Slaves of Golconda

T.S. Spivet

2012-01-31T18:59:00.002-06:00

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen is one of those books it is hard to tell if you will like until you actually start reading it. But even starting to read it is a bit off-putting. The book is a little oversized which also makes it heavier and rather awkward to hold. Then when you open the book you discover it has wide margins that frequently contain illustrations and diagrams and long notes with arrows pointing to them from the text. But if you can get past all of that, the book is a pretty fun read.

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, or T.S. for short, comes from a long line of Tecumseh Spivets. T.S. is a precocious twelve-year-old boy who lives on Coppertop Ranch in Montana. He is compelled to spend his time mapping everything. When he talks about maps, these aren't just maps of land or places, but also maps of actions, facial expressions, blood cells, or sounds. For T.S., a map translates the unknown into the witnessed and the known:

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here ad there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

T.S. is so good at mapping that his illustrations have appeared in science magazines and even at the Smithsonian. And one day, the Smithsonian calls to tell him that he has been awarded the Baird Fellowship. They do not know he is only twelve.

T.S. finds himself in a dilemma. Does he tell the man on the phone that he is twelve or does he just show up? And if he shows up, how does he get there? He doesn't feel as though he can tell his parents because he doesn't think they will understand. His father is the practical, ranch owning and working sort, the kind of man for whom physical ability is important and other things just aren't quite graspable. T.S.'s mother, Dr. Clair, is a scientist. She spends her time in search of a beetle that may or may not actually exist. There is also a teenage sister who is a pretty normal teenage girl. And there used to be a brother, Layton, a few years older than T.S., who died in a tragic accident just six months ago. T.S. feels the accident might have been his fault and in memory of his brother, hides "Layton" in all of his drawings.

T.S. decides he will just show up at the Smithsonian and tell no one. So one night he takes his suitcase and hops a freight train to Chicago. From Chicago he catches a ride with a trucker to D.C.. Of course much happens on his trip. This section of the book is also taken up with T.S. reading a notebook he stole from his mother. In the notebook he discovers the story of Emma Osterville, a precocious girl who is an ancestor of his mother's. Emma became a scientist when women scientists were few. Emma's is an interesting story but I haven't been able to satisfactorily connect it to the rest of the book.

The Smithsonian is surprised to say the least that T.S. is only twelve. But they see an opportunity to exploit his youth and run with the story, making up more and more details and taking it ever further away from the truth. How it all ends, you'll have to read it and find out for yourself.

At first the very adult voice of T.S. was rather disconcerting. Once I got used to it, I began to notice that while he talks knowingly about maps and science, he is still very much a boy who likes boy things and doesn't understand as much about the world as he thinks he does. The marginal notes and drawings turned out to be fun little side trips of their own and, I thought, didn't detract from the main story at all. The book got a little bogged down in the middle, just before he found the wormhole in the Midwest (I've been through that wormhole, it's called "Iowa"), but once on the other side and in Chicago the story picks up again and speeds on to the end.

I very much enjoyed all of the musings about mapping, what maps do, how they help us see things and make connections, how they create their very own world that isn't necessarily the same as the real world. I can honestly say I will not think of maps in the same way ever again.

Overall, the book is not amazing, but it is a very good read which has got to be worth something.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Next for The Slaves of Golconda

2011-12-19T10:28:00.003-06:00

It was so close, but 'The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet' narrowly beat 'The Bingo Palace' I think, so we'll be reading Rief Larsen's novel next.

Thanks to everyone for voting. Discussion begins on 31st January.

January's Choices

2011-12-10T07:47:00.002-06:00

It’s a bit of a random list of choices for the group this month. There’s no unifying theme, it’s just a list made by an excited book gazer looking at shelves. I’m so thrilled to get to pick the list this month and I hope everyone sees something they like the look of.

‘White is for Witching’ – Helen Oyeyemi: (Publisher copy) ‘In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and her father. When one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.’

‘The Bingo Palace’ – Louise Erditch: (Publisher copy) ‘At the crossroads of his life, Lipsha Morrissey is summoned by his grandmother to return to the reservation. There, he falls in love for the very first time—with the beautiful Shawnee Ray, who's already considering a marriage proposal from Lipsha's wealthy entrepreneurial boss, Lyman Lamartine. But when all efforts to win Shawnee's affections go hopelessly awry, Lipsha seeks out his great-grandmother for a magical solution to his romantic dilemma—on sacred ground where a federally sanctioned bingo palace is slated for construction.’

‘An Equal Stillness’ – Francesca Kay: (Publisher copy) ‘Jennet moves to London in search of a more exciting life and finds it in her new environment and in the handsome and enigmatic figure of the painter David Heaton.

When Jennet falls pregnant, her parents more or less force the two to marry. In the post-war austerity of the 1940s, the young couple struggles to make ends meet and Jennet finds that her home life is gradually eroding everything she has fought to achieve. Aware that David is becoming increasingly reliant on drink and tired of the dank and drab bed-sit in which they live, Jennet suggests they move to Spain. There, the bright blue skies, warm air and sunlit beaches give the couple and their children a new lease of life.

Jennet begins to paint again and an agent takes an interest in her work. But as Jennet's own career begins to take off, her relationship with David sours and the two enter a destructive spiral with tragic consequences.’

‘The Selected Works of T S Spivet’ – Rief Larson: (Publisher copy) ‘T.S. Spivet is a 12-year-old genius mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. His father is a tight-lipped cowboy and his mother is a scientist who for the last twenty years has been looking for a mythical species of beetle. His brother has gone, his sister seems normal but might not be, and his dog - Verywell - is going mad.

It's odd, but then families are. T.S. makes sense of it all by drawing beautiful, meticulous maps kept in innumerable colour-coded notebooks: maps of the countryside, maps of his family's behaviour, maps of animal and plant life. He is brilliant, and the Smithsonian Institution agrees, though when they telephone with news that he has won a major scientific prize they don't suspect for a minute that he is twelve years old.

So begins T.S.'s life-changing adventure, fleeing in the dead of night, riding freight trains two thousand miles across America to reach the awards dinner, the fame, the secret-society membership and the TV appearances that beckon. But is this what he wants? Do maps and lists explain the world? And why are adults so strange?’

‘The Electric Michelangelo’ – Sarah Hall: (Publisher copy) ‘Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.’

Voting ends on 18th Dec and the discussion of whichever book is chosen will take place on 31st Jan 2012. Eeep, how is it 2012 already?

- Jodie (Bookgazing)

Wild Life

2011-11-30T20:08:00.000-06:00

Like Danielle, I had mixed feelings about Molly Gloss’s novel Wild Life. To begin with the positive, there were times in this book where I felt thoroughly engaged. It’s in part an adventure story, and the main character, Charlotte, does have some great adventures. The novel takes place in the west, somewhere around the Washington/Oregon border, in the early 20th century. It’s logging territory, and a pretty wild, uncertain place. Charlotte lives with her five children, trying to carve out a writing career. Her husband is not in the picture, but she has a woman who acts as nanny, which allows her to sneak off now and then to get some writing done. The adventure begins when the nanny’s granddaughter disappears in the woods. When search parties fail to find her, Charlotte decides she needs to go search for her herself. She takes off into the wilderness and soon enough gets lost herself. These passages were exciting. I could imagine all too well what Charlotte was experiencing as she struggled to find her way back to civilization.

