there “like me.” It’s unfortunate that there are instances in which gay youth still feel ostracized and marginalized in the same way, and for them it’s good that people like Lawrence, and Jeanette Winterson, and Radclyffe Hall, and others are accessible. It’s also unfortunate that today, people still feel the need to deny who they truly are in order to be accepted in their families, their community, their occupation, and in society in general. I thought about Ted Haggard a lot while reading Women in Love.

Women in Love was certainly better than I expected it to be. I get why it should be included on any list of important 20th century novels, not because it’s a better novel than others, but because it matters. I feel like Lawrence and I have made peace, and there is a lot more of him to be read over the next few decades. Moving out of the Modern Library list, I feel 1 for 3 isn’t a bad place from which to move forward.

Clea

2010-07-26T16:34:00.001-04:00

Clea – the fourth (and final) installment in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet – returns us to the narrative style of Balthazar, and picks up where it left off.

At the conclusion of Balthazar, Darley receives a letter from Clea, though since I read that novel almost a year ago I don’t have any recollection what that letter was about. But anyway, it was enough to prompt Darley, who had been living on an island with Nessim & Melissa’s daughter, to return to Alexandria.

Everything is different in Alexandria. The war is on, and places that used to be apartments are now brothels servicing the various military men that are all over the city. Justine is in exile, under house arrest for her role in the Hosnani Brothers arms smuggling deal. Mountolive has picked up with Pursewarden’s blind sister, Liza. Pombal, Darley’s former roommate, has a pregnant girlfriend whose husband is on the front, and then was taken prisoner (Pombal is not the father – her husband is). Balthazar was beaten up by his younger boyfriend and became a recluse, though he reenters society early in the story. Da Capo really is alive, as I had suspected. Scobie is now an unofficial saint.

Shortly after his return, Darley and Clea begin an affair, though to me, it only seems like a reshuffling. After all, she is the only female left from the core group presented in Justine, and I cannot help but feel that there is a lack of genuine feeling here – or really throughout the entire Quartet. The only real passion anyone appears to have has been for Justine. And perhaps Mountolive for Leila – or Leila for Mountolive.

I’m finding it difficult to summarize Clea, since this novel felt less like its own narrative – by which I mean it did not really contribute much new information to the story – and more like a wrapping up. Here’s all the characters moving on – perhaps symbolized best in the burning of Purswarden’s letters to Liza. The only organizing theme appears to be boat accidents. Pombal’s girlfriend is shot and killed during a disagreement between a naval crew (blockade?) and Pombal. Clea is harpooned while diving when the harpoon gun on board goes off and spears her to a wreck underwater.

I was sitting at my hairdresser’s waiting for my dye job to bake (or whatever it is that hair dye actually does - dry? absorb?) when I read the “Clea gets harpooned” scene. It was then that I suddenly realized how emotionally invested I am with these characters, in the same manner (though to a lesser degree) that I felt connect to Nick Jenkins & Co. from A Dance to the Music of Time. I felt like someone punched me in the chest. There were probably five or six hairdresser’s each working on their clients, and someone had brought in a dog, so there was a lot of commotion, and I almost felt compelled to ask for the proper respect to be paid to Clea – it felt as if I had just received word that someone I actually knew had been harpooned, and might die (she doesn’t). I hadn’t felt that Darley and Clea were going to live happily ever after (“And now this!”), nor did I particularly have any feeling regarding how I wanted any of the characters to end up, but I just felt so terrible. I was awash with relief and hope when they were able to save her. Though I have thoroughly enjoyed these novels, the thought never even crossed my mind that I might actually care about these people to some degree until then.

In the end, Darley leaves (again!) – and everyone knows he won’t be coming back. Amaril (who turns out to be her former lover) has constructed a new hand for her following the accident, and she is able to continue painting. Liza and Mountolive have married. And Justine reemerges. She has made amends with Memlik Pasha by discovering he just wanted an entrance into society. She and Nessim have reconciled (if they could ever have been considered estranged in the first place, given the revelations of Mountolive) and are conspiring to embark on an even bigger scheme in Switzerland. After months back on his island, Darley receives yet another letter from Clea, and we are given to believe that the two of them will meet up again in Paris.

I began the Alexandria Quartet back in December of 2008 or January of 2009 – I don’t
remember which, but I know it feels like a lifetime ago. I am sometimes criticized for being a list person, both online and offline – why do I spend time reading books I don’t expect to like? And even though I complain sometimes, and rage over certain books, selections like Quartet are exactly why I bother in the first place. This series was absolutely wonderful – a meditation on love, on relationships, on fidelity, on perspective – and I likely would never have heard of Durrell in the first place had it not been for the Modern Library list. Justine is clearly the gem of the bunch, and could be read as a stand-alone novel (though the others could not), I found them all worthwhile ways to spend my – now limited – reading time. I know that I will return to Durrell in the future – this may be a series (Justine in particular) that I come back to again and again in my life, and I will likely seek out more of Durrell’s work.

Women in Love - No longer initial thoughts

2010-07-16T13:25:00.003-04:00

I thought I might save this gem for my final review, but I can't!

If you are a female, and had the following conversation with your (male) fiance:

“Must one just go as if one were alone in the world—the only creature in the world?'
'You've got me,' she said. 'Why should you NEED others? Why must you force people to agree with you? Why can't you be single by yourself, as you are always saying? You try to bully Gerald—as you tried to bully Hermione. You must learn to be alone. And it's so horrid of you. You've got me. And yet you want to force other people to love you as well. You do try to bully them to love you. And even then, you don't want their love.'
His face was full of real perplexity.
'Don't I?' he said. 'It's the problem I can't solve. I KNOW I want a perfect and complete relationship with you: and we've nearly got it—we really have. But beyond that. DO I want a real, ultimate relationship with Gerald? Do I want a final, almost extra-human relationship with him—a relationship in the ultimate of me and him—or don't I?'

Wouldn't your follow-up to that be something to the tune of, "Did you ever maybe consider that you're gay, and in love with Gerald?"

But of course not! Instead:

She looked at him for a long time, with strange bright eyes, but she did not answer.

What I cannot figure out in this novel is how much of this overtone was intended by Lawrence, and how much is only because I am viewing this through 21st century lenses? Did Lawrence intend that Gerald and Rupert have a "bromance" or did he want me to think that they are clearly bisexual or gay? Also, how much of this am I supposed to believe Ursula and Gundrun suspect or guess at? Am I to assume that Ursula is wondering about the nature of fiance's relationship with his best friend, or am I to assume that Ursula is wondering about the nature of her relationship with Rupert, and how much he is invested in it, if he keeps wondering about other people (male or not)? I'm finding it difficult to understand what Lawrence expects me to read between the lines.

Women in Love - Initial Thoughts Part 4

2010-06-30T00:48:00.000-04:00

This should no longer be titled "Initial Thoughts," as I'm almost 40% of the way through WiL already, but why change now, right?

Ursula is in love with Rupert Birkin. It is questionable whether he is in love with her. They are kind of dating, in the way Edwardian English people did that. Ursula (who is not 12 years old, but a grown woman) is sitting by the door waiting for Rupert to come visit her (unannounced, I might add). The day goes by, and he doesn't show up. So Lawrence gives us this straight from Ursula's mind.

She sat crushed and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of death. She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho into the unknown. The knowledge of the imminence of death was like a drug. Darkly, without thinking at all, she knew that she was near to death. She had travelled all her life along the line of fulfilment, and it was nearly concluded. She knew all she had to know, she had experienced all she had to experience, she was fulfilled in a kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the tree into death. And one must fulfil one's development to the end, must carry the adventure to its conclusion. And the next step was over the border into death. So it was then! There was a certain peace in the knowledge.

Ursula, YOU ARE NOT 12!

Mountolive

2010-06-28T20:07:00.001-04:00

There are spoilers here. Be forewarned. Also forgive me if I get some of the details wrong about the previous novels. But then again, that’s partly what this post is about.

I am notorious for forgetting what happens in novels. I hate this. It is made so much more frustrating when I am reading another part of a series, and have trouble remembering what occurred in the previous novels.

This has been my #1 problem with The Alexandria Quartet. When I picked up Balthazar last year, I kept thinking about Mareotis. What was Mareotis? Oh yes – a lake. Didn’t somebody die there? Who was it? (Capodistra) With Mountolive, the third novel in this series, I kept thinking about the death that occurred at the ball – wasn’t someone (a guy?) mistaken for someone else (I thought Justine? Maybe Clea?) and murdered with a hat pin? Wasn’t it Narouz that murdered him?

This problem is my fault, as months have gone by between novels. I should have read them all in one shot, which was my initial plan. But that just didn’t happen. Someday, when I reread these novels – which I most certainly will – I will read them back to back, and then perhaps they will make more sense.

Mountolive takes an entirely different view from the first two. This is not a continuation of Darley’s tale, but rather told in the third person. It is also a very political novel – everything is through that lens. It is here we learn – I believe, as I don’t think it was mentioned in the other novels, maybe hinted at – that Nessim is smuggling weapons to Palestine for the Jews. (This is pre-WWII. There was no Israel.) As a Coptic Christian, he is mistrusted by the Jewish leaders he is working with: Capodistra, Balthasar, etc. In order to increase his credibility he marries Justine, a Jew.

Someone – was it Scobie, or did Scobie have Darley do it? – in one of the previous novels went to one of their meetings in the desert, and came back saying it’s harmless – just a bunch of Cabalists in the wilderness discussing metaphysics. Was that for the same thing? It must have been. Then Pursewarden investigates for the British and comes to the same conclusion essentially (except he witnesses the “transformation” of Narouz into crazy preacher with a whip). Mountolive also gives us a political motive for Pursewarden’s suicide. Through Melissa (Darley’s girlfriend who is also a dancer and prostitute), Pursewarden comes to learn that he was wrong about Nessim and the others – they really are smuggling weapons. He is so dumbstruck by this revelation, and his conflict between his official duties and his friendships, he kills himself.

The beautiful language of the previous novels is not in the forefront as it is in the other novels, but it would have been out of place in a political novel. The most striking scene here is the reunion between Mountolive and Leila, Nessim’s mother. When Mountolive was younger – I would estimate early 20s, he goes to live with the Hosnanis in Egypt to learn Arabic. There he begins a relationship with Nessim and Narouz’s mother. Mountolive eventually leaves Egypt, yet he and Leila continue a correspondence throughout the rest of their lives, always vaguely planning to reunite someday. Mountolive comes to Egypt as Ambassador, and he and plans are made and canceled at least once. Finally, due to Nessim’s involvement in arms dealing, Leila has to go to Kenya for a while, and she and Mountolive meet one last time. It is decidedly not the reunion that Mountolive had in mind. In his mind, things had largely remained the same – Leila was probably perpetually a good looking and intelligent 40 something. When he gets in the car with her, he doesn’t recognize her at all. There she is, an old Egyptian woman ravaged by smallpox, begging him to spare her son’s life. He never really thought about time passing. All of us, I’m sure, can understand this, and Durrell paints the scene of bitter disappointment with beautiful, evocative prose – as always. I lament with Mountolive the love of his youth, but at the same time, I fear becoming Leila.

The ending of Mountolive confused me. Not in that I didn’t understand what was going on, but I’m still not sure if there was a time shift or not. We have the terribly bitter and sad reunion between Mountolive and Leila, supposedly on the day before the Hosnani annual duck shoot at Mareotis. When we encounter Narouz at home in the next scene, I assume that it is the day of the duck shoot, where Capodistra will be murdered (or not?). But then Narouz is murdered (by order of Memlik Pasha, a very sinister character). What happened to the duck shoot? Perhaps this “next scene” did not occur the day after Mountolive meets with Leila?

When I come to the end of a novel, I like to do research on the internet – see what others are saying about it. When I google this novel, any novel in this series, “Alexandria Quartet,” etc., there is virtually nothing. I know that I had never heard of Durrell or any of his works until I became enmeshed in these lists, and it seems as if many other people haven’t heard of him either. I found, obviously, reviews on amazon, which vary widely: people either love them or they detest them; it’s all 5 stars or 1 star. The top review was titled: "If you like the DaVinci Code, this is NOT for you.,” I love that. Yes, parts of The Alexandria Quartet are over written. Durrell even admitted it. But it’s damn good overwriting. I have loved these three novels so much that I wish I had someone to recommend them to. But I don’t. Except you, perhaps. I will start Clea tonight. I can’t wait to read this conclusion – hopefully it will tie up some of these loose ends.