The book has fantasy elements to it, but they don’t become part of the story until Charlotte gets lost: while wandering around the woods nearly starved to death, she comes across a group of large human-like creatures, frightening-looking but kind animals, who slowly adopt her into their community. The creatures’ lives are endangered by the encroachments of logging; they need space in which to wander and forage for food, but that space is quickly disappearing.

All this works pretty well, although the fantasy element comes too late in the book to feel natural and properly-integrated. The book’s structure is odd in one way — the pacing is wildly uneven — but quite interesting in another: it is a mix of several genres. The main story is told through Charlotte’s diary, but interspersed throughout are fragments of her fiction, stories that are sometimes based on her own life and so rework the material in the diary, and also Charlotte’s essay-like ponderings on what it means to be a woman writer. These materials reinforce each other by exploring themes and ideas from different perspectives, so we can see Charlotte’s life told through her diary and also transformed into fiction.

What bothered me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling although I’m not sure how fair this is, was that Charlotte felt unrealistic, too much of a fantasy figure. For her to be able to write as much as she does without a husband and with five sons seems improbable, even given the nanny. But even more so, her feminism seemed fashioned purposely to please 21st-century audiences rather than to capture a truth about the time period. I know that feminism at the turn of the last century was well-developed and that people were making arguments about women’s writing similar to Charlotte’s, but Charlotte seems just too perfect. She defies stereotypes about women at every turn, in the way she dresses and acts, in her conversation, in the way she treats men, in her writing. I am all for strong female characters who defy gender stereotypes, but I don’t want to be jerked out of the world of the story by the feeling that I’m being presented with an argument rather than a character.

All in all, it’s a pretty odd book, although not entirely in a bad way. The book’s various elements — the wild west, the fantasy, the feminism, the theorizing about gender and writing, the experimenting with structure — don’t quite cohere, but it’s interesting in parts, and it’s fun when the story finally hooks you and you absolutely have to know how Charlotte is going to make it out of the woods.

Wild Life

2011-11-30T19:26:00.002-06:00

Wild Life by Molly Gloss takes readers to 1905 America in the Pacific Northwest when logging was tearing through forests and civilization was a small town on the Columbia River. Our heroine is Charlotte Bridger Drummond, writer of popular adventure novels, mother of five boys, and widow or abandoned wife (we never know for sure and neither does Charlotte).

When the book opens Charlotte is living a happy existence, escaping everyday to a shed in the yard to write while Melba, a woman she has hired, takes care of the house and her children. Charlotte is a staunch feminist and a woman with opinions who is not afraid to express them. She also tries her hardest to scandalize as many people as she can by her cigar smoking and riding around town on a bicycle while wearing men's pants. She is a stark contrast to Melba who is motherly and believes that cooking and cleaning and raising children is what a woman is supposed to do.

Not a lot happens for the first third of the book and I found myself disliking Charlotte quite a lot. She is so concerned about not being put down because she is a woman that she goes overboard in not allowing herself to exhibit typical female traits. When word comes down the river that Harriet, Melba's granddaughter, who was at a logging camp with her father, has gone missing in the woods, Charlotte makes light of Melba being upset and worried to the point of it being rather cruel and heartless.

When it becomes clear that Harriet really is missing, Charlotte decides she will go up to the logging camp herself and help in the search. Even though she has no experience in the woods, she figures she has written enough adventure stories that she can handle herself. Plus, even when she arrives at the remote logging camp, Charlotte still believes that somehow, even after the loggers have been looking for Harriet for a week, she, Charlotte will miraculously find the girl alive and well albeit a bit hungry and dirty.

But events don't work out that way and after several days of searching, Charlotte gets separated from the search party and quickly finds herself impossibly lost. But she has a compass and a little food and decides that she can find her way back to camp. Three days later and still lost, she has to admit that she was wrong.

Spring in the Pacific Northwest is a generally damp affair and while the season had begun drier than usual, this quickly changes. Charlotte has to contend with the wet and the cold and without food or any knowledge of what she might be able to eat in the forest, she comes to understand she is in rather dire straits.

But there is something else in the forest besides bears and dear and mountain lions. "Wild men," hairy "giants" or what we might call "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch" are also in the forest. Charlotte comes across a family consisting of a mother and three children. She begins to follow them and eat what they eat. Eventually she becomes an adopted part of the family.

When I write it out like that it sounds stupid and hokey but it isn't. Being reduced to living like what Charlotte at first believes are simply gentle and shy animals, strips away nearly all the "human" from Charlotte. And while it is cliche to learn about what being human means from creatures other than humans, it is handled in such a matter-of-fact way without being sentimental or didactic that I liked this part of the book best which surprised me because I was expecting to not like it. Charlotte eventually returns to civilization a changed woman to say the least.

I liked the book but I didn't love it. The pacing is a bit off especially in the beginning. One thing I did really like about the book is the way it is structured. It is basically Charlotte's journal with news articles, pieces of stories Charlotte has written, character sketches, and various other documents interleaved. While Charlotte is lost in the woods she continues keeping the journal. The journal provides comfort, documentation, a lifeline, and an outlet for her voice. When Charlotte returns to the world of people, she is unable to speak for quite some time but still manages to continue writing. Charlotte's writing is the thread she holds onto throughout the story that keeps her sane, keeps her from completely losing herself.

After the book ended I found myself wondering what sort of person Charlotte would become next, how much of the wild would she retain? Could she, can any of us, keep in contact with the wild parts of ourselves? And if so, what would that mean? What would such a life look like? Any book that prompts one to think about such things is definitely worthwhile.

Cross posted at So Many Books

The Next Slaves Book is...

2011-10-16T12:02:00.002-05:00

Wild Life by Molly Gloss.

Discussion will begin on Wednesday, November 30th.

Happy reading everyone!

Time to Pick a New Book

2011-10-09T11:24:00.003-05:00

Margaret Atwood is publishing a book this October about science fiction which inspired me to put together a list of books that are considered science fiction (or fantasy) that you may be surprised by. As Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide says, Don't Panic! All of the books on the list were nominated for, or won a Tiptree Award. The award is given to a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores gender. The books on the list are from all along the genre spectrum from you'd-never-know-it-was-scifi-unless-someone-told-you to the "way out" and "totally bizarre" if the group feels like it wants to be daring. So without further ado...

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. From Amazon: "If I had not been what I am, what would I have been?" wonders Lou Arrendale, the autistic hero of Moon's compelling exploration of the concept of "normalcy" and what might happen when medical science attains the knowledge to "cure" adult autism. Arrendale narrates most of this book in a poignant earnestness that verges on the philosophical and showcases Moon's gift for characterization.