Women in Love - Initial Thoughts Part 3

2010-06-28T12:24:00.002-04:00

Guys - next time you need to get out of a sticky situation with a female, try this one on for size (long quote):

'You mean you don't love me?'
She suffered furiously, saying that.
'Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn't true. I don't know. At any rate, I don't feel the emotion of love for you—no, and I don't want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.'
'Love gives out in the last issues?' she asked, feeling numb to the lips.
'Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does NOT meet and mingle, and never can.'
...'And you mean you can't love?' she asked, in trepidation.
'Yes, if you like. I have loved. But there is a beyond, where there is not love.'
...'But how do you know—if you have never REALLY loved?' she asked.
'It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them.'
'Then there is no love,' cried Ursula.
'Ultimately, no, there is something else. But, ultimately, there IS no love.'
Ursula was given over to this statement for some moments. Then she half rose from her chair, saying, in a final, repellent voice:
'Then let me go home—what am I doing here?'
'There is the door,' he said. 'You are a free agent.'
...She hung motionless for some seconds, then she sat down again. 'If there is no love, what is there?' she cried, almost jeering.
'Something,' he said, looking at her, battling with his soul, with all his might.
'What?'
'There is,' he said, in a voice of pure abstraction; 'a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman,—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.'
Ursula listened to this speech, her mind dumb and almost senseless, what he said was so unexpected and so untoward. 'It is just purely selfish,' she said.
'If it is pure, yes. But it isn't selfish at all. Because I don't KNOW what I want of you. I deliver MYSELF over to the unknown, in coming to you, I am without reserves or defences, stripped entirely, into the unknown. Only there needs the pledge between us, that we will both cast off everything, cast off ourselves even, and cease to be, so that that which is perfectly ourselves can take place in us.'
'But it is because you love me, that you want me?' she persisted.
'No it isn't. It is because I believe in you—if I DO believe in you.'
'Aren't you sure?' she laughed, suddenly hurt.
He was looking at her steadfastly, scarcely heeding what she said.
'Yes, I must believe in you, or else I shouldn't be here saying this,' he replied. 'But that is all the proof I have. I don't feel any very strong belief at this particular moment.'
She disliked him for this sudden relapse into weariness and faithlessness. 'But don't you think me good-looking?' she persisted, in a mocking voice.
He looked at her, to see if he felt that she was good-looking. 'I don't FEEL that you're good-looking,' he said.
'Not even attractive?' she mocked, bitingly.
He knitted his brows in sudden exasperation. 'Don't you see that it's not a question of visual appreciation in the least,' he cried. 'I don't WANT to see you. I've seen plenty of women, I'm sick and weary of seeing them. I want a woman I don't see.'
'I'm sorry I can't oblige you by being invisible,' she laughed.
'Yes,' he said, 'you are invisible to me, if you don't force me to be visually aware of you. But I don't want to see you or hear you.'
'What did you ask me to tea for, then?' she mocked.
'I want to find you, where you don't know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly. But I don't want your good looks, and I don't want your womanly feelings, and I don't want your thoughts nor opinions nor your ideas—they are all bagatelles to me.'
'You are very conceited, Monsieur,' she mocked. 'How do you know what my womanly feelings are, or my thoughts or my ideas? You don't even know what I think of you now.'
'Nor do I care in the slightest.'
'I think you are very silly. I think you want to tell me you love me, and you go all this way round to do it.'
'All right,' he said, looking up with sudden exasperation. 'Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage.'
'Is it really persiflage?' she mocked, her face really relaxing into laughter. She interpreted it, that he had made a deep confession of love to her. But he was so absurd in his words, also.

And Ursula buys this horse pucky!

Women in Love - Initial Thoughts Part 2

2010-06-24T09:46:00.004-04:00

Chapter 7 of Women in Love contains the following:

Hearing voices coming from the sitting-room, Halliday talking to Libidnikov, [Gerald] went to the door and glanced in. He had on a silk wrap of a beautiful bluish colour, with an amethyst hem.
To his surprise he saw the two young men by the fire, stark naked. Halliday looked up, rather pleased.
'Good-morning,' he said. 'Oh—did you want towels?' And stark naked he went out into the hall, striding a strange, white figure between the unliving furniture. He came back with the towels, and took his former position, crouching seated before the fire on the fender.
'Don't you love to feel the fire on your skin?' he said.
'It IS rather pleasant,' said Gerald.
'How perfectly splendid it must be to be in a climate where one could do without clothing altogether,' said Halliday....
And Gerald realised how Halliday's eyes were beautiful too, so blue and warm and confused, broken also in their expression. The fireglow fell on his heavy, rather bowed shoulders, he sat slackly crouched on the fender, his face was uplifted, weak, perhaps slightly disintegrate, and yet with a moving beauty of its own.
'Of course,' said Maxim, 'you've been in hot countries where the people go about naked.'
'Oh really!' exclaimed Halliday. 'Where?'
'South America—Amazon,' said Gerald.
'Oh but how perfectly splendid! It's one of the things I want most to do—to live from day to day without EVER putting on any sort of clothing whatever. If I could do that, I should feel I had lived.'

I feel like Cheever should come in here: "And now we come to the homosexual part." But no - these are straight men. This novel keeps getting better and better.

Women in Love - Initial Thoughts

2010-06-22T12:09:00.003-04:00

Women in Love so far:

A small action happens so that the characters can pontificate on bullshit. Example: Birkin and Hermione come into Ursula’s classroom and then they pontificate about education corrupting our animal natures and spontaneity, or some such bullshit. Rupert and Gerald get on a train and pontificate about religion, smashing life, living for something, love etc. Ursula and Gundrun go for a walk and pontificate about, well, I don't remember what about because it was that uninteresting. And that's just the first 50 pages.

Yeah, this is going to be a long one.

1001 Books - 2010 edition

2010-06-18T09:01:00.003-04:00

It seems that the publishers of the 1,001 books series have an agenda: if they come out with a new edition every two years, some of us gullable OCD-bibliophiles will continue to shell out $25 (amazon.com price) to see what's new on the list.

I am going to save you a lot of trouble, and money. I have previously posted the 2006 edition list in its entirety, as well as the 2008 edition - what was added as well as what was removed from the '06 edition. Click on the book list label to find them. While I complained at length about what books were removed from the '06 edition to make way for much more obscure, international authors, the '08 edition did have an upside; namely, it opened up more doors to obscure international authors to people like me. The 2010 edition, however, really is a sham.

The only difference between the new edition and the '08 edition is 11 novels. That's right. 11.

Here's what was added:

Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery
The Children's Book - A.S. Byatt
Invisible - Paul Auster
An American Rust - Philipp Meyer
Cost - Roxana Robinson
The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Home - Marilynne Robinson
Kieron Smith, Boy - James Kelman
The Gathering - Anne Enright
The Blind Side of the Heart - Julia Franck
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

Here's what they removed:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid (#7 on '08 list)
Animal's People - Indra Sinha (#3 on '08 list)
The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell (#5 on '08 list)
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka (#13 on '08 list)
Small Island - Andrea Levy (#7 on '08 list)
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth (#8 on '06 list; #18 on '08 list)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon (#21 on '08 list)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon (#19 on '06; #27 on '08)
Islands - Dan Sleigh (#20 on '06; #31 on '08)
The Heart of Redness - Zakes Mda (#55 on '06; #52 on '08)
Small Remedies - Shashi Deshpande #65 on '06; #53 on '08)

So, here are my 11 thoughts on 2010 list.

I'm glad they didn't remove any I already read
I'm not surprised they didn't add any I've already read
What's up with removing the ONLY Michael Chabon novel on these lists?
Why have these editors either (a) not removed the books on these lists that are not - and have never been - available in English, despite the fact that they were published in their native language more than 20 years ago; or (b) sponsored a translation?
I'm glad they added Oscar Wao to the list
I'm glad they removed The Kindly Ones. I'm sure some day I will pick it up, but I'm not expecting to like it, or necessarily get through it all. I get frustrated with the idea that Nazis had to have these strange fetishes to give reason for how they able to do what they did. Then we can conceive of them as "other" and therefore give ourselves a free pass - "I'm not like these sick-os, so I could never do that stuff." No - you are like those sickos because they were just like you. Enough pontificating on a book I've never read.
I wonder why they didn't add Out Stealing Horses, or The Road, or even The Kite Runner.
Has anyone ever looked at the publishing company who puts out these 1,001 books and see if they have any financial stake in the publication of some of the books on the lists?
Sorry to see Curious Incident go. It's been slowly moving to the top of my TBR pile.
I spend most of my time with the '06 list. So I just noticed that there was an addition to the 2008 list called A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. I want to read that just for the title. Anyone read this?
I kind of feel abused by these list makers. They give me a list in 2006 and say, Here are books you should read. Two years later they give me another list, and say, 282 of those books on the previous list aren't worth it anymore - so here are 282 novels to replace them. So I finally get used to the idea...I finally sort of make peace with the lists, commit to attempt to read 1283 over the next 45-50 years. And then, they come back and say - scratch that. Those 11 that we told you to read - six of which we removed Austen and Dickens and Faulkner to make room for - ignore those and read these 11 instead. Now the list is 1295 books long. Is this going to go on in perpetuity? Every two years, adding and removing? Seems to me like they editors are purposely trying to prevent anyone from actually reading all they recommend. Which is impossible anyway, unless you know Korean (see #4 above)

Lord Jim

2010-06-11T18:44:00.001-04:00

Joseph Conrad and I have always had our ups and downs. Our relationship is not stable. Approaching him, I never know if I’m going to be blown away or left in the dust.

We started to get to know each other when I was 18 years old and I tried to read Heart of Darkness. I say tried because I didn’t understand a word that I read. I see now that I wasn’t ready, but I wanted to be cool and say I read the book that Apocalypse Now was based on. Because at that time, I thought being able to talk about Apocalypse Now was part of the definition of cool. Not so much anymore, though that has nothing to do with Conrad.

After that embarrassment, I didn’t pick up Conrad again for eight years; then in 2007 I read The Secret Agent. Damn that was a good book. If you want to read something by Conrad that isn’t so, well, Conrad-esque, read The Secret Agent. Now that book is cool. So cool, in fact, that Hitchcock made a film version of it. But if you are looking to watch it, don’t watch The Secret Agent, because that’s an entirely different movie. Confusing, I know.

Ok – I thought – Conrad, I’ve got you now! Well, not so much. Nostromo in 2008 was, well, I don’t know. I didn’t have any expectations. I knew that plot was dissimilar enough from The Secret Agent to not hope for a repeat of that novel. It turned out to be 2/3 boring, the rest decent. Not a book I intend to pick up again – or at least for a very long time.

So I came to Lord Jim with mixed feelings. It’s a book I’ve wanted to read since I was in high school, when my A.P. English teacher said she could never get through it. Reading a classic novel that even your teacher couldn’t finish? Very cool. Also, it’s about sailors and islands in the South Pacific. Double cool. But then I have this history with Conrad which made me suspect – maybe I was being set up here.

Well, I wasn’t set up. From the very beginning – from the very first paragraph, I settled into this novel like I haven’t settled into a book in a very long time – perhaps since I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a year ago. It felt like curling up in bed, with familiar sheets and blankets and soft, soft pillows - being surrounded by comfort. Why certain books make me feel that way I couldn’t say, but this was definitely one of them.

Jim was a first mate on a ship filled with Muslim pilgrims. One night on the journey, while all the passengers are asleep, the boat hits something and springs a leak. The crew are convinced that the ship will sink, and to wake the passengers would cause complete pandemonium and nobody would get off the ship alive. So, they abandon the ship and leave the passengers to drown. At the last minute, Jim, who has always dreamed of being the Big Hero who Saves the Day, abandons the ship with them. He is embarrassed and disgraced. The crew manages to get safely to shore and make up a story about the sinking. Turns out, though, that the ship didn’t sink. It was towed to land and everybody is safe. Big oops. There is an inquest, Jim is left to take the brunt of it all, and is stripped of his seaman’s papers. At the inquest, he meets a man, Marlow, who sees that Jim is “one of us” (a gentleman, not a regular seadog). Marlow goes about helping Jim find various jobs, all of which he leaves once talk of the Patua comes up. He is so thoroughly ruined in his own mind my his cowardice – he just cannot forgive himself for acting in a way that was completely contrary to who imagined himself to be. Marlow finally gets him a job as the manager of a trading post on the island Patusan, replacing the “slinking” manager, Cornelius. Jim arrives there, orchestrates and attack on a local tyrannical lord and is loved by the people of the island. He picks up with Cornelius’s step-daughter and is generally hated by the former manager. Marlow comes to visit and finds Jim about as happy and satisfied as he could possibly be, essentially able to restore his dignity far away from his past. Then, something bad happens – a group of thieves come to Patusan to find some food, and discover an island ripe of the taking. The natives launch an attack, and the thieves – lead by a man named Brown – is stuck in the river. Eventually, Jim and Brown talk, and he decides to let them go back down the river and leave. It was a trick, and on their way out they attack a group of natives further down the river, killing one of Jim’s close friends and the son of the local leader along with many others. This incident completely breaks down Jim’s world. He is no longer the infallible authority – he told the natives to let Brown & company go, and look what happened! Jim knows his time is up – another disgrace, another breaking of trust. His loyal servants and his girlfriend ask if he wants to fight, or to try to escape, but he is resigned to his own fate – tired of running away, but there is nothing to fight for – an honor he never had in the first place. He took full responsibility for everything that happened, went to the local leader’s camp and allowed his friend’s father to shoot him in retaliation for the death of his son. The end.

Conrad could tell this story chronologically, from beginning to end (as I have just done), and have a decent narrative. But he doesn’t do that. He tells the story through Marlow, who hears some of it through Jim, some through Brown, some through Stein, etc. It’s more complicated, and you get the story jumping around. That may annoy some readers, but I don’t mind. Conrad does it seamlessly here, as I don’t feel he did with Nostromo. One original reviewer complained that "[Conrad’s] story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences . . . like a river-mist." I can see this point, and definitely feel there was a haziness about Nostromo, (and The Heart of Darkness, though that might have been my own fog); I felt that Lord Jim was much more straight forward and easy to understand. Or maybe I’m just evolving. But compared to Henry James, Conrad is a sunny, cloudless day.

The blogger at mopie.com – a newly discovered site for book reviews wrote the following about Lord Jim: “All about how a whiny white man redeems himself by solving all the problems of the “natives” with his wise white wisdom, and sacrificing himself to them. So condescending. And the narrative is this one guy delivering a florid book-length monologue…and pondering the “nobility” problems of the main character. Oh no, a young imperialist failed to be noble when he was supposed to be noble! Thank god he could go tame the natives and reclaim his nobility! I hate Joseph Conrad…My notes in the margins read: ‘Oh quit whining, you giant effing baby’ and ‘Stupidly British imperialist honor nobility bullshit.’ Which makes no sense, but you get the point, I think?”

Ok – yes, Conrad’s writing is colored by the times, but he wasn't a British imperialist. His trip to the Congo (which inspired The Heart of Darkness) allowed him to see firsthand the treatment of “natives” by the imperialist/capitalists, and he recognized the inhumanity of it. The residents of Patusan didn’t follow Jim because he was white, but because he was successful and trustworthy. They did see him and the other whites as “others” and set apart, but I didn’t get the impression they saw them as better, or that Jim felt himself superior to them because he was white and they weren’t. There wasn’t any “taming” involved. Maybe I missed that and am completely interpreting it wrong, but I didn’t feel any of that. Of course in today’s post colonial world it seems racist, but looking at it from a turn-of-the-century perspective, it was much more progressive than other contemporary works. After all, what year did Birth of a Nation come out?

Yes, he was a little whiny about the whole thing. At times you did want to say, get on with this nobility and honor. But it was a big deal. People would have gotten that a hundred years ago in a different way than we get it. Maybe a gang member would understand it. That may be an interesting modern interpretation - what happens when a Blood acts cowardly and has to get away?

I think, too, that a lot of this is addressed by his confrontation with Brown. Jim questions Brown about why he came to their island and started causing trouble. Brown realizes – from his conversations with Cornelius (who snuck to Brown and tried to double cross Jim) – that Jim has something to hide. Why is this brilliant white kid of some class here on this outpost? And Brown ignores Jim’s question and knows how to get to him. He asks, “well why are you here?” Brown tells him he’s on the run too – that they aren’t any different. They’ve both lived their lives and done things that dog them. Brown is the other side of Jim – Jim thought that he had escaped his past, had been able to put it behind him and move on, starting over. But your past always follows you, if no where else but inside you. And Brown shows up, almost like Satan in the desert, to remind Jim. Is Jim any more honorable than Brown? Has he really redeemed himself in any way? Probably not really. In the eyes of other "gentleman," (Marlow) he clearly has somehow.

Conrad definitely isn’t for everyone. He can be boring, tedious, and foggy. But something about his writing continues to attract me back to him again and again. I couldn’t describe it, but its observations like, “the nights descended on her like a benediction” that I just eat up. The beauty of that phrase both crushes me and fills my heart with joy. It’s so beautiful. And Conrad’s language is riddled with that kind of stuff. So if you love just great writing in a style that really is no more, than maybe Conrad is for you. After Lord Jim, I am definitely excited to revisit Heart of Darkness in a year or two. I think that this time, I’ll understand it.

I, Claudius

2010-06-01T13:14:00.004-04:00

I’ve been reading I, Claudius since some unknown date in January or February. I know that I was reading it at the beginning of March when I saw Elaine Pagels give a talk on the Book of Revelations. She was showing photos of Roman statues in Aphrodisias, Turkey – including one of Claudius. My instantaneous reaction was, “I know him!”

And after that spontaneous outburst in my mind, I realized that “I know him” is an apt description of how I felt while reading I, Claudius. Robert Graves writes in a very conversational style – at times a little too conversational. Claudius begins telling us something, and then in the middle of the story will say, “I’ll come back to this, let me tell you about this other thing first.” I don’t know how much of Claudius’s writings exist today, and I wonder if Graves at all was attempting to imitate the Emperor’s actual style. At times this casualness was annoying, but overall it lent itself to the feeling that it really was a conversation. I felt like Claudius’s pal, his ally (of which he didn’t have many). It was a personal book - Claudius is put down by everybody except a few who figure out he really did know what was up. And they all die. Who can’t feel for a guy like that?

The main problem with IC is keeping track of all of the relationships. There is so much intermarriage and adoption and people with the same name that I don’t imagine there is anyone who could possibly keep track. I wonder how the Romans themselves kept track of it themselves. I created this chart which was very helpful, but should give you a clear idea of how complicated it was.

There were moments in IC when I was genuinely freaked out, almost afraid to turn out my book light. The downfall of Germanicus, for example – the dead babies under the floor and the mysterious message on the wall. But generally, a feeling of fear pervades the entire novel - for Claudius, members of the imperial family, and the masses. Claudius had a physical ailment of some sort, and was often regarded as an idiot. He is wisely advised early on to keep up the ruse…Graves portrays him as a deeply intelligent man, but must play dumb in order to avoid being murdered. Everyone has to watch out…you could have no friends or confidants, as informers were paid well to make up stories and turn people in to the Emperor, who – whether Tiberius or Caligula – rather enjoyed killing his subjects. This was all complicated by the fact that they all seemed mentally ill to some degree or another, and no one was ever sure what was expected of them. I cannot even imagine living in that environment. Well, to some degree I can, but that’s another story entirely.

I have always loved history – I used to watch the History Channel all the time back when they actually showed real, critical historical programming, not the shit that feeds into the Dan Brown fanatics need for conspiracy. And I really have no interest in Ice Road Truckers. But my knowledge about Ancient Rome (and Greece, and really a lot of the Middle Ages up to the Renaissance) is severely lacking. I recognize this, and have most of Will Durant’s Story of Civilization waiting for the day when I finally get around to cracking them open. I could have probably named a few Roman Emperors, given you some plots from Shakespeare’s (and Hollywood’s) interpretations and told you that “Bread and Circuses” was what lead to Rome’s downfall, but that’s about it. So much of the information in IC was new. I knew Imperial Rome was messed up, but I didn’t know it was that messed up. Graves really wet my appetite to learn more about Rome, so perhaps Caesar and Christ will get opened sooner than I anticipated. (But definitely after I finish this damn Modern Library list!)

I wouldn’t call I, Claudius suspenseful, because it doesn’t take long to figure out what is going to happen to everybody, but it was enthralling. I am looking forward to reading the second part of this “autobiography,” Claudius the God. I don’t see how it made it to #14 on the list, as there are novels far better than this farther down on the list. But there it is. Overall, though, it’s a good book.

Howards End

2010-04-12T12:39:00.005-04:00

My first book finished since February. That's quite a dry spell for me, and I'm disappointed in myself for being so lax about my reading goals, as the end of the Modern Library list approaches. But I've honestly had better things to do these last few months. In the meantime I missed the fact that I topped 10,000 hits, which isn't too shabby since I added the counter two years ago. Thanks to all my readers who have stuck with me in spite of my absences!

Now, onto Forster.

In 2007, I was very excited about A Passage to India. I love India, in theory of course since I've never been there. But I was disappointed - I just wasn't able to get into it, and I don't know why. I had a similar problem with Kim - another Indian novel (written, of course, by another Brit) that I looked forward to but was disappointed by.

Last year, I read A Room with a View. I had once attempted to watch this movie, and was so bored by it that I just turned it off. So I wasn't expecting that it would have anything for me, and I was pretty much right. I think in my review I said that if you are a fan of very Edwardian novels, or romantic comedies, than perhaps you would like A Room with a View. In general, it's not my thing - though a few Edwardians are notable exceptions (HG Wells, Hardy, and the wonderful children’s' literature the era produced specifically).

Batting 0-2 for Forster, I came to Howards End without expectations, except perhaps to not like it. But actually, I didn’t think it was too bad. Maybe you don’t think that’s much of a complement, but it’s probably the best Forster will get out of me.

The story centers around two sisters, Margaret and Helen Schlegel. Helen is the beauty, Margaret the brains. Really, the distinction isn’t that blatantly defined, but it’s essentially the division between the two. Their lives intertwine with that of the Wilcox’s, decaying old money. Mrs. Wilcox becomes close with Margaret, and in a letter to her husband right before she died, she leaves her family home, Howard’s End, to Margaret. The Wilcox family is mildly scandalized by this, and after some legal inquiries simply ignore the request. After Mrs. Wilcox’s death, Margaret runs into Mr. Wilcox, and they eventually decide they like each other and will get married. Then some stuff happens and Helen moves to Germany. The Schlegel’s aunt falls ill, and Helen returns to England but doesn’t want anyone to see her. Margaret, believing her sister is mentally ill, stages an intervention with her husband and a doctor. Turns out that Helen doesn’t want anyone to see her because she’s pregnant. Charles Wilcox, Margaret’s step son (who I think is about Margaret’s age) is scandalized by this connection with a fallen woman, and in another series of events accidently kills the man involved while beating him with a sword. Charles goes to jail for a few years, and in the end Helen moves with Margaret and the Wilcoxes to Howard’s End. Henry decides to leave the house to Margaret. And in the end, she gets Howard’s End anyway. Fin.

I have completely ignored the Leonard/Jacky subplot, and how it connects with the Wilcox/Schlegel story, but it’s really not relevant. It adds dimension, but in a summary of a 270 page book it took me two months to read, it really doesn’t matter. The theme, Only Connect, shows the intricacies of our interconnectedness and how someone you knew decades before pops up as the wife of a guy whose umbrella your sister-in-law picked up accidently at a concert. A mini-Dance to the Music of Time, I suppose.

What struck me most about HE is the language. Forster would be going on with typical turn-of-the-century British household chit-chat, and then pull out this elegantly written, descriptive paragraph, and I think, E.M., where did that come from? I don’t remember enjoying the beautiful (and often humorous) language in the other two novels. Maybe I was just so frustrated at the plot to notice the writing.

Doing research for this post, which really didn’t amount to anything, I did learn that Zadie Smith’s On Beauty is a retelling of HE. Smith has been on my list of authors to read for quite some time, and I would love to see what she did with the story.

There’s a lot more here – the difference between classes, sexes, rural/urban, liberal/conservative, etc. Sheila O’Malley has said, “it's almost like he somehow gets the entire history of England and humanity into one book.” Most scholars say Howards End is Forster's masterpiece, which is odd because I thought that I had read that Passage to India was his masterpiece. Whatever. I thought it was the best out of the three I've read. If there was something in Howard’s End for a tired and cynical gal slugging her way through it, it mustn’t be too bad. And again, that's probably the best complement I can give Forster.

Evidence of Bookmarker Eaters

2010-04-12T08:31:00.001-04:00

Missing Blogger

2010-04-07T09:04:00.002-04:00

Ok...I cannot believe it's been a month since I last posted. I'm such a bad blogger lately.

I'm still plugging away through Howards End and I, Claudius. I do what I can in between work, investigating starting my own jewelry business, buying new clothes (because I'm a mom now, and almost 29, and I feel strange still wearing the same graphic t-shirts I wore in college), closing on a house (which has involved more attorney fuck ups than should be allowed by law) AND a 7 month old with a runny nose who likes to eat my bookmarks. I am not kidding about eating my bookmarks.

I don't have much to say about either of those books. I'm nominally enjoying both, but neither are page-turners, so I find myself wanting to practice some yoga or research jewelry than picking up either one. It's so frustrating to get down to the end of this list, to see the finish line, and know that it's doable in a normal year - or what a normal year used to be - and get stalled here. My goal is finish both this month, so watch for posts in the next few weeks.

A Brief Thought about Howards End

2010-03-09T16:27:00.002-05:00

"It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it. Whether you are like Mrs. Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come—of course, not so as to disturb the others—or like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fraulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is echt Deutsch; or like Fraulein Mosebach's young man, who can remember nothing but Fraulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings. It is cheap, even if you hear it in the Queen's Hall, dreariest music-room in London, though not as dreary as the Free Trade Hall, Manchester; and even if you sit on the extreme left of that hall, so that the brass bumps at you before the rest of the
orchestra arrives, it is still cheap. "

This is my third Forster work. I was very disappointed in A Passage to India and certainly wasn't wowed by A Room With a View. But I am thus far pleasantly surprised by Howard's End. It's not really exciting - or particularly interesting yet - but the writing is much funnier, and markedly different than the other two novels.

I think I'm glad I saved this one for last. If I had read this first, I believe I would have been much more disappointed by the others. But that doesn't stop me from thinking, why couldn't you have been this good consistently, E.M., damn it!

An American Tragedy

2010-03-07T16:44:00.001-05:00

I’ve been slow lately. I’ve been slow in reading and slow in reviewing. There are many reasons for this. Obviously, as I’ve said many times, I have a 6-month old. Along with my regular job and all the other duties of life, I just don’t have that much time. I don’t know if I’m going to get through the Modern Library list this year, but I’m going to do my best and not worry about it.