Wild Life by Molly Gloss. From Amazon: Molly Gloss delivers a rare blend of “heady cerebral satisfactions, gorgeous prose, and page-turning adventure” (Karen Joy Fowler). Set among lava sinkholes and logging camps at the fringe of the Northwest frontier in the early 1900s, WILD LIFE charts the life — both real and imagined — of the free-thinking, cigar-smoking, trouser-wearing Charlotte Bridger Drummond, who pens popular women’s adventure stories. One day, when a little girl gets lost in the woods, Charlotte anxiously joins the search and embarks on an adventure all her own. With great assurance and skill, Molly Gloss quickly transforms what at first seems to be pitch-perfect historical fiction into a kind of wild and woolly mystery story, as Charlotte herself becomes lost in the dark and tangled woods and falls into the company of an elusive band of mountain giants. Putting a surprising and revitalizing feminist spin on the classic legend of Tarzan and other wild-man sagas, Gloss takes us from the wilds of the western frontier to the wilds of the human heart.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh. From Amazon: In its pages, we enter a postrevolution America, moving from the hyperurbanized eastern seaboard to the Arctic bleakness of Baffin Island; from the new Imperial City to an agricultural commune on Mars. The overlapping lives of cyberkite fliers, lonely colonists, illicit neural-pressball players, and organic engineers blend into a powerful, taut story of a young man's journey of discovery. This is a macroscopic world of microscopic intensity, one of the most brilliant visions of modern SF.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. From Amazon: Its clearest influences are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, but it isn't much like them. It's Dickensian in scope, but fast-paced and modern. It's a love song for cities, and it packs a world into its strange, sprawling, steam-punky city of New Crobuzon. It can be read with equal validity as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or slipstream. It's got love, loss, crime, sex, riots, mad scientists, drugs, art, corruption, demons, dreams, obsession, magic, aliens, subversion, torture, dirigibles, romantic outlaws, artificial intelligence, and dangerous cults.

Life by Gwyneth Jones. From Amazon: "Life" is a richly textured fictional biography of the brilliant Anna Senoz, a scientist who makes a momentous discovery about the X and Y chromosomes. Anna's discovery provokes widespread sexual rage and impacts cruelly on her career, her marriage, and her child. Ultimately, Anna faces a challenge that the practice of science alone cannot meet. You can also read more about the book from Nic at Eve's Alexandria

Voting will be open through Saturday, October 15th.

The Golden Mean

2011-09-30T18:11:00.001-05:00

Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean is the latest selection of the Slaves of Golconda reading group. The novel tells the story of Aristotle's life, focusing particularly on his relationship with the future Alexander the Great. It's told from Aristotle's first-person perspective, and for me, this was the chief interest of the book: imagining what it might have been like to be Aristotle. We see him disagreeing with his former teacher Plato's ideas about the nature of reality, developing his ideas about tragedy as a genre, and thinking about the danger of extremes and the importance of the middle way. We also see him dealing with a complicated relationship with his wife and facing disappointment in his career. He runs into political trouble because of his association with Athens at a time when he was living in Macedonia, Athens's enemy. All of this makes it possible to conjure up an image of life as it might have been so long ago and to think of Aristotle as a real person with regular-person worries and needs, when generally I think of him as nothing more than a brain and a set of ideas.

I found the book disappointing, though. Like Stefanie, I thought it was a little dull. The main problem is the lack of narrative tension. I don't need an exciting plot, but I do need some kind of tension to pull me through a book, or, failing that, I want some interesting ideas, beautiful writing, and/or characters I enjoy spending time with and thinking about. I didn't find enough of any of these things. There are interesting things to think about, the tension between being a warrior and a scholar that many of the characters experience, for one. I was also intrigued by the way the first person perspective makes Aristotle come across as a sympathetic human being, one who treats the mentally disabled with tremendous compassion unusual for the time, but who also owns slaves and assumes that women have limited capabilities and value. There is something fascinating about getting into the mind of a person who thinks about the world in such a fundamentally different way than we do today.

But the ideas don't seem to lead anywhere in particular. I was interested in Aristotle in a general and vague kind of way, but I wasn't worried about what would happen to him -- he was clearly going to get back to Athens eventually -- and his thoughts and observations weren't interesting enough to keep me happily reading. I think I would have preferred the book in the third person with some more insight into the culture of the time from an external narrator's point of view. The advantage of first person, of course, is getting to see the world through Aristotle's eyes, but perhaps an exterior view would have helped bring his character into sharper focus and would have allowed more commentary on the social and political values of the time. In the abstract I like the idea of historical fiction that doesn't get bogged down in explaining all the details of the time and place -- where the author isn't showing off her research on every page -- but in this case, I wanted a little more guidance.

At any rate, I started off the book with high hopes and did well at first, and then found myself less and less eager to pick it up. Other people have enjoyed it very much, though, and you can read Lilian Nattel's very positive review here.

Liberties Were Taken with the Facts

2011-09-29T19:16:00.002-05:00

The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon is narrated by Aristotle and tells the story of his time spent teaching Alexander soon to be "The Great." In the process we also get some flashbacks of Aristotle's boyhood and how he came to be the great philosopher.

As with all historical fiction one must remember this is, well, fiction, and not history or biography. Curious about Aristotle's real life, I checked out his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a fantastic and reliable resource by the way). In the novel liberties are taken with Aristotle's timeline and just how close his relationship with Alexander was. According to the encyclopedia, Aristotle was 38 when he became the teacher of 13-year-old Alexander (my math on Aristotle's age) and taught him for only two or three years, though some scholars dispute this and say it was as long as eight years. But we do know that by the time Alexander was 15 he was already going out on campaigns with his father, Philip II. The book takes what seems to be the eight-year number approach.

In the book Aristotle sees himself as providing a balance to the martial education Philip is providing Alexander and insists that to be a good ruler, Alexander must find the "golden mean," the balance between extremes. Aristotle is presented as a pacifist of a sort, but some sources I read in addition to the Stanford article, indicate that Aristotle encouraged Alexander to conquer Asia. Whatever the case, little concrete information is known about what Aristotle actually taught Alexander and what kind of relationship they had.

A very curious change was made to one real historical figure in the book, Alexander's half brother, Arrhidaeus. In the book he is made to be severely mentally disabled and Alexander hates him. In the book Aristotle takes Arrhidaeus under his tutelage, treats him like a person, teaches him letters and music, how to ride a horse, essentially lifts him up from being an animal into being the mental equivalent of a young boy with the body of an adult. However, in reality, Arrhidaeus had only a mild mental disability and Alexander lover him dearly. On Alexander's death, Arrhidaeus became Philip III of Macedon. Granted, he was more a figurehead than anything and neither his life nor his reign lasted long, but why the big change about this in the book? It really doesn't serve any purpose to have written Arrhidaeus and Alexander's relationship to him so very differently.

Ok, so like I said, The Golden Mean is a novel, fiction, it doesn't have to adhere to reality. But even forgetting all of the historical transgressions, I didn't much like the book. When I was still in the first third of the book a coworker asked me what I was reading lately and I mentioned The Golden Mean and what it was about. She commented that it sounded interesting. I replied that I had thought so too but that it was actually a boring book. If it weren't for the fact that I read it for the Slaves discussion, I would not have finished it. It got marginally better by the end but I still didn't enjoy it. Nothing happens in the book, which isn't a bad thing, but if nothing is going to happen in a book it needs to have interesting characters. The characters should be interesting, I mean Aristotle and Alexander, but they are not. Nor is their relationship. Nor are there any secondary characters or relationships that are interesting.