Now onto An American Tragedy.

In general, I don’t read exciting books. I don’t think about this too often, but every now and then I come across a book that actually is exciting – or, you know, has a real plot, a real climax that the whole novel is working towards – and I realize that I don’t read page turners. Personally, excitement isn’t a quality that I require for a novel to be good or enjoyable, and (for the most part) I wouldn’t say the books that I enjoy that are also lacking in excitement are boring. They just aren’t exciting. An American Tragedy is exciting, and it did make me think – briefly – that perhaps I should pick up some John Grisham novels or something. But then I look at the Calvino books on my shelf and rethink that.

An American Tragedy started out at a slow pace. We first encounter Clyde Griffith as a teenager with his family, who are street preachers in Kansas City. He hates this. He hates the poverty of his family, and the humiliation he feels at having to stand on the corner and sing hymns. Clyde gets a job at a hotel as a bell hop, makes friends with the other bell hops, visits a prostitute and meets Hortense. I described her briefly here. She’s a low-rung gold digger. Clyde is head-over-heals with her, but she couldn’t care less about him – she likes the money he spends on her in his attempts to get her to sleep with him. Hortense keeps leading him on, making him believe that if he just buys her this one item more, she’ll go to bed with him. But she never does.

In the crescendo of their relationship, Hortense asks Clyde to buy her an expensive fur coat. She – again – leads him to believe that if he purchases the coat for her, she will definitely, finally sleep with him. It’s more than he can afford, but he intends to buy it for her anyway.

Up until this point, we know that Clyde is a moron for fawning over Hortense in this manner. You just want to yell at Clyde to give it up. (1) She doesn’t like you; (2) she only wants you to buy her things; (3) she is not going to have sex with you; (4) You are aware of all of this. Find someone who is (1) cheaper; and (2) easier. But no, he is her pathetic lap dog. But it’s at this point that Clyde’s real personality starts to come out. Clyde’s sister, Esta, (who he seemed to have genuine affection for) had run away with a traveling actor who left her (pregnant) in Pittsburgh. Clyde had been giving his mother some money out of his earnings and part of that money had been going to Esta, and Clyde knew this – though his mother thought it was a secret. Esta was about to give birth, and his mother needed $50. As his mother is asking for this, Clyde HAS THE $50 IN HIS POCKET, that he was going to use as a down payment on Hortense’s coat. And what does Clyde do? He lies to his mother – he doesn’t have $50 and he couldn’t get it for her.

I understand that Clyde’s a teenager, and he’s having his first love affair – of sorts – and wants to have a good time. And maybe my perception of this situation is colored by the fact that I now have a son, and can better see the point of view of his mother. She is embarrassed that she has to ask her son for money in the first place. And he knows that the money is going to support his destitute and very-pregnant sister who again he seemed to have real affection for. And he lies flat out about not having the money, and he intends to use this money to buy that whore Hortense a friggin’ fur coat.

A little while later, Clyde and some of his friends go for a ride with a car that does not belong to them – one of the boys “borrowed” it from the owner, and intended to return it before the man knew it was gone. Nothing good could ever come of this scenario. They get late returning and in their haste run over a little girl, then try to escape from the pursuing police and crash the car. Clyde escapes and skips town before the police arrive on the accident scene.

Clyde wanders around a bit and ends up in Chicago, working again as a bell hop in a hotel. One day, he encounters his uncle, whom he never met. Uncle Samuel Griffith owns a successful collar manufacturing business in New York. Clyde approaches Samuel, who ends up offering him a job. Clyde is then on his way to New York.

The Lygurgus Griffiths consist of Mr. and Mrs. Griffith, the privileged, jerky son Gilbert, and a few daughters (I don’t remember if there were two or three – or maybe one – it doesn’t matter). Gilbert essentially runs the factory and is resentful of Clyde from the start. The Gilberts give Clyde the lowest level job they can and then ignore him. Eventually they feel enough duty towards him to invite him to dinner, where he meets some of the Lycurgus young set, including Sondra Finchley, the daughter of another factory owner. The Griffiths promote Clyde, putting him in charge of a sub-department, and soon thereafter meets one of his workers, Roberta. After encountering her one day at a park, they quickly strike up together.

Roberta and Clyde have to keep everything a secret because of a policy against department heads dating employees, but also Clyde is worried that one of the Griffiths will see him with Roberta, just a working class girl, and think twice about him, both socially and professionally. It isn’t long before Clyde starts pressuring Roberta to take the relationship to the next level. When she expresses that she doesn’t want to do that – despite being working class, she is “respectable” in that sense – Clyde becomes a royal ass until Roberta finally gives in.

All is well and good (in a sense), until Sondra Finchley decides – mostly as a joke against Gilbert Griffith – to start inviting Clyde to parties and dinners. Clyde falls head over heals for Sondra – mostly because of her position in Lycurgus society and what a pass into that society would mean for him. Not that he doesn’t like Sondra personally – I just think a lot of his feelings are wrapped up in her social position.

Of course, Clyde starts to be mean to Roberta – cancelling dates with her, ignoring her mostly, except when he wants from her what he couldn’t get from Hortense. He lets Roberta know he’s going out socially with the Griffith crowd, but leaves Sondra out of it. Roberta starts to get down about it and frustrated. Clyde, because he clearly is a sociopath or clinical narcissist gets mad at Roberta for this, believing that she should be happy that he is being adopted, so to speak, by the upper crust.

And then Roberta becomes pregnant. This is when the plot really picks up the pace. Clyde tries to find a way to end the pregnancy. He seeks some drugs to cause her to miscarry, which fail, and he tries to find a doctor to perform an abortion, but fails at that too. Roberta was fine with all of this. But when everything failed, she started to let Clyde know that she expected him to marry her, as he had led her to believe he would do one day anyway.

Clyde DOES NOT want to marry Roberta, because his position with Sondra is pretty good and he expects to be able to marry her within a year. Obviously he cannot have this scandal, or go away or anything. Around this time, he comes across a newspaper article that describes an accident scene: two people (unidentified man and woman) take a boat out onto a lake. The boat overturns, the woman is found drowned, but no trace of the man. Clyde begins to hatch a plot: kill Roberta by drowning her in a lake and then escaping.

I won’t go into all the details now, because they get really intricate. But I probably needn’t tell you that Clyde absolutely botches the whole thing. Like most clinical narcissists (I say “clinical” to distinguish narcissistic personality disorder from the popular terms narcissism meaning people who like to look at themselves in the mirror), he believes he is SOOOO smart in setting this whole thing up, which the local sheriff takes apart in a matter of a hours. Dreiser throws in one other interesting – yet small – twist. In the moment, Clyde cannot act. And then something happens – one of those physical things which leads to an accident that afterwards you cannot quite recall the details of how exactly it happened – and he hits Roberta with his camera. Not deliberately, but not entirely accidentally. And she falls, tipping the boat over, and Clyde with it. She cannot swim, and he decidedly doesn’t try to help. It didn’t happen as he had planned – which was to actively kill her. It was more of an accident – he plotted to kill her, and then it all sort of happens by accident. He is responsible for her death, but not in the exact way he had intended to be.

The whole trial and denouement with the minister was anti-climactic, and made up more than 100 pages. But of course we had to know all that information. Which is something that I thought about throughout the entire novel: it is SO detailed, so intricately plotted. I kept wondering if Dreiser could have left any of it out and still had the novel, and I don’t know what the answer to that question is. Perhaps a more *technically skilled* novelist could have done something different with it, been more nontraditional with it, but if you are going from point A in Clyde’s life to the very end of it, yes – all of it had to be included. Because as with “real” life, every detail matters.

One thing that bothered me was about Roberta and nobody seemed to be able to tell that she was pregnant. She was obviously slight of frame (when they pulled her body out of the water they said she weighed about 100 lbs.) so it should have been obvious – to the dress maker and to the police at least. But it wasn’t until the coroner thought to check that anyone realized she was. I know everyone is different, but I am only a little bit bigger than Roberta’s size (<10 lbs), and by 5 months (how far along Roberta was when she was murdered), it was getting fairly obvious that I had a decent size bump. I didn’t expect everyone to know, but like I said, some people should have guessed by then (like when the pulled her wet body from the lake). What was surprising to me was the nonchalantness with which abortion was approached. We as a culture would be shocked to be told of someone who treated abortion with such flippancy, and yet here it is, almost 100 years ago.

Dreiser’s works, which really are bleak pictures of American life, wouldn’t really be the stuff of scandal – or at least you wouldn’t think so. They seem so “conventional.” But Dreiser was constantly having to make his works suitable for the public, dialing it down to something we could stand. After the publication of An American Tradegy, a publisher – Donald Friede, set up a censorship case, which he lost. He appealed and lost again. From Time Magazine, 1929:

Obscene: Publisher Donald Friede, president of Covici-Friede Corp., formerly of the late Boni & Liveright, was convicted in Boston last week for violation of the Massachusetts statute forbidding distribution of objectionable literature. The book: Author Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The book's theme: how U. S. conventions and his own limitations caused a young man to murder his sweetheart.

Not Obscene: Publisher Friede (see above) rushed from Boston to Manhattan to appear before a Court of Special Sessions. There his company's novel, The Well of Loneliness by Authoress Radclyffe Hall of England, was being attacked by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Three judges decided this book was not obscene. The book's theme: Lesbianism.

The confusion inherent in this is humorous. I wonder what the outcome would be today? Which is worse: how US conventions and personal limitations caused a young man to murder his girlfriend, or lesbianism. I think the answer might be lesbianism. Especially the Well of Loneliness kind….you know, not the Tila Tequila kind.

Dreiser also has a reputation of being rather clumsy with his prose, and that definitely shone through much more in this novel than in Sister Carrie, which I read two years ago. I ran across an article by Garrison Keiler about that other novel in which he asked why everyone had gotten so upset about a novel that was so bad. His writing is clunky. Time Magazine called it “a pipe fitter's approach to writing” but in the end, he is able to weave a story together unlike what most of his contemporaries were doing. And though it’s almost laughable that it would be censored, there is still stuff there to surprise, and to shock, and to disturb.

I see a pattern with Dreiser. His characters are often amoral – and though their actions are their “fault,” they are all also the product of their environment. They are the victims as well as the victimizer. He is part Dostoevsky, part Of Human Bondage, part Balzac. Somewhere I read that they are the flip side of the American Dream. Don’t come to Dreiser expecting a happy ending. Even when their characters get everything they want, they are still lacking. But if you want an American Dostoevskian view of the world, Dreiser beckons to you.

The Salinger Myth

2010-02-22T10:22:00.002-05:00

Two interesting articles on the recently deceased J.D. Salinger.

One at Salon.com
One at NY Times

Salinger was only a recluse in that he shunned the media. Turns out, he didn't live in a cave, but appears to have pursued a life that on the surface was pretty much like the lives of us regular folks.

We often have a stake in the myth of our favorite heroes, be them actors, atheletes, writers or politicians, and those myths are too often sternly defended. The truth is so much better.

Have a Beer with Joshua Ferris

2010-02-18T15:33:00.001-05:00

How do I get a gig like this?

Watch more Asylum Drinks With Writers videos on AOL Video

An American Tragedy and More Holdups

2010-02-08T08:42:00.005-05:00

The goal of finishing the Modern Library is within sight. There are less than 20 left. But of course, life has been intervening. I’m in the middle of a crisis, which doesn’t seem to be the End of the World, which it seemed like last week. But it’s still affecting me and it’s so frustrating.

But in the last day or so, I have been completely in to Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I know he doesn’t have a reputation as the best writer from a technical perspective, but this plot is excellent. Right now, I DO NOT want to put this book down. I’m about half way through – nine days behind schedule – but I wanted to put down a few thoughts here to tide everyone over until I can post a complete review.

I don’t want to dislike Clyde. We are all products of our environment, for better or for worse, and at first I tried to sympathize with him, particularly in the Hortense situation and the idea that he had to some extent help out his family when, as a teenage boy, he really just wanted to help himself out. I kept thinking back to “Of Human Bondage” and poor Philip in relation to Mildred and I was seeing Clyde in that context – through my “Poor Philip” glasses. All of that began to change when his mother asked him to loan her $50 to help out his sister, whom he dearly loved. He had the $50 in his pocket, which he intended to use to buy Hortense a fur coat. And he lied to his mother and told her he didn’t have the money.

Hortense is obviously a bitch, and sort of a gold digger. She only shows attention to Clyde in order to get material goods out of him, but on the other hand he only gives her material goods because he thinks he’ll get laid. But he doesn’t. He guesses that this is what Hortense is doing, but he persists. In this situation, I almost feel like they are meant for each other. But then there is the accident (nothing good ever comes from teenagers riding in cars together, especially when the car belongs to someone else – Saved By the Bell, anyone?) and Clyde runs away to Chicago where he meets his rich uncle who offers him a job back in Lycurgus, NY.