Nonetheless, when I finished the book and read all the glowing blurbs on the back cover I feared I had missed something. I mean, it was a bestseller in Canada, published in six languages, was nominated for the Giller prize and won a few other prizes. Maybe the book was better than I thought? But after I did a little research on Aristotle and Alexander I began to trust my reaction a bit more. And then Rebecca didn't give it many stars on Good Reads and suddenly I feel much better about my take on the book.

But it is my take. Lots of people in Canada liked it so not everyone who reads it will come away with the same experience I did. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone though.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

The Golden Mean wins -- plus more books!

2011-08-04T11:16:00.003-05:00

Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean has won the most votes, so that will be our next book for September 30th. It's available in paper in the UK and Canada and will be available in paper in the U.S. on September 6th. There are a lot of used hardcover copies available on Amazon right now, though, if you would like it sooner. Thanks for voting everyone and thanks to Lilian for choosing the list!

And now for a few more books that couldn't quite make it on the list. Lilian's editor sent these along as possibilities, but they didn't arrive in time for the voting, so I thought I would include them here for those who are curious. These are books published recently by Canadian authors that might be of interest:

The Lizard Cage, by Karen Connolly
Consumption, by Kevin Patterson
Fauna, by Alissa York

I'm looking forward to the discussion in September!

Time to Choose Again!

2011-07-29T18:43:00.002-05:00

It's time to choose the next book! Lilian has very kindly put together a list for us, this time of recent Canadian fiction. So, let's finish up voting by Wednesday of next week (August 3rd) and have our discussion beginning on September 30th. That should give everyone time to read and post on the book. As always, anyone is welcome to join the group! All you have to do is read the book and participate in the discussion on your blog and/or on the discussion board.

Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (the original title), otherwise known as Someone Knows My Name (the U.S. title).
Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road.
Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.
Heather O'Neill's, Lullabies for Little Criminals.
Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean (this one is available in paper on September 6th in the U.S.).

Vote in the comments!

Cakes and Ale

2011-07-01T05:38:00.000-05:00

I first read Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale when I was in my early twenties and an ardent admirer of his prose style, which I admired for its supple, civilised elegance. Maugham always seemed so in control of his narrative, entering his stories behind the façade of an ironic and urbane first-person voice, a witness to the vagaries of the human condition. These he described with a sharp but sympathetic eye ever intent on pointing out the messy, less than noble reality that lies underneath his character’s attempts to dress up life as something respectable and meaningful. I liked all of that, but I was probably more attached to the lingering romanticism in Maugham’s works, that always made his characters quest after an ideal of achievement or a perfect relationship – although of course they were destined to be disappointed in both. In Maugham’s stories that’s okay, though, since experience is all that really matters in the end; to live life fully is as much about the stupidities and self-deception of ambition and desire, as it is about success and admirable behaviour.

All these things I still appreciated about Cakes and Ale when I reread it for the Slaves. But I was surprised to note that there was much about the narrative that irked this time, too. The story is told from the perspective of William Ashenden, a successful writer in late middle age who is approached one day out of the blue by another writer friend of his, Alroy Kear. Ashenden is suspicious about Kear’s motives from the start. The trouble is that Kear represents a kind of superficiality that he really dislikes. Kear has won himself a tremendous reputation in the world of letters by being a suck-up, basically, a sycophant and a social climber, trading on his bluff, hearty manner and the impression he emanates of being a sound, reliable chap, the right sort. Kear is conservative with a small c, someone who buys into the ongoing ideology, who doesn’t rock boats or wake sleeping dogs, and it’s for these qualities that he has been asked to write a biography of a now eminent Victorian novelist, Edward Driffield, a man who Ashenden knew well in his younger days.

Ashenden knew Edward Driffield all right, but not in the guise of the great writer Kear wants him to be. The Driffield Ashenden knew was a bit of a rogue and a bounder, a man who sang music hall songs accompanying himself on a banjo, who came from humble roots and wrote vulgar books that no one cared to read, and who had an attractive, easygoing wife, Rosie. It’s Rosie, in fact, whom the young William really gets to know. She is an ex-barmaid who has a reputation for being free and easy with her favours, and when William spots her one evening, arm-in-arm with the local coal merchant, laughingly known as Lord George for his pretensions, he is both shocked and intrigued. Rosie and Edward Driffield eventually depart from Blackstable under a cloud and several years pass before Ashenden, now a young man studying medicine, meets up with them again in London. And this time his relationship with Rosie will become his first love affair.

When I first read this book, I think I found all this quite satisfyingly romantic. Now, in my more callous years, I rolled my eyes a bit at the old tart-with-a-heart routine. The portrayal of Rosie seemed patronising and incomplete; she was pretty and sensual and dumb, just the kind of woman, then, who could be slept with and cast aside, idolised in later years as generous and loving but thankfully not really one’s sort. To be fair, a little historical sympathy is called for – this is the early twentieth century, a time thoroughly steeped in class divisions, when respectability was of primary importance, and working ‘in trade’, indicated a lower social standing. If women were in any way sexual, they were not suitable marriage material. Life was spent policing the behaviour of one’s neighbours, reinforcing the boundaries between castes, and urgently covering up any faults or indiscretions.

And it’s from this sort of cultural conditioning that the most interesting part of the book arose for me. What I did appreciate on this reading, was the almost anthropological depiction of the literary world. Edward Driffield remarried later in life and his second wife is determined to turn her husband into the star of literature that he deserves to be. With the help of a mentor, the deliciously formidable Mrs Barton Trafford, Driffield has risen to great eminence, and his recent death has left his widow determined to set the seal on his reputation. Literary success is dependent on social acceptability. His early misdemeanours – described by our narrator as Driffield’s genuine source of vitality and interest – must be whitewashed. There’s a gently savage attack going on across this narrative on people who prefer image to reality, who revile the warts and the blemishes of humanity when they could be seen as our most authentic and sympathetic parts. And of course, the notion that we really must have our geniuses likeable, charming, and noble is surreptitiously but repeatedly challenged. Is this a vanquished world, or do its traces live on still today? That’s the question that remained with me, long after I had finished reading.

Cakes and Ale

2011-06-30T20:29:00.001-05:00

I think I read Of Human Bondage years ago, but I have no recollection of it, so at this point Cakes and Ale represents the sum total of my knowledge of W. Somerset Maugham's oeuvre. Based on what I know about Of Human Bondage, though, it would be a mistake to attempt any generalizations about Maugham based on Cakes and Ale--so I won't!

Cakes and Ale struck me as quite an odd book. It has many passages in it that are amusing, interesting, and eminently quotable, such as the set pieces on the role of beauty in art and criticism, or on the place of the first-person singular in the art of fiction. The book is about a writer writing about a writer, narrated by another writer; between this set up and the embedded commentaries on fiction and criticism, the book overall seems as if it must be metafiction of some kind, and yet it doesn't seem so, and this is one reason I found it odd: I can't quite see how to connect all this self-referential potential with the story the novel tells about Edward Driffield and his putatively enchanting first wife Rosie, bar-maid turned society beauty turned scandalous absconder. That is, the metafictional commentary doesn't seem to be saying anything about the kind of book Cakes and Ale actually is. I suppose this means it isn't metafictional after all but incidental, just the kind of stuff a narrating writer would write about. Here's a bit from the excursus on first-person narration, for instance:

A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. . . . I was much concerned, and forthwith asked Alroy Kear (who reads everything, even the books he writes prefaces for) to recommend to me some works on the art of fiction. On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.

Amusing, as I said. Ashenden goes on to conclude that the value of first-person narration is that in an increasingly confusing life, it makes sense to focus on our own limited experience, which is, after all, all we can really be sure of and hope to understand. Yet Cakes and Ale is not really about him, is it? Or, is it? If so, it does a good job effacing his part in it: he's a Nick Carraway type, significant (or so it seems) primarily as a device for delivering Maugham's gentle literary and social satire and for telling us about other people, especially Driffield and Rosie.

Driffield, too, is a fairly absent main character: in his case he seems to be there to provide the occasion for the literary commentary, as well as for some pretty funny stuff about the rise and fall of literary reputations and the dubious reliability of critical judgments. Ashenden does not admire Driffield much himself:

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eyewash. His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm and calm, and of nestling habits; it was his longevity. . . But why writers should be more esteemed the older they grow, has long perplexed me. . . . After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of an author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grown older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author who wrote them.

Let's not start naming contemporary authors we think might be unduly revered for just this reason! Again, this is funny, with just enough sting to make it interesting too. But the novel does not give the issue of literary merit any momentum as a theme (by, say, really focusing on whether Driffield does have any genius besides longevity), and I don't think it also takes it on as a formal problem by trying to embody in its own narrative any special genius.

The only element of the novel that has much forward momentum is the story of Rosie--but to me, she was too flat a character, and too representative of a kind of male fantasy of undemanding available amoral female sexuality, to captivate me the way she (to me, inexplicably) enchants young Ashenden. So enamoured is he that even after she has run off with the coal merchant of Blackstable and started a new life as Mrs Iggulden in America, he defends her for having "carried on" behind Driffield's back: "She was a very simple woman. Her instincts were healthy and ingenuous. She loved to make people happy. She loved love." Challenged on this sappy conclusion ("Do you call that love?"), he responds,

Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone, it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn't lasciviousness; it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character; she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.

Well, not so artless she doesn't welcome the gift of a very expensive fur cloak from one of her lovers, and not so fond of giving pleasure to others that she hesitates before causing them pain. Her acts have little effect on her character because Maugham (or Ashenden) gives her very little character to begin with. The absence of complexity in her personality is not liberating: it's limiting, if you intend the portrait to be in any way related to reality. But maybe Rosie isn't intended to be more than an animated, good-natured fantasy figure. Or maybe there's something dimly progressive about the freedom with which she enjoys her own sexuality, and about Maugham's (or, again, Ashenden's) refusal to judge her for it--but I'm not convinced.

And yet--near the end we learn a bit more about Rosie's history, something that adds darker shades to the radiant glow in which she always seems bathed (her skin is so "dewy" that at one point Ashenden asks if she rubs vaseline on it). More interesting still, that sad past is linked to the one novel of Driffield's that Ashenden particularly admires, for having a "cold ruthlessness that in all the sentimentality of English fiction strikes an unusual note." This novel, The Cup of Life, is also the novel that drew censure down on the novelist for being "gratuitously offensive [and] obscene." The incident in the novel that so outrages the righteous public turns out to be taken almost straight from life. So perhaps there is a metafictional angle after all, and it turns on Rosie: perhaps her story, and her character, with its overt and unapologetic sensuality, is a challenge to Maugham's (or Ashenden's?) readers, to see, for instance, if they will appreciate her beauty without decrying her morality, or find beauty in her freedom from social constraints. Is the novel about the relationship between beauty and virtue? Does that help us make sense of the title? But again, I'm not convinced, because I just don't find Rosie, or the novel as a whole, for that matter, substantive enough to hang a theory on.

The novel is funny, though, if only in strange fits and starts, so to close, another of the many quotable passages, this time about a poet who becomes, for a time, the rage of London literary society:

Now that he is so completely forgotten and the critics who praised him would willingly eat their words if they were not carefully guarded in the files of innumerable newspaper offices, the sensation he made with his first volume of poems is almost unbelievable. The most important papers gave to reviews of it as much space as they would have to the report of a prize-fight, the most influential critics fell over one another in their eagerness to welcome him. They likened him to Milton (for the sonority of his blank verse), to Keats (for the opulence of his sensuous imagery), and to Shelley (for his airy fantasy); and, using him as a stick to beat idols of whom they were weary, they gave in his name many a resounding whack on the emaciated buttocks of Lord Tennyson and a few good husky smacks on the bald pate of Robert Browning. The public fell like the walls of Jericho.

Maybe fun is the key: Maugham had an idea for Rosie, he tells us in his Preface, and wanted a book to put her in, and he also had a lot of experience with the vagaries and vapidities of literary celebrity and the satirical skill to write them up elegantly. Why not put these ingredients together into a little confection of a book?

(cross-posted at Novel Readings)

Cakes and Ale

2011-06-30T19:47:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles.

Cakes and Ale is the fourth Somerset Maugham novel I’ve read, and with each book I keep changing my opinion of him. I really liked Of Human Bondage, which was my first book, and then I listened to The Painted Veil, which I loved. So far so good; I thought at this point that I should eventually read everything he wrote. Then I got to The Razor’s Edge, which I didn’t like at all. It felt dull and ponderous. I like idea-driven novels, but in that one, I didn’t care about the ideas and didn’t like how they were presented. With Cakes and Ale, I’m beginning to think Maugham may not be quite as good as I thought. There were interesting aspects of the novel and enjoyable moments — particularly the discussions of authors and writing — but I was hoping to love it and I didn’t.

The novel tells the story of the Driffields — Edward Driffield, a famous author, and two Mrs. Driffields, his first wife, Rosie, and his second, Amy. (My edition has a preface by Maugham that says Edward Driffield is most emphatically not Thomas Hardy, in spite of what anybody says, which meant that I spent the entire novel thinking of him as Thomas Hardy, of course.) It’s narrated by William Ashenden, a writer himself who knew Edward and Rosie at various points in his life. There’s another writer involved as well, Alroy Kear, who is planning on writing a biography of Edward, who in the present tense of the novel has passed away. Alroy approaches the narrator in an effort to gather information about Edward’s life, which sends him off on long reminiscences of his time with the Driffields.