Now, we think, Clyde is going to turn his life around and make something of himself. He is going to realize how stupid he was in the Hortense situation and watch himself. And at first he does. But once he gets put in charge of a department (really, a sub-department), he soon thereafter picks up with one of his workers. Now, in general, I don’t have problems with that. And it appears at first that Clyde has genuine affections for Roberta, and it felt as if it weren’t for how his relatives would view this relationship, both because (a) she works under Clyde, which is expressly forbidden; and (b) she is clearly just a factory girl, and beneath the station to which Clyde aspires, I would guess that Roberta and Clyde would live happily ever after. But I have come to realize that with Dreiser, nobody lives happily ever after.

Everything is going ok with Clyde and Roberta, in general. But Clyde is a jerk, really. He pressures Roberta – who at heart really appears to be a good girl – into taking their relationship further than she wants, at least without a promise of marriage. And then he discovers Sondra Finchley. Sondra is of the Griffith’s upper crust, and meets Clyde at the one dinner his uncle invites him to. A few months later she sees him walking and picks him up in her car and drives him home. Sondra and some of her friends scheme to invite Clyde to some of their social functions, mostly to get at Gilbert, Clyde’s cousin, who is a jerk too. And of course, Clyde completely falls for Sondra and begins to neglect Roberta in a jerky way. He cancels dates at the last minute, or just doesn’t show up, and then lies about where he was, why he was there, and who he was with. Dreiser shows us Clyde’s inner thoughts about Roberta, which are essentially that she should be happy for him that he’s now got all these great friends and prospects, and who is she to have any claims over him.

Clyde – I really was “rooting” for you, here, but you keep screwing it up!

Roberta: Poor Roberta. She is perhaps a good match for Clyde – or would have been if he didn’t have his eye on being considered a “Griffith.” She perhaps would have been a good match if Clyde deserved anyone decent, which I’m not sure about. He pressures her into deeper relations, and while never actually promising to marry her, he hinted in such a way that Roberta obviously assumed that was what he meant. And he knew that is what she assumed, but let it go. I say that she appears to be a good girl, though sometimes I have paused about this, as Dreiser hints that she believes Clyde is more connected to the Griffiths than he actually is. How much of that belief was tied in with her feelings for him?

And now – Roberta is pregnant.

I know what is going to happen, vaguely – because I know the basic story on which Dreiser based this book. I know where this is going. My natural tendency would be to look up the details on wiki or some such site, but I don’t want to. For once, I am enjoying the suspense.

The Old Wives' Tale

2010-01-27T07:16:00.000-05:00

Reasons I thought I was going to dislike Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale:

It's called The Old Wives' Tale. Not a very exciting title. Now Lawrence - he knows how to mask a boring book with an exciting title.
The author's name is Arnold Bennett. Seems like he would be a model of Edwardian snoozefests.
Mr. Bennett is known to not have had any artistic ambitions in writing. He wrote for the money, and because he knew he could do better than others. ("Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself? Not me. If anyone imagines my sole aim is art for art's sake, they are cruelly deceived.") Pshaw!
The novel begins by describing the Five Towns, St. Luke's Square, Bursley, etc. English village life. I'm sensing Lawrence here, or Wessex (even though I like Hardy), and I'm getting bored.
And speaking of Lawrence...Bennett's novel centers around two daughters of a shopkeeper. One is very conventional, the other a sprite. Bringing back memories of The Rainbow. Am I asleep here yet?

No - I'm not asleep! To my utter surprise, OWT slowly - but not too slowly - won me over. I... actually... began... to... like... it!

Reasons I ended up liking OWT (despite my readiness to hate it):

Mr. Bennett is a decent writer. Even if he was doing it for the money.
Unlike Lawrence, Bennett is to the point. He didn't waste my time with page-long paragraphs signifying nothing. There is dialog, and actually has more moments of excitement than I have found is typical for an Edwardian novel. He makes ordinary people interesting.
It's actually humorous in some parts. I would give you some examples, but you would say, "Kristin, that's not really funny." But trust me, when you're reading the book, you will chuckle at a few things. Including: Sophia takes out Povey's wrong tooth; the ironic circumstances in which Mr. Baines dies; the reaction to Sophia's poodle.

OWT concerns the Baines family. First Mr. and Mrs. Baines, who are raising their daughters Constance and Sophia. Then Sophia elopes with a loser (as always happens) and Constance marries one of the shop helpers. Mr. and Mrs. Baines die. Constance runs the shop. Her uncle-in-law kills his wife. Constance's husband dies and her son (Cyril) moves to London and generally is unappreciative of his mother's devotion. Sophia and loser husband move to Paris. He abandons her, but through her own pluck and smarts ends up running a successful pension on the Champs Elysee. After running into Cyril's BFF in Paris, she returns home to Bursley where she and Constance live out the rest of their years. Ok, I know that doesn't sound terribly interesting, or even simply not- boring, but I assure you - I, the most easily bored person on the face of the earth - was not bored. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.

Early 20th century England certainly did have its interesting literary circles, and Bennett was at times in the center of it. All circulating together you had Wells, Woolf, *James,* Conrad, Forster, etc. And they all went to each other's parties and made fun of each others spouses. Woolf - representative of a new modernist streak coming up in literature - had a heated public feud with Bennett over what makes a good novel, and whether the other's novels fit that model. Bennett said Woolf, among with other contemporary authors, had not "displayed the potential for mastering the novel." Woolf was equally vocal about her dislike for Bennett's style, calling him and other "materialist" novelists "mundane" and saying that their books could have been written by government workers. (IMO, she was wrong.) This went on for more than a decade. But when Bennett died, Woolf wrote the following in her diary: "Arnold Bennett died last night; which leaves me sadder than I should have supposed...I yet rather wished him to go on abusing me, and me abusing him." She described him as "a lovable genuine man; impeded, somewhat awkward in life; well meaning; ponderous; kindly; coarse; knowing he was coarse; ...glutted with success; wounded in his feelings; ...set upon writing; always taken in; deluded by splendor and success; but naive; an old bore; ...shopkeeper's view of literature; yet with the rudiments, covered over with fat and prosperity and the desire for hideous Empire furniture, of sensibility." I'm not sure if the quip about hideous Empire furniture is to be taken literally or if she is referring to his writing. Either way. I find it all fascinating, this interplay between these authors, and wish that I could go back and be invited to one of their parties. I wish I could be invited to one of their parties more than I wish that I could be invited to Paris c.1920 with Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I wish this even though parties with Woolf and co. would be much stuffier and high-brow and there would probably be less alcohol involved.

Old Wives' Tale is kind of like a turnip. You're dreading it - you know you have to eat it, but you don't want to. You take the smallest bite possible, and lo and behold, it's not as bad as you thought it would be. It's not your favorite food, but you still don't mind eating it. OWT isn't the best novel I've ever read - it won't knock your socks off. And I'm not entirely sure why it deserves to be considered one of the best of the 20th century - though it's definitely an improvement over some of the others. But it wasn't as terrible as I expected it to be. In fact, Old Wives' Tale was not at all what I was expecting. To my surprise, it turned out much better.

I never thought I would be comparing a novel to a turnip and meaning it as a compliment.

Old Wives Tale Quote

2010-01-26T16:21:00.000-05:00

Nothing will sharpen the memory, evoke the past, raise the dead, rejuvenate the ageing, and cause both sighs and smiles, like a collection of photographs gathered together during long years of life.

Explaining my absence…

2010-01-18T16:23:00.002-05:00

I haven’t been writing here much. This is due mostly to two factors: (1) thanks to having a young child in day care, Shawn & I catch everything he catches. And this past week, it has been both a nasty stomach bug AND a cold. Thanks, Brendan; and (2) what I'm reading is taking a looooonnng time. This would usually cause me great anxiety, not finishing books off quickly. I've been tempted to pick up some shorter novels, like John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, etc., but haven't been able to get into them. I'm feeling very focused about finishing the Modern Library list, and if that means only reading 17 or so books this year, then so be it. It's pretty easy dealing with this situation right now, as all the books I'm in right now are pretty decent.

So...a reading update:

The Old Wives Tales - I'm about 60% of the way through, according to my Kindle. I'm liking it, which is surprising. Hopefully a post on that next week.
An American Tragedy - Only 25% of the way through, but also really enjoying it. Won't finish this until the end of February.
I, Claudius - just picked this up the other night...only reading a few pages at night when rocking Brendan to sleep, and again, it's really good. I'm having some trouble keeping track of everyone's relations, but I'm going to make some kind of family tree to hopefully solve that problem.
The Big Money - I can't really say that I'm actually "reading" this. I started it back in November (?) right after finishing 1919, but couldn't get into it. I thought going from one to the other would work, but I guess I needed a break. I'm hoping to start back up in February maybe...I don't want to get too far away from 1919, because I will forget everyone's relationships.

And on the movie-watching update, this week I think I'll begin what I'm calling my Grandpa Project. I've been meaning to do this for more than a year, and I think it's time. More info on this later...

Booking Through Thursday

2010-01-07T15:39:00.005-05:00

Booking Through Thursday asks...

What books did you get for Christmas (or whichever holiday you may have celebrated last month)? Do you usually ask for books on gift-giving occasions or do you prefer to buy them yourself?

I always ask for books on gift-giving occasions. In fact, other than movies and sometimes some music, it's pretty much all I ever ask for. Most of the time I have to give people a list. I understand why - because I have so many books, most people have no idea what I already have; still, I long for the time when someone will hand me a book and say, "I think you'd enjoy this." Especially if the selection revealed some intimate knowledge of my interests and quarks...especially if I DID enjoy it. I really do miss the spontaneity of not having to ask for any specific book.

So - what books did I get for Christmas...I hope that I can remember them all...

Blood Meridian - McCarthy
The Magus - Fowles
Parade's End - Ford Maddox Ford
Letters of Groucho Marx
Labyrinths - Borges
Beloved - Morrison
Little Women - Alcott
Wittgenstein's Mistress - Markson
Clea - Durrell
Mountolive - Durrell

I think that's it. I also went on a small spree myself this past weekend and purchased the following used books:

House for Mr. Biswas - Naipaul
Women in Love - Lawrence
King Solomon's Mines - Haggard (with a somewhat racially-inappropriate cover, which is probably why it was only $1.50)
East of Eden - Steinbeck
Age of Innocence - Wharton
A Short History of the Movies text book
Introduction to Film Studies text book

P.S. - I did forget one book I got for Christmas: Powwowing Among the Pennsylvania Dutch.

2009 Year in Review - Books

2009-12-31T23:59:00.005-05:00

I read a lot more this year than I thought I would, given that the first 2/3 of the year I was pregnant and not feeling well, and then the last 1/3 I have been taking care of an infant. But I wouldn't say, as I did last year, that it was a good reading year. I read some books that I really did enjoy (marked with a *), and I found some new (for me) authors that I really liked - particularly Douglas Adams and EL Doctorow. But it took me until March or April to get to a book that I really liked. 2009 seems to have been a year of books that I am still indifferent about.

In 2010, I hope to finally finish the Modern Library's Top 100 of the 20th Century - that will be a big accomplishment, considering I've been "actively" working the list since 2005. I also hopefully will FINALLY get to some books that have been at the top of my TBR pile for a few years: In Cold Blood, The Shipping News, and maybe even Possession. We'll see though - the focus will be getting through the ML list, and with such tomes as Parade's End, Studs Lonigan and Finnegan's Wake still to go, it may be a struggle.

Here's the Read in '09 list:

A Room with a View - EM Forster
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Empty Phantoms - Interviews with Jack Kerouac
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Fight Club - Chuck Palahnuik
Fatelessness - Imre Kertesz
Amok - Stefan Zweig
Time's Arrow -Martin Amis
Closely Watched Trains - Bohumil Hrabal
The Rainbow - DH Lawrence
Justine - Lawrence Durrell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler*
Atonement - Ian McEwan*
Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow
Ragtime - EL Doctorow*
High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes
A Dance to the Music of Time (4th Movement) - Anthony Powell*
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
Golden Bowl - Henry James
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov*
Balthasar - Lawrence Durrell
And Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris*
Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Chocky - John Wyndham
The 39 Steps - John Buchan
King Lear - William Shakespeare
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer*
The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
1919 - John Dos Passos
Zuelika Dobson - Max Beerbohm
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy*
Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren
The Ginger Man - J.P. Donleavy

2009 Year in Review - Movies

2009-12-31T23:27:00.000-05:00

I didn't watch as many movies as I did last year. Once again, this is mostly due to pregnancy and then the arrival of Brendan in August. But I did ok considering. Favorites are underlined/bolded.