The difference between what the narrator remembers about the Driffields, what he chooses to tell Alroy, and what Alroy will actually put in the biography is the novel’s source of tension. The Driffields — Edward and Rosie — were…not quite proper. The narrator first meets the couple when they move into Blackstable, his hometown. Edward’s father was a bailiff and Rosie had worked as a bar maid, which was a big part of the problem, but they also never quite followed the rules as they were supposed to, and everyone knew it. Eventually Edward’s fame as a writer comes to make up for his social deficiencies, but Rosie was always a bit of a scandal.

The novel is really Rosie’s story in many ways, in part because of the narrator’s fascination with her and her bohemian ways that stayed with him all his life. But there’s also the problem of what to do about the troublesome, sexually-suspect first wife after she is gone and the second wife is trying to establish her husband’s reputation as a respectable, important writer. How should that first wife be portrayed in the biography, and what to do about episodes such as the time the Driffields skipped town with debts and servants left unpaid? And what about Rosie’s sexual history?

It’s all a question of class, of course, about how Alroy and Amy Driffield try to transform Edward from his working-class roots into a solid bourgeois, respectable writer and how the narrator questions and resists them. It’s also about writers and writing. Alroy Kear is the object of much scorn from the narrator; not only is he going to whitewash Edward’s past in what is sure to be a bland biography, but his writing, at least according to the narrator, sounds blandly boring as well:

I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily dose of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Thomas Carlyle is an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word … he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle.

There is no room in Alroy Kear’s world for the exoticism that someone like Rosie Driffield can offer, and so the narrator scorns him.

I was disappointed in part by Rosie as a character; the back cover of my edition promises that she is Maugham’s “greatest heroine,” but she never quite came to life for me. It was the moment when the narrator tells us what she wasn’t a big talker that did it: I had pictured her as vivacious and voluble, and when I tried to picture her being quiet, I couldn’t do it. Then I began to doubt that I had really understood her at all. I’m also not entirely sure I like the narrator. There are times his mildly ironic tone is amusing and I can’t help but agree with his dismissal of Alroy Kear, but there’s something off-putting about the voice, something distancing. I suppose the mildly ironic tone gets a little wearying after a while. I don’t think that we are meant to read the narrator uncritically; as a writer himself, he is not exactly a disinterested observer of the fates of Driffield and Kear, and his detached, judgmental attitude toward his subjects seems self-serving. But critiquing the narrator in this way wasn’t enough to make the book a satisfying read.

Something Missing

2011-06-30T19:03:00.002-05:00

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

~Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham and I didn't enjoy each other's company all that much. It wasn't the story, I liked the story. It was Maugham. His voice rubbed me the wrong way and I hated how he would occasionally slip into using "you" in describing things, saying how "you" feel when this or that happens, or how "you" think about certain things. It makes assumptions about who the reader is and leaves the door wide open for the reader, as it did in my case, to say no, not me, I don't feel or think that way. And as for Maugham's voice, I can't say exactly what bothered me about it so much. It felt to me like it had an all-knowing and condescending sort of flavor to it, a sort of wink wink, nudge nudge quality due in part to the narrator revealing the whole story to the reader but not to the other characters in the book. That probably doesn't make sense. I could be making it all up and when I type it out it seems such a silly thing to not like a book over, but there it is.

As for the story, the narrator is William Ashenden, an author who was popular once but has now slipped to the midlist. Still quite respectable though. He is asked by his acquaintance and fellow author, Alroy Kear, who happens to be a bit of a golden boy type, to share his recollections of Edward Driffield for a biography Kear was asked to write by Driffield's second and now widowed wife. Driffield became the author of his day for his realistic portrayal of working-class people - the coal merchants, the tavern keepers, etc. Ironically, when Driffield first came on the scene, genteel readers were shocked by his subject matter. To say that there is much in this book about class is to state the obvious.

Driffield came from the class that he wrote about as did his first wife, Rosie. Our narrator Ashenden meets them when he is a boy and they move into the small town where he lives. Driffield teaches him how to ride a bicycle and both he and Rosie are kind to this teenage boy who got a transgressive thrill from sneaking to their house for tea while at the same time looking down his nose at some of their behavior and what he considered lack of manners. Things happen to cause Ashenden and the Driffields to lose touch until many years later when Ashenden is in med school in London.

Alroy Kear, the biographer, wants all the details, but he doesn't really. He only wants the socially acceptable side of Edward Driffield. Anything unsavory he sees no reason to include in the biography, though an occasional allusion might be okay. Much of what Ashenden knows about Driffield pretty much falls into the unsavory category especially as it relates to his first wife Rosie.

There are some amusing passages on writers and writing such as this one:

After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of the thirty read nothing at all. As they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author that wrote them. Of course he must go on; he must keep in the public eye. It is no good his thinking that it is enough to write one or two masterpieces; he must provide a pedestal for them of forty or fifty works of no particular consequence. This needs time. His production must be such that if he cannot captivate a reader by his charm he can stun him by his weight.

Mildly amusing but not enough to make the book come alive. And that, now that I think of it, is what is missing for me. The book had no spark. It should have, all the elements are there for it, but it was only meh.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Next Read: Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham

2011-04-14T14:09:00.003-05:00

W. Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale is our June read. Discussion will start Thursday June 30. Thanks for voting everyone!

A Second Chance: The Runner-Up Round

2011-04-07T20:52:00.003-05:00

It's time to vote for the next group read. There was an excellent suggestion that rather than coming up with a new list of books that we choose from the runners up from the last few rounds. Since these came so close to being chosen, these books are being given a second chance. Please drop your vote in the comments area. Votes will be counted on Wednesday April 13. Discussion will start Thursday June 30.

A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé: "Ivan, a one-time world traveler, and Francesca, a ravishing Italian heiress, are the owners of a bookstore that is anything but ordinary. Rebelling against the business of bestsellers and in search of an ideal place where their literary dreams can come true, Ivan and Francesca open a store where the passion for literature is given free rein. Tucked away in a corner of Paris, the store offers its clientele a selection of literary masterpieces chosen by a top-secret committee of likeminded literary connoisseurs. To their amazement, after only a few months, the little dream store proves a success. And that is precisely when their troubles begin. At first, both owners shrug off the anonymous threats that come their way and the venomous comments concerning their store circulating on the Internet, but when three members of the supposedly secret committee are attacked, they decide to call the police. One by one, the pieces of this puzzle fall ominously into place, as it becomes increasingly evident that Ivan and Francesca’s dreams will be answered with pettiness, envy and violence. "

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany: "All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed "scientist of women"; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires. These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion in Alaa Al Aswany's remarkable international bestseller. Teeming with frank sexuality and heartfelt compassion, this book is an important window on to the experience of loss and love in the Arab world."

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham: "Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrassing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best."

Passing by Nella Larson: "The tale is simple on the surface--a few adventures in Chicago and New York's high life, with lots of real people and race-mixing events described ... But underneath, it seethes with rage, guilt, sex, and complex deceptions. Irene fears losing her black husband to Clare, who seems increasingly predatory. Or is this all in Irene's mind? And is everyone wearing a mask? Larsen's book is a scary hall of mirrors, a murder mystery that can't resolve itself. It sticks with you."

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson: "Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the center is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's solitary figures. Anderson's stories influenced countless American writers including Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Oates and Carver. "

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys: "Sasha Jensen has returned to Paris, the city of both her happiest moments and her most desperate. Her past lies in wait for her in cafes, bars, and dress shops, blurring all distinctions between nightmare and reality. When she is picked up by a young man, she begins to feel that she is still capable of desires and emotions. Few encounters in fiction have been so brilliantly conceived, and few have come to a more unforgettable end."

The Transit of Venus

2011-04-04T20:59:00.000-05:00

I was not entirely sure what to make of Shirley Hazzard’s 1980 novel The Transit of Venus while I was reading it, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it now. I enjoyed the book very much in the way that I enjoy reading slow, demanding books occasionally, and part of that enjoyment comes from the fact that I don’t mind feeling a little bit at sea. It’s not so much the complex language that made me feel that way, although the language certainly is dense. It’s that it took me a while to figure out the mood and the focus of the book, and I’m still figuring it out.

As I read through the first half or so of the book, I kept wondering exactly where Hazzard was taking the story. In the beginning, we learn about two sisters who grew up in Australia and are now living in England. One of the sisters, Grace, is engaged to be married. She is a fairly conventional young woman who is happy to follow the traditional path of marriage and motherhood. The other, Caro, is more complicated, not gifted with Grade’s ability to please others without effort. She is independent and a little prickly. It is clear from the beginning that her life will be more difficult.

So I thought it would be a novel about the relationship of these two sisters and how Grace’s marriage affects it — which is partly what the book is about, but it’s not really the main point. Then we come to a flashback about the sisters’ childhood in Australia growing up with their emotionally manipulative and truly awful half-sister, Dora. I thought then that the book would move back and forth regularly between the past and the present, showing how the one created the other. But that’s not really what happens, either.

Instead, the book expands outward from its opening scenes, moving forward through many years to cover long stretches of the main characters’ lives. And it also shifts from character to character, moving away from the two sisters now and then to tell other stories. It expands outward in terms of place as well; there are sections in New York and in South America, as well as the flashbacks to Australia.

Ultimately, I think, the book is about relationships and the various ways they develop, mostly, unfortunately, in sad ways. Grace’s relationship with her husband, Christian Thrale, ends up complicated. Caro marries happily, but … something goes wrong there too, something entirely different from what happens to Grace. Ted Tice, a character introduced to the two sisters early on, spends his whole life longing for Caro, who is indifferent to him. And then there is Paul Ivory. He is engaged to be married to a neighborhood woman, but he and Caro begin an affair, one that reveals Caro’s depths and Paul’s harshness.

All this sounds a little soap opera-ish, and if I were to give away the entire plot, it would sound even more so. But that’s not the way the book feels. Instead, Hazzard captures the experiences and emotions of her characters with depth and subtlety. One of the most memorable sections for me is when Caro is living alone in London working as a lowly secretary to a horrible, sexist, stingy man. She is lonely and has no money. When Dora is suffering and needs help — Dora, the half-sister who was supposed to raise her and failed utterly at it — Caro raises money and sets out to help her even though it’s a huge sacrifice. Christian Thrale, Grace’s husband, doesn’t lift a finger to help, even though he has the means to do so. The depths of Caro’s isolation seem bottomless. Her life does improve, but it’s hard as a reader to forget just how bad things once were. It makes sense not to trust happiness in this book.

I’ve been discussing the book with other Slaves of Golconda readers over at the discussion boards, and the consensus seems to be that it would richly reward a rereading. There are a couple crucial moments where the narrative flashes forward, and without catching those moments, the reader might be lost at the end. But I hear there are other instances of foreshadowing that I didn’t catch the first time around that would be great to explore on a reread.

If you would like to read more about the book, there are lots of posts on it over at the Slaves site. It’s an excellent book for a group discussion!

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

2011-04-04T19:09:00.001-05:00

A conscious act of independent humanity is what society can least afford. If they once let that in, there'd be no end to it.

--Ted Tice, in The Transit of Venus

Although I had never heard of Shirley Hazzard before The Great Fire won the National Book Award back in 2003, I was so keen to read it afterwards that I plucked it from a cart down in tech services instead of waiting for it to make its way upstairs and out onto the library floor. It turned out to be a tough read, with its "often oblique writing style, more implication than explanation," as I wrote, after finishing it, at Live Journal. Till then I'd never read such elliptical writing, and while I determined that I did want to attempt The Transit of Venus, her previous novel that she'd published all the way back in 1980, I was of the opinion that Edward P. Jones' The Known World should have won the NBA. I'm a sucker for anachrony, especially flashforwards, and Jones left me swooning with his ability to go forward, backward, all in the same paragraph.

Had I known that Hazzard would hinge the reader's comprehension of what takes place at the end of The Transit of Venus on a couple of flashforwards, I'm sure I'd have quit intending to read it--someday, when my brain's up for it-- and actually read it long before now.

The Transit of Venus requires a lot of effort, a lot of focus, from the reader. Being me, I raced through it in a weekend, pencil both asterisking and underlining excessive sentences and paragraphs for further study. I'd read enough of several reviews to know that the ending tripped people up, that a line on the first page that seemed a throwaway at the time was of vital importance, and with that heightened awareness--somehow, that dead body under the bridge, mentioned briefly in the newspaper, is going to come back up--and my own love for flashforwards, I reached the end with a fairly good big picture understanding of what had taken place. Since then, I've been going back through the pages, rereading what I'd marked and noticing many many other glints of literary gold I'd previously missed, foreshadowings and insights and sentences that made more sense now that I was looking at them from the proper angle. Not that I feel that I've mastered the material, but that I'm sure that it's worth my time to read again.

And it seems a fitting book to be reading now, when I'm also reading A Visit from the Goon Squad (another book that breaks your heart in its flashforwards), so I can think how two writers concerned with what's left out, what's told slant, manage to create characters and stories that aren't reduced to the status of second fiddle.

The Transit of Venus

2011-04-04T19:02:00.001-05:00

Oh my goodness, I almost completely forgot about today being the day of the Slaves discussion of Shirley Hazzard's marvelous book, The Transit of Venus. It was originally set to take place on the 31st of March and then got moved to today. And all last week nearly everyday I'd think to myself, Hazzard post on Monday, you won't forget because it's your birthday. And here I almost forgot! Bookman and I had the day off from work today to celebrate (there was yummy cake!) and I sat down at my computer to write a blog thinking, hmm, now what should I write about today? And my mind began to wander along, considering different ideas, before the realization struck me right between the eyes. So now, what to say about Transit of Venus?

I loved it. I have not read Hazzard before. She is one of those authors I fully intended to read, I have The Great Fire, but just haven't gotten around to. After this, I have more incentive because I know what a treat will be in store.

The astronomical event called the transit of Venus takes place when the planet Venus passes between the sun and the Earth. It's like a lunar eclipse but because Venus is farther away than the moon, when the transit happens Venus appears as a small dark spot moving across the sun rather than an eclipse. Transits come in pairs. The first part of the most recent transit took place on June 8, 2004. The second part of the pair will happen on June 6, 2012. After that, there won't be another pair until 2117 and 2125. So mark your calendars for next June!