Le Cercle Rouge
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (I LOVED this! Definately the best I watched all year)
Soylent Green (not bad for a Charlton Heston film)
Thumbsucker
Double Life of Veronique (A movie I really wanted to love, but it just left me cold)
Meatballs
Divine Horsemen
Fateless
Atonement
Slum Dog Millionaire
Three Penny Opera (I was pretty disappointed in this one)
Wonderful/Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Did she support the Nazis or not? Was Triumph of the Will a propaganda film, or a documentary? I still don't know.)
The Big Sleep
Return to Oz
Cabaret
Clash of the Titans (Can't wait for 2010's remake of this starring Ralph Fiennes)
Appaloosa (I know I watched this, but honestly, I can't remember a thing about it)
L'Avventura (Didn't really get it when I watched it, but appreciate it more after reading Ebert's review)
Frozen River
Battleship Potemkin
The Public Enemy (1931 version with James Cagney, not Johnny Depp)
Monkey Business (I enjoyed Duck Soup to this, but it was classic Marx Brothers nonetheless...and I love me some Marx Bros.)
The Trouble With Harry
Incident at Oglala (Should my "neighbor" Leonard Peltier really be in prison? Probably not.)
Rear Window (After years of only seeing parts of this film, I finally saw the whole thing)
Gran Torino (Terribly disturbing)
The Fire Within
Iris
Stranger Than Fiction (No matter how many films I see her in, I cannot conceive of Maggie Gyllenhall as a romatic lead at all, but this movie was cute anyway)
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (I think this has been called "celluloid excrement," and I can't say that I disagree)
No Country for Old Men

The Ginger Man

2009-12-31T12:10:00.003-05:00

I cannot say that I went into reading this book with an open mind. I was expecting not to like it. That expectation was largely based on Doug Shaw's review. And guess what - once again he was right.

Doug sums up the plot of The Ginger Man so succinctly, I will just let him tell it to you:

Okay, okay, quiet down now, I got a joke for you. Stop me if you've heard this one: ...[Sebastian Dangerfield] walks into a bar, right? Gets blind drunk, smashes up some things, goes home, and pawns his woman's stuff to get more money to buy booze. Wait, it gets better. She gets mad, he smacks her, and she leaves eventually. He pawns the rest of her stuff, gets drunk, and finds another woman who has sex with him and falls in love with him...
Wait, it gets better... after this new woman falls in love with him, this guy walks into a bar. Gets blind drunk, smashes up some things, goes home, and pawns this new woman's stuff to get more money to buy booze. She gets mad, he smacks her, and she leaves eventually...
That plot synopsis I just gave you is the entire story of The Ginger Man. That one theme, over and over. And over.

The Nation says that this novel is "a comic masterpiece." The New Yorker called it "a triumph of comic writing." Let me give you some quotes here, and you tell me if you think this is comedic:

[Sebastian] took the child's pillow from under its head and pressed it hard on the screaming mouth.
"I'll kill it, God damn it, I'll kill it, if it doesn't shut up."

AND

[Sebastian's wife]: "That we've been starving. That the baby has rickets. And because you're drinking every penny we get. And this house too and that you slapped and punched me when I was pregnant, threw me out of bed and pushed me down the stairs. That we're in debt, owe hundreds of pounds, the whole loathsome truth."
...He slowly reached out and took the shade off the lamp. He placed it on his little table.
"Are you going to shut up?"
"No."
He took the lamp by the neck and smashed it to pieces on the wall.
"Now shut up."

HOW ABOUT THIS:

[Sebastian:] "Well god damn it, another word out of you and I'll bat you in the bloody face..."...Sebastian's arm whistled through the air. The flat of his palm cracked against the side of her face and Mary sat stunned. He slapped her again. "I'm going to kick the living shit out of you. Do you hear me?"

That's hillarious, isn't it? Jay McInerney - whose book Big City, Bright Lights is on my TBR pile, calls Dangerfield thoroughly charming. Yeah - Dangerfield seems like the type of person you'd really enjoy knowing, doesn't it? I'm not sure on what planet someone would find Dangerfield charming, but it isn't on the planet I live on (or would want to live on).

I don't know that I've run across another literary character that I so thoroughly detested. At first I debated who I disliked more - Sebastian Dangerfield or Rabbit Angstrom. But Dangerfield wins hands down. At least Rabbit, Run wasn't supposed to be funny.

I'll be frank here, as this is pretty much all that I have to say about this novel (which is a waste of paper, if you asked me). Sebastian Dangerfield is an Asshole - with a capital A. A story about an abusive guy who takes all his money (and his wife's money, and his girlfriend's money, and his friend's money, etc.) to get drunk and schmooze women, while his wife and infant daughter virtually starve in a house that is literally falling down is not funny. In fact, I find it incredibly disturbing that anyone would think this is funny, or that such a character is "charming." And if you are someone who thinks this character is charming, or sympathetic, or funny, I'll venture to guess that you're probably an Asshole - with a capital A - too. So there.

Please don't construe this as a softening of any anti-Henry James-ness, but I think that I would rather reread The Ambassadors than have to encounter Sebastian Dangerfield ever again. The only use for my copy of this novel is to give it to Brendan to fart on.

1984

2009-12-28T12:14:00.003-05:00

1984 is personal. My reaction to it was purely personal. Obviously I know and understand its links and parallels with the USSR, but I didn't care about any of that. To quote from my 2006 journal entry about this novel:

1984 bothers me....I don’t give a shit about big brother, loss of privacy, the ability to or possibility of altering the past, the social commentary, its relevance to today, etc. I don’t care. What bothers me is the story about Julia.

I was deeply disturbed by the love story here. DEEPLY disturbed. And it all centered around this:

"...Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you - that would be the real betrayal."

I wrote extensively about this in my journal at the time. I read 1984 when I was dating Shawn - about a year and a half into our relationship. Everything was still fairly new, and we were still in the lovey-dovey stage. And I completely felt Winston in this instance - he and Julia know they will be tortured, and that they will give the other up. But no matter what, they would still love each other. That feeling would still be there.

And then there is Room 101 and the rats. And Winston really does betray her, in his own definition of the word. He tells O'Brien - do it to her, not to me. His own self-preservation instinct is stronger than his feelings for Julia. And Julia did the same thing. This FLOORED me. It had me questioning everything: would I do the same thing? Would Shawn? And what did that mean? I was bewildered and confused for days.

I continued in my journal:

...After Winston is arrested and begins to be tortured, all I wondered about was Julia – was she constantly on his mind, there with him, etc. Because I would like to imagine that I would feel him there with me. But then I think about those tortures – being kicked in the back where my discs are bad, or to be beaten, shocked, and it's frightening because maybe it would be so bad that I wouldn’t think or feel anything but my own pain. It’s frightening that someone could take him away from me in that manner. Then there was the scene when they shock his brain to convince him of things, and I became afraid of someone who would remove him from my brain in such a way to make me forget that I love him. But then in the end, with the rats, when he tells them to do it to Julia instead...That was the betrayal – he thought of himself to her detriment. What bothers me is that someone else can force you to that point, and you can believe all you want that it won’t or couldn’t happen, but it can. Until just now, I thought that what bothered me was that someone else could do that to me – someone else could force me to betray him but when I was just writing that, I realized that someone could do that to him as well – he could betray me in the same way, and suddenly, I’m not sure which is more disturbing.

I read a lot, but it's rare when a book truly elicits a reaction, or that really moves me. I'm not talking about feelings of frustration, boredom, and general anger at a book or author (*cough cough* Henry James *cough cough*). I'm not talking about being engrossed in the plot. I'm talking about something that stays with you, and that when I recall it, it brings that emotion back up. I can really enjoy a book: its plot, its language or style, etc., but it's those that are not only reading experiences but emotional experiences as well that I love. I get anxious just remembering my reaction to this novel, and that says a lot. I'm not sure that I could stomach reading it again, but I'm sure that I will some day. 1984 may not be my favorite book, but it certainly was able to bring forth really strong emotions. And THAT makes it a damn good book.

Pippi Longstocking

2009-12-23T08:56:00.005-05:00

Last night I finished Pippi Longstocking. I had never read it before.

I mentioned this briefly here: as far as I can tell, Pippi Longstocking is the ONLY children's book included in the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list (2008 edition - not included on 2006 list). This bothers me. If we are going to start included children's books on such a list, that is fine, but there are many others that would come to mind before Pippi Longstocking. What about Winnie-the-Pooh? Charlotte's Web? Even The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn't included. WHY ONLY PIPPI?

The editors of the 1,001 list revamped it in 2008 to address criticism that it was too Anglo-centric. So they took out all these classics of Western literature - Dickens, Faulkner, Austen, Woolf, and added all these non-Anglo texts to the list. (There isn't anything inherently wrong with that, but see my reasoning here, here and here for why the editors didn't go about it in the right way.) The only explanation I can come up with for the appearance of Pippi in that misguided reshuffle is that someone thought - we don't have enough Swedes on here! And put Pippi Longstocking on there to fill that gap (for those wondering, the 2008 ed. included nine books by Swedes; five of those nine were not included in the 2006 edition). With that logic, I can see why they left off all those other great children's books that I mentioned - because they are all written by British or American men, which clearly didn't fit their new model.

I know I should get so frustrated with a silly book list, but I take these things seriously. They chopped The Brothers Karamozov, The Sound and the Fury, and Pilgrim's Progress off the list, and added Pippi Longstocking. There is something very wrong with that. Not all baseball players deserve to be at Cooperstown, if you know what I mean, even if they are decent.

No Country For Old Men

2009-12-22T12:48:00.000-05:00

I feel completely unqualified to write about this book. McCarthy always makes me feel this way. I just don’t ever know what to say. McCarthy is so singular that there are no comparisons to make.

I often want to call his prose “sparse,” but that word implies “less than what is necessary” which isn’t what I mean at all. It is only what is necessary – no less, but no more either. While I truly love the flourish of well written prose, McCarthy’s is as stripped down as it could possibly get. Even quotation marks are an unneeded extravagance. This writing style highlights the bleakness of his topics: apocalyptic disaster, absolute evil, etc. The horror speaks for itself – McCarthy doesn’t need a lot of words to convey it.

I won’t go into the plot details here, mostly because I don't feel like it, but also because the story is probably familiar to most. I am fascinated by two characters in this story: Moss and Chigurh. Moss: he thinks that HE is the “ultimate bad-ass”. He greatly overestimates his abilities in this department. He is no match for Chigurh – but then again nobody is, not even Wells. But here is Moss, repeatedly told not to try to outrun this thing, because it will not work. He will get you. But Moss is so caught up in himself. “I’m going to make you my special project” – he says something like that to Chigurh, and you just want to laugh at him. Yeah, ok Moss. He’s just so dumb in that respect.

I keep reflecting on Chigurh, and found a lot of insights about him in some research. He’s not a “character” in the traditional sense. He doesn’t have a personality. Characters change and react to their surroundings and the events that happen to them. Chigurh just IS. And he is simply not responsible for the deaths of the people he murdered. Fate has put these people in his way, and that wasn’t their doing. At some point, they made a choice which led THEM to HIM in a sense, not the other way around.

What more can I say? Again – McCarthy always leaves me speechless.

One woman who attended my local book club when I was participating said that she was disappointed in No Country for Old Men’s translation into feature film. She felt it didn’t do the book justice. I’m not sure I completely agree. Perhaps the film wasn’t great at showing that Chigurh isn’t just a bad guy. He is THE bad guy– a force of nature, destiny personified - conscienceless, ruled by fate, meting out some kind of divine justice. Maybe he is best described as beyond good and evil. It didn’t matter to him that he could have let Carla Jean go, just to be nice or whatever. Everyone involved had to die – just because they did. I only say that this might not have been conveyed in the right way due to Shawn’s reaction: “I don’t like the ending,” he said. “They didn’t get the bad guy. I hate it when the bad guy gets away.” I didn’t try to explain that you simply CANNOT get Chigurh. If you could, No Country would be just another chase story, no different from a number of other Tommy Lee Jones movies. Chigurh is beyond that. I don’t know that anything that said was much as included in the novel but not the movie, but I’m not sure that this all-important element came through. That’s probably why so many people were confused by the ending. They went to the cinema expecting to see a modern western staring Tommy Lee Jones, but they got something different.

The denouement, when seen through the lens of what the general viewing public may have expected from this film, was anticlimactic. But I believe that Bell is perhaps the central figure in this story. HE is the one that has a change, though perhaps that is simply because he’s the only one that doesn’t end up dead. In the beginning, we find the Sheriff realizing that he is confronting something that simply wasn’t when he got in the law enforcement business. I don't want to say "didn't exist," but just wasn't. He doesn’t understand this new thing, this new force. He doesn’t WANT to understand. He wants no part of that world. He thought at some point God would come into his life, but what he finds instead is Chigurh – who in a way is like some people’s conception of God. In the end, he has to opt out. Is the ending ambiguous? Yes. But perhaps less ambiguous than The Road with the fish… and the ties between those two novels, with the fire being carried forward, has been pointed out many times by people more qualified than me to discuss this.

I enjoyed this from the Scanners discussion forum (regarding the film, but applies to the novel as well):

Chigurh is by no means the focus of "No Country For Old Men" (it's more about the other characters' responses to his presence), but he bothers some people because they don't know who he is or what he represents. And that's just fine. Ask yourself, "What does he seek?" (in the words of his movie-killer antithesis, the cannibal psychologist Dr. Hannibal Lecter)... and where does that get you? He seeks $2 million in a leather satchel. As Joel Coen once said to me in an interview about "Barton Fink": "The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere." Sometimes, if certain questions don't appear to have an answer, maybe that's enough of an answer. Or maybe it's a superfluous question."

One (hopefully non-superfluous) question I do have to ask – and maybe it makes me look like a moron – but who the hell was Chigurh working for? Was he working for anyone? If any explanation was given, I missed it.

I really only started this book because I’m (1) not into The Big Money for some reason – I guess I needed a break after 1919 and have kind of given up for the time being; and (2) I am having a difficult time stomaching The Ginger Man. Watch for seething post on that coming up in a few weeks. McCarthy is always a nice break from the mundane. I can’t wait for Blood Meridian in 2010 (which will also eventually be made into a film).

The Known Universe

2009-12-21T14:47:00.000-05:00

This has nothing to do with books, but I liked it anyway :-)

Zuleika Dobson

2009-12-10T13:39:00.002-05:00

I had no preconceived notions of what Zuleika Dobson was going to be like. I didn’t even go into expecting it to be a comedy, because in my mind I kept getting it mixed up with Zlata’s Diary and therefore thought it might be about someone in Eastern Europe. But it actually has nothing to do with Eastern Europe. I kind of wish that it did, though. Roger Ebert’s words about a movie he REALLY didn’t like come to mind: It has to be seen to be believed, but I don’t recommend that.

What to say about this mess that is Zuleika Dobson?

I suppose I should lay out the plot here first. We have Zuleika Dobson, who is very beautiful and makes her living as a conjurer, putting on parlor tricks for rich people in Europe and America. (She’s “less than mediocre” at her profession, but I suppose she gets by on her looks.) At the beginning of the novel, she is coming to stay with her grandfather at Oxford.

Zuleika is notorious for not falling in love with anyone. That is until she sees the Duke of Dorset, a student at Oxford. He is notorious for the same thing. Of course, they fall in love, but only briefly. The day after they meet, Zuleika visits the Duke, but when she learns that he loves her, she isn’t interested anymore. Yeah, the whole thing lasted about 12 hours. The Duke is still smitten of course, and decides to kill himself for love of Zuleika. He tells her of his plan. She is excited that someone would do this for her.

The problem is that all of Oxford is in love with her apparently, and when word gets around that Dorset is going to kill himself for her, all the other males at Oxford decide to do the same.

How does Zuleika respond? Well, she must do something for all these young me who are going to throw themselves in the river for her. So she puts on her conjuring show. How kind of her! When the Duke is walking Zuleika back to her rooms after the show, he tells her that he wants to live, and asks her to release him from his promise to kill himself. Zuleika is disgusted by the suggestion.

And then we get to Chapter 11. Geesh, this book exhausts me.

The Duke has now decided not to kill himself over Zuleika. But then he gets a letter from home about two owls, and apparently that means that he is going to die. So he hasn’t prolonged his life any after all. He knows that no one will believe him if he says, “it’s silly for all of us to kill ourselves over this woman, but I’m going to die today anyway.” He walks around Oxford trying to talk people out of the mass suicide but without any success.

And then we get to this entire subplot, where his landlady’s daughter is in love with him. The morning that he is going to jump in the river, he confronts her about it, and she admits that she loves him. He tells her that he hates Zuleika, and gives Katie a pair of pearl earrings that Zuleika had given him as a trinket. He kisses Katie and then goes to kill himself. All the undergraduates kill themselves by jumping into the river and yelling “Zuleika!”

But it doesn't end there. There was one undergraduate that doesn’t kill himself, though he intended to: Noaks, who lived with Dorset. When Katie, after finding out that everybody has committed suicide, goes to ready Noaks’ and Dorset’s room for their families, she finds Noaks hiding behind a curtain. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he didn’t kill himself over Zuleika, because that would make him a coward. Katie tells him that she loves him, because he didn’t kill himself over Zuleika, who Katie hates because of the situation with Dorset. Noaks, pleased that somebody likes him (he’s kind of a dork) asks her to marry him – well, more like he gives her a ring and says now they are engaged. Before too long Zuleika shows up, and Noaks tries to make excuses to her why he isn’t dead like the rest of them. But now Zuleika loves him precisely because he is the only one left. Katie of course overhears all of this, throws Noaks ring at her, informs Zuleika that Noaks was just chicken and that she knows that Dorset didn’t kill himself over her. This kid Clarence (who I assume is Katie’s brother, though I’m not sure that we’re ever told that) goes to beat up Noaks, but Noaks jumps (or falls) out the window and dies.

Zuleika decides that she is going to enter a convent so that she can’t wreck havoc like that again, but at the last minute, terribly worried that everyone will find out that Dorset didn’t kill himself over her, decides to go to Cambridge, presumably so that she can do the same thing again.

Phew. That took a lot to recount, and it wasn’t a very long book.

Despite its attempts to be a comedy, I found Zuleika Dobson to be terribly unfunny. By Chapter 3 or so, I was wondering what the hell was this thing? Is Beerbohm being serious about this? I really didn’t get at first that he’s being facetious – that it’s supposed to be some sort of satire. If taken seriously, it reminds me of the melodramas I tried to write when I was 12 years old. That’s not a complement, in case you were wondering. This is TERRIBLE! I thought. How the [expletive] did this drivel end up on the Modern Library list? How could ANYONE possibly like this? But as I started to research other bloggers/online reviewers who read Zuleika, I find that they all had over-the-moon praise for it. Orrin, the reviewer at Brothers Judd said, “the revelation of this satirical baroque masterpiece justifies all the wretched dreck I’ve waded through on this list.” The reviewer at 70proof called it “wonderfully clever,” “genuinely funny and significant” and said that its verbosity “only adds to the pleasure.” WHAT???? I’m not entirely sure that I was reading the same novel as they were.

The New York Times, at least gets closer to my feelings. One article there states, “Beerbohm cannot approach real harshness. For a satirist he’s too congenial…The visciousness that makes Juvenal and Jonathan Swift great is beyond his modestly ironic touch.” Perhaps that is what is wrong with it…I don’t know. It feels like there was potential there, but something wasn’t right.

A new revelation has suddenly come to me. I have known girls like Zuleika, and they annoy the piss out of me. These are the girls that fawn over all the men – even ones they do not like – because they cannot stand to be in a room with someone of the opposite sex and not be the complete center of their attention. I had a roommate like this once. I know it comes from a place of insecurity, but it is annoying nonetheless. It’s frustrating when you can’t bring a boy home with you because you know your roommate will be clawing at him all night, and though I mean no disrespect to any males reading this blog, but most men are too stupid to realize what females like this are doing. I didn’t realize until now that perhaps the reason this book frustrated me so much was because Zuleika is TOTALLY like that roommate.

I could be snarky here. And trust me, I want to be. I feel almost compelled to be an ass about people who think this book is worthwhile (William Styron, one of the Modern Library list’s judges called it “a toothless pretender”). But it’s the Christmas season, so maybe I should try to be nice or something. So rather than blast those crazy reviewers who enjoyed this novel, I will leave you with a phrase my grandmother always says when someone enjoys something she doesn’t, and can’t understand why they like it because she thinks it’s stupid, but she wants to be nice: “It’s good we don’t all like the same things.”

Holiday 2009 SLIFR Quiz

2009-12-02T16:17:00.006-05:00

Ok - I may be REALLY out of my league here but I've been meaning to fill one of these out for a long time, and I finally did it! Yay for me!

PROFESSOR RUSSELL JOHNSON'S "MY ANCESTORS CAME OVER ON THE MINNOW" THANKSGIVING/CHRISTMAS MOVIE QUIZ

1) Second-favorite Coen Brothers movie.
Fargo

2) Movie seen only on home format that you would pay to see on the biggest movie screen possible?
The Wizard of Oz

3) Japan or France?
France

4) Favorite moment/line from a western.
I know they may take away my American card for this, but I don’t like westerns.

5) Of all the arts the movies draw upon to become what they are, which is the most important, or the one you value most?
Literature, of course! Actually, thanks to Dos Passos, I am now completely fascinated by the influence that film had on the novel.

6) Most misunderstood movie of the 2000s (The Naughties?).
Because I can’t answer “misunderstood” I’m going to say underrated: Idiocracy. This is where we potentially are headed, people.

7) Name a filmmaker/actor/actress/film you once unashamedly loved who has fallen furthest in your esteem.

Angelina Jolie. Her fall from my esteem has more to do with her personal life than her acting. I suppose I liked her better when she was nutso. Is this kind of like admitting I don’t like Mother Teresa or something? because that’s what it feels like.

8) Herbert Lom or Patrick Magee?
I cannot answer this, as I do not know enough of either’s work to make a judgement call

9) Which is your least favorite David Lynch film
Blue Velvet

10) Gordon Willis or Conrad Hall?
Willis

11) Second favorite Don Siegel movie.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. First favorite: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (it’s the only one of his I’ve seen, but with the line “Gessner!” i feel it has a right to more than one slot).

12) Last movie you saw on DVD/Blu-ray? In theaters?
DVD – the delightful Stranger Than Fiction. I honestly don’t remember the last movie I saw in the theaters. It must have been Slumdog.

13) Which DVD in your private collection screams hardest to be replaced by a Blu-ray?
Not upgrading yet.

14) Eddie Deezen or Christopher Mintz-Plasse?
See my answer to #8; but based on their wiki photos, I’m going to go with Deezen.

15) Actor/actress who you feel automatically elevates whatever project they are in, or whom you would watch in virtually anything.
This one was harder than I imagined it would be. There are the obvious old-timers, like Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant. I’m wracking my brain for something that George Clooney was in that I didn’t like, and I can’t think of any, so maybe I should answer him. But I’m also thinking Kate Winslet. Yes, that includes Titanic. Oh and Christina Ricci.

16) Fight Club -- yes or no?
A very unenthusiastic yes.

17) Teresa Wright or Olivia De Havilland?
See answer to #8. Yeah – I’m admitting it; I’ve never seen Gone with the Wind. Please don’t throw tomatoes!

18) Favorite moment/line from a film noir.
There are so many things I could put here, but I’ll go with my long-time favorite, from the wonderful movie WHICH IS NOT YET OUT ON DVD DAMN IT!, The Blue Dahlia – “Bourbon straight with a bourbon chaser.” Loves it.

19) Best (or worst) death scene involving an obvious dummy substituting for a human or any other unsuccessful special effect(s)
I can’t think of an answer for this.

20) What's the least you've spent on a film and still regretted it?
I’ve seen some real stinkers at the drive-ins (<$2/film) (The Saint being one of them), but I wouldn’t say I regretted it. They were a waste of time, but I wouldn’t say regret. Only two films fit the regret category: Saw and Pink Flamingos.

21) Van Johnson or Van Heflin?
Yeah, once again, haven’t seen anything either of them were in. Though Van Johnson looks familiar.

22) Favorite Alan Rudolph film.
Does the fact that Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is in my Netflix queue count for anything?

23) Name a documentary that you believe more people should see.
Hearth and Harvest – because my husband’s in it! Otherwise, I’ll say Jesus Camp. It’s a blatant depiction of sanctioned child abuse.

24) In deference to this quiz’s professor, name a favorite film which revolves around someone becoming stranded.
A favorite of mine from when I was a pre-teen, Shipwreck (or was it Shipwrecked?)

25) Is there a moment when your knowledge of film, or lack thereof, caused you an unusual degree of embarrassment and/or humiliation? If so, please share.
Yes – admitting in #18 that I never saw Gone with the Wind. I am constantly embarrassed when a film is referenced that I didn't see. I am taking steps to correct this, though.

26) Ann Sheridan or Geraldine Fitzgerald?
I don’t think I’ve seen anything either of the them were in. This quiz should be my answer for #25.

27) Do you or any of your family members physically resemble movie actors or other notable figures in the film world? If so, who?
No.

28) Is there a movie you have purposely avoided seeing? If so, why?
There are so many movies in this category I wouldn’t know where to start. In general I avoid seeing run-of-the-mill romantic comedies (sorry Sarah Jessica Parker!) and all the slasher films that have been coming out in the last 5-10 years. I also refuse to see anything with Seth Rogen, because I think he’s an ass.

29) Movie with the most palpable or otherwise effective wintry atmosphere or ambience.
The Snowman.

30) Gerrit Graham or Jeffrey Jones?
Jeffrey Jones. One I can finally answer!

31) The best cinematic antidote to a cultural stereotype (sexual, political, regional, whatever).
I can’t answer this one…it would require too much thought, and when I get up at 5:30 for more than two days in a row, I just don’t have it.

32) Second favorite John Wayne movie.
My American card may be revoked for this too – I don’t like John Wayne. Please don’t throw tomatoes.

33) Favorite movie car chase.
The Bourne Identity.

34) In the spirit of His Girl Friday, propose a gender-switched remake of a classic or not-so-classic film.
Honestly, I have no idea. Cannot think!

35) Barbara Rhoades or Barbara Feldon?
Yeah, maybe you could just keep looking at #8?

36) Favorite Andre De Toth movie.
*Sigh* See #8. Again.

37) If you could take one filmmaker's entire body of work and erase it from all time and memory, as if it had never happened, whose oeuvre would it be?
Luis Bunuel. I feel guilty about it, but I just can't stand it!

38) Name a film you actively hated when you first encountered it, only to see it again later in life and fall in love with it.
I wouldn’t say hated, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind wasn’t what I expected, which disappointed me at first. But now I feel better about it.

39) Max Ophuls or Marcel Ophuls?
I’ll give you one guess of what my answer here is.

40) In which club would you most want an active membership, the Delta Tau Chi fraternity, the Cutters or the Warriors? And which member would you most resemble, either physically or in personality?
Is it terrible of me to admit I don’t know what is referred to by the Cutters? Perhaps this should be my answer to #25. And having never seen The Warriors, I’m going to have to go with Delta Tau Chi. Hopefully the answer to the second part isn’t Belushi.

41) Your favorite movie cliché.
The noir femme fatale

42) Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen?
Well, I saw Donen’s Funny Face and didn’t really like it. Never saw anything by Minnelli. Except Liza. Harharhar.

43) Favorite Christmas-themed horror movie or sequence.
Gremlins - can that count as horror?

44) Favorite moment of self- or selfless sacrifice in a movie.
Perhaps this is because it’s fresh in my mind, but I love Will Ferrell stepping in front of the bus in Stranger Than Fiction.

45) If you were the cinematic Spanish Inquisition, which movie cult (or cult movie) would you decimate?
Pink Flamingoes. There is simply no excuse.

46) Caroline Munro or Veronica Carlson?
So, have I earned my film dunce cap yet?

47) Favorite eye-patch wearing director.
I guess I’m required to answer John Ford, aren’t I?

48) Favorite ambiguous movie ending.
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. That whole film was ambiguous.

49) In giving thanks for the movies this year, what are you most thankful for?
I’m thankful that I saw the following movies: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Trouble with Harry, Gran Torino, Iris, Stranger Than Fiction. And I’m looking forward to someday seeing the following movies that were released this year: The Informant, The Men Who Stare At Goats, The Road

50) George Kennedy or Alan North?
They just had to throw in one last embarrassment, didn’t they?

A U.S.A. Resource

2009-12-01T13:07:00.002-05:00

I'm currently in about 2/3 of the way through Dos Passos's 1919, the second installment in the USA trilogy. Because I allowed such a huge gap between my reading of the first installment and this one, I am having a hell of a time keeping track of characters and remembering who we know from 42nd Parallel, and how those characters relate and interact with the characters in 1919. I have search high and low, and haven't really been able to find much information about USA, specifically a character list. This is an egregious oversight on the part of book readers/bloggers. But today I stumbled upon this website, which is really excellent.

Booking Through Thursday

2009-11-26T18:01:00.003-05:00

It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S.A. today, so I know at least some of you are going to be as busy with turkey and family as I will be, so this week’s question is a simple one: What books and authors are you particularly thankful for this year?

I'm thankful for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Atonement for making me cry
I'm thankful for finishing all the Henry James novels on the Modern Library list.
I'm thankful for discovering EL Doctorow and Iris Murdoch
I'm VERY thankful for A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I'm thankful for being able to finally finish A Dance to the Music of Time after a year and a half of reading it.
And most strangely, I'm thankful for Anthony Powell. I miss Nick and Isobel and the rest of the clan already! They will be part of my consciousness for the rest of my life.

Brideshead Revisited

2009-11-25T09:27:00.000-05:00

Back in '03 or '04 I was participating in a lot of online book clubs, mostly through yahoo groups. After a rather tumultuous time at the end of 2004/beginning of 2005 I had to give them up, mostly due to lack of internet access at home. (Gosh, I can't believe there was a time when I didn't have internet - or a computer that worked for that matter!) Anyhoo...it was then that I first heard of Evelyn Waugh.

As I've mentioned before, at first I thought that Mr. Waugh was a female. I remember checking Brideshead Revisited out of the library, and never even opening it. It had been selected as a monthly read by one of those online groups, and I believe that it was around the time that everything started to fall apart - or perhaps more correctly come together - and I didn't have much patience for reading anything other than my "comfort" books. So it wasn't until I picked up Scoop a few years later (2007?) that I had my first real introduction to Waugh. And Scoop was friggin awesome.

Now here's the interesting thing: Scoop and A Handful of Dust (which I read earlier this year) were very similar in style. Certainly A Handful of Dust wasn't as funny...in fact it wasn't particularly funny at all - at least not in the way that Scoop was funny - but you could tell they were written by the same author. But if you handed me Brideshead Revisited and didn't tell me who wrote it, and asked me who I thought wrote it, I wouldn't answer Evelyn Waugh. I would tell you it was written by Waugh's contemporary, my pal Anthony Powell, of A Dance to the Music of Time fame. In fact, it is so similar, I am getting things mixed up. Is Charles - the narrator - Charles Ryder, or Charles Stringham? Or is Charles Stringham Sebastian Flyte (because they are sort of similar)? Erridge or Brideshead. Julia and Jean...both older sisters of their friends, both married to morons, both having an affair with the narrator, etc. And wasn’t there someone who reminded me of Widmerpool? Oh no, that was young John Bayley in Iris. [That is completely unfair to Bayley, as it was only social awkwardness and a very slight resemblance between Hugh Bonneville and Simon Russell Beale.] I'm so confused!

Brideshead Revisited both is and is not what I was expecting. It is what I was expecting in terms of plot: it's the story I had understood would be contained in the pages. Because, you know, sometimes the story is NOT what had been promised (as in, A Handful of Dust wasn't HILLARIOUS! as promised on the cover). It was NOT what I was expecting, however, because it didn't appear to be Waugh at all...it appeared to be Powell. Now, Powell has a reputation (at least in my mind) of being very long winded, which is the opposite of Waugh. I’ve always found him pithy – to the point, without a lot of long sentences, connecting an exorbitant amount of sometimes unrelated information together will a lot of commas. Though I say that Brideshead Revisited reminds me Powell, I did not mean in this aspect. Waugh is certainly more wordy here than in his other novels I’ve read, but he has not gone too far into that comma-laden world.

The way in which he resembles Powell here is in the characters and the world they inhabit. It’s the circle of the respectable British middle class and low-hanging, decaying nobility. The narrator is slightly more involved, however, here than in Dance. There are differences, of course. The Marchmain clan are Catholic, which causes all of the problems around which the plot centers. Oh yes – and there really is a plot here, again as opposed to Dance, which is just the long story of life.

Last year (was it last year?) a film adaptation of Brideshead was released. I had wanted to see it at the time, but of course didn’t, so I had it in my Netflix queue. I have issues with novel adaptations: do you read the book first, or see the movie? I have traditionally seen the movie, because when I do it the other way around, I am completely uninterested in the film and either (1) fall asleep; or (2) start doing something else and forget that I was even watching it. So typically if I read the book first (especially if it had been a recent reading), I should just forget about watching the film. Anyhoo – Brideshead was in my queue, slowly creeping its way to the top, but after finishing the novel I removed it. I had heard rumblings that the film became more of a condemnation of Catholicism, as in: look at the bad things that happen to this family because they were Catholic! There isn’t a happy ending because of it! How terrible! Which of course isn’t the point of the book at all. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. Despite his agnosticism throughout the book, in the end Charles has a mini-conversion. He doesn’t go out and convert – at least that isn’t said that he does – but he seems to get it in the end. The old Charles would have said to Julia, “What do you mean we can’t get married? This is ridiculous. All for that silly superstition?” But the new Charles simply agrees. Maybe I’m wrong about the film though – I don’t know. Now that I’m distanced from the book by a few weeks, I think maybe I should add it back on the queue. Anyone seen it?

This was the last Waugh off of the Modern Library list, which I am finally winding down (only 20 left!). I have to say thanks to the ML list editors for this recommendation - I don't know that I would have ever picked him up otherwise. That's what makes these lists worth bothering about...discoveries like this. And though I'm done with the Waugh on the list, I know in the coming years I will seek him out again and again, both to read new and to re-read. I'm not sure if Brideshead will be one that I will reread any time soon, but it was a good book, and one I'm not disappointed that I spent the time to read.

My 50 favorite films of the first decade of the 21st century

2009-11-23T14:46:00.004-05:00

New meme!

Ok, so I wrote down all the films I rated well on Netflix from this decade, and couldn't come up with 50. This could be for 2 reasons (1) I've mostly been focusing on watching the classics I missed...there are so many! High schools really need to offer classes in film the way they offer classes in English. Really - we all need better education in this stuff; and (2) I haven't gone to see a movie in a theater more than once a year for the last 5 years. And that's for 2 reasons as well (1) there really haven't been that many films I've wanted to see in the theater in the last five years and (2) going to the movies just never was one of those activities that Shawn & I engaged in as a couple. I don't know why...it just isn't. And though I have gone to see movies by myself before, it isn't really something I even think about doing. So, anyway, here's my list (no particular order). I concur with the disclaimer posted on other sites for this meme:

This list means nothing, except to me. It's a list of 50 29 movies that gave me pleasure over the past decade. I can say without reservation that I would watch any of these again. Would I say that all of them are great films, however great films are supposed to be defined? Probably not. But that's nothing you need to worry about. Because it's my list.

Lord of the Rings (How could this not be on the top of anyone's list, ordered or not?)
The Constant Gardener
Everything is Illuminated
Elf (definitely one of the greatest Christmas movies ever)
I Heart Huckabees (The faux-existentialism is annoying, but it's awesome nonetheless)
Little Miss Sunshine (Could be the best movie of the decade)
Mulholland Drive (I have watched this film over and over and over again. It it completely a part of me)
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (NEVER thought I would like this movie, but was "forced" to watch it on a bus ride from NYC...and lo and behold, I was completely hooked)
O Brother Where Art Thou (THE FUNNIEST MOVIE EVER)
The Dreamers
House of Fools (Little known Russian film...maybe my favorite, for purely personal reasons)
Coyote Ugly (Formulaic cheese featuring Tyra Banks, but I love it anyway)
The Ring (I'm so embarrassed that this movie scared the crap out of me, but it did)
Master and Commander
Donnie Darko
Iris
Jesus Camp
Wall-E
Bad Santa
Charlie Wilson's War (Love Philip Seymour Hoffman in this)
300 (For a brief time, we considered naming Brendan Leonidas. I never knew Xerxes was gay until I saw this film -j/k)
Borat
Bourne Identity
Moulin Rouge
Y tu mama tambien
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Didn't really like it when I saw it, but I like it more and more as time goes on)
The Wind that Shakes the Barley
Gran Torino
The Others (Unlike The Ring, I am NOT embarrassed that this movie scared the crap out of me)

Iris

2009-11-23T12:40:00.004-05:00

Ok, so I mentioned in my post about Under the Net that I was going to watch Iris but accidentally got The Fire Within instead. The Fire Within was decent, but I really wanted to see Iris. Which I did this weekend. Totally devastating.

This is going to sound stupid, but I never think of famous people getting old and losing their minds and having to be put in a home. It's weird. I don't know why, but it's weird. Somehow it seems that famous people should be immune from that because, you know, they aren't like the rest of us. But of course they are.

Beyond that, though, it really was a devastating movie, regardless of whether or not the person disappearing from Alzheimer's was famous or not. The dedication of John Bayley to stick with her through that is amazing. That's love. This movie made me realize that if I ever get like that, I want my loved ones to put me in a home and forget about me. I wouldn't want to be remembered in that way.

I will definately be picking up the Bayley memoirs that the movie is based on.

Under the Net

2009-11-06T12:44:00.007-05:00

I did not expect to like this book at all.

For some reason, certain books get linked with other books in my mind. Such as: I have long associated Zuleika Dobson with a book written about Sarajevo (Zlata's Diary). I have no idea why, other than the strange Z names. In this case, I had lumped Under the Net with The Ginger Man in my mind. I could not keep them straight. And since I have only read bad reviews for The Ginger Man, I have not looked forward to reading Under the Net.

Once - was it earlier this year? - I picked Under the Net up off the shelf, laid down on the bed in my library (which, in case you wanted to know, was my great-grandparents bed) and read a few pages. Now, in the first few pages all we learn is that Jake is being kicked out of where he was staying. I didn't care about this. So I put it back, further cementing in my mind that I was not going to like reading this book.

But in my effort to get through the Modern Library's List by the end of next year (it's going to be close - I've got a lot of thick books ahead), I knew I would have to read it. And as I've mostly got, as I just mentioned, LONG books left (An American Tragedy, Studs Lonigan, Women in Love, and *ahem* Finnegan's Wake) I thought now, while I'm home with Brendan, might be a good time to knock this one out.

Ok, so I was slightly bored in the beginning. I couldn't tell you when the novel picked up for me, but it was long before Jake steals the show dog from Sammy's apartment in order to use it as a bargaining tool to get his manuscript back. And by the time we got to THAT part, I was really into it. Under the Net turned out to be a funny! I had no idea.

Jake needs a place to stay, and that sets off a series of events, and for a time he finds a place to stay, and even has a job, but that all unravels, and he ends up exactly where he was in the beginning - but this time with a dog. Not the most exciting novel ever, but I found it entertaining. I've already added The Sea, The Sea to my TBR. Under the Net may be one of the few remaining pleasures on the list...after all, I'm staring down Women in Love, Old Wives Tale, AND Finnegans Wake.

I'm a little annoyed with Netflix...or maybe I should say I'm annoyed at myself. I was really looking forward to seeing the movie Iris, which is based on Murdoch's life with her husband. But of course like the dumby that I am sometimes, yesterday I was searching for some French New Wave films, and accidently rearranged my queue so that The Fire Within is on its way instead of Iris. Oh well.