How the title fits the book, I haven't entirely put together. Venus, of course, is also the Goddess of Love, which does fit the book. Oh, and I just realized she is even paired. The book is about two sisters, Caroline (Caro) and Grace Bell, born in Australia and orphaned at a young age when their parents died in a ferry accident. They were raised by their half-sister, Dora, the offspring from their father's first marriage. So here we have our two Venuses. Their transit isn't across the sun though, more a transit through life and a transit through love. So maybe that's how the title fits.

Caro is the eldest of the two sisters, beautiful, but not in a conventional way. She is quiet and intelligent and observes people closely. She has a tendency to be unsettling. She also always seems so sure of herself. She is independent and practical and, in spite of being told by potential love interest Ted Tice that most people (read women) don't pass the exam for a government job at all, let alone on the first try, Caro passes it the first time with flying colors. But of course because she is a woman in late 40s and early 50s London, she can only really work as a secretary.

Grace, the younger sister, is golden and domestic and beautiful and she manages to marry young, a man named Christian Thrale, who turns out to be a tightwad and not at all Christian. At first, of course, she is in love and happy and is everything a devoted wife should be. She has children. From the outside she has the perfect life. The inside, however, does not always match the outside.

Caro, does not get married until she is into her 30s. She has an affair for a number of years with a famous playwright. Eventually she does marry, a wealthy American, who flies around the world attempting to help dispossessed groups in issues of diplomacy and political interventions. It is a happy and satisfying marriage.

Then there is Ted Tice, the potential love interest. He loves Caro from the start but she doesn't love him back. Still, he can't move on from that. Eventually he marries and has children but his poor wife knows that he still loves Caro. Will he ever get the girl of his dreams? I'm not saying.

And always in the mix is the half-sister, Dora. She is mentally and emotionally abusive and continues to hold a certain power over both Grace and Caro well into their adult lives. She is a real piece of work. An entire blog post can be written about her alone.

Transit of Venus is a rich, gorgeously written book. Not once did anything go clunk. There isn't really a plot to speak of. It is all character and all language, the kind of language that tastes like a square of extremely dark chocolate - the really good and expensive kind - melting slowly on your tongue.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

The Transit of Venus

2011-04-04T17:35:00.001-05:00

Litlove's wonderful post goes right to the aspect of the novel that seems to me, also, most provoking: its language. Not that the story or characters or setting of The Transit of Venus aren't interesting--on the contrary, I thought the people had a superb distinctness to them; the story was elegantly constructed, with its crossings and recrossings, its mirrors and inversions and misreadings and accidents; and the settings had a fascinatingly lucid particularity in the details Hazzard used to put them before us. How well this little set piece evokes, for instance, a mildly acerbic colonial bitterness (a tone not altogether unfamiliar to Canadians):

There was nothing mythic at Sydney: momentous objects, beings, and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. Sydney could never take for granted, as did the very meanest town in Europe, that a poet might be born there or a great painter walk beneath its windows. The likelihood did not arise, they did not feel they had deserved it. That was the measure of resentful obscurity: they could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it.

Or, more particular yet, here's a London morning, damply unwelcoming: "At that hour all London was ashudder, waiting for the bus." We feel, as well as see, the place. I thought a lot of Hazzard's descriptions had this tactile quality.

That slightly estranging, too-poetic word "ashudder," though, is a tiny example of just how stylized Hazzard's prose is. It is, as litlove says, difficult, elliptical, opaque. There's a lot of utilitarian prose, or worse, in mainstream and especially genre fiction. Writers whose work I like nonetheless bore me with their assumption that the writer's job is to get the story told without the language getting in the way; they seem to aspire to prose that is as transparent or functional as possible. That is a safer option, no doubt, than venturing into the dangerous territory of overt artistry. It is not easy to tell a story directly and clearly, but it is far riskier to tease and play and experiment with language--riskier, because, for one thing, the measure of success becomes immediately more elusive. Hazzard is a risk-taker.

On the whole, for me, Hazzard's style was successful. One measure that I use is whether the style of the book suits what I discern as the organizing ideas or interests of the book: do the author's verbal tricks seem like sheer display, or does the aesthetic whole have integrity? The Transit of Venus is intensely interested in the degree to which people are opaque to each other, with the uncertainties of their external appearance as indicators of their thoughts and intentions. It sometimes seems that the more literally naked her characters are, the less that is revealed about them; their physical proximity exacerbates rather than overcomes their mental distances, their tendencies to misinterpret or to fill in blanks. So, a prose with gaps and omissions, precise about surfaces but constantly fraught with meaning that seems too weighty to be contained in the sentences that carry it--that seemed right. It's not a realistic mode exactly (I agree with litlove that the dialogue often strains credulity): the novel proffers a heightened reality. Does it make sense to the rest of you if I say there seemed to be something cinematic about it, not because there's a grand panoramic sweep, or a plot of secrets and revelations (though in a way, I suppose both of these things are true), but because there are a lot of effects in each scene and as they play out, you can so easily imagine the ebbing and receding of an emotional score? Music, in films, often brings out emotions that can't be easily displayed through words or actions. I felt like Hazzard's language sought to do the same, without making every thought or emotion explicit. "Everything had the threat and promise of meaing," Hazzard says early on. That threat and promise permeate both the story and the language.

Another measure I use is the balance of pleasure and annoyance. I was sometimes annoyed, reading along. I found the missing word trick (more accurately, the omitted word trick) especially annoying, even though I have offered sort of an explanation for its thematic fitness. One example: "Caro might have asked, How old. But was silent . . ." It's like a writing exercise, or an excercise in close reading: What difference does it make, to the sentence, to the rhythm, to the meaning, to our reading experience, to put "she" back in? "Caro might have asked, How old. But she was silent . . ." What is lost in that smoothing out of the syntax, that restoration to normalcy? Or, what is Hazzard doing to us by refusing us that smoother process? The immediate result for me, each time, was to force me to reread: had I just missed something? Had I not grasped the actual grammar of the sentence? These moments always made me stumble and have to gather myself up again. That's not necessarily a bad thing. And annoying as it could be, the prickly sense of irritation at what seemed, sometimes, just a mannerism was outweighed by the number of times I sighed with appreciation over a sentence that seemed pure and satisfying in its precision. Every word seemed chosen and placed (or omitted!) with such care, which is not to say that the language becomes precious, just that it has a deliberate cerebral quality that is just what you don't find in so much other fiction. And this is not to say that the book is ponderous: wit can be cerebral as well. I particularly liked this little bit, for example, on the changing fortunes of the perversely pastoral poet Rex Ivory, who keeps on writing poetry about the natural "glories of his native Derbyshire" even during and after his time as a POW:

[H]is story was soon one of the items of victory, for the newspapers took it up and he became "the poet Rex Ivory" in publications where an indefinite article had formerly done for him well, and rarely, enough. A Selected Poems went into print on coarse, flecked wartime paper, and there were no more witticisms about ivory towers. He read that he had been correct in spurning the First World War, and prescient in endorsing the Second; and he pondered the new idea that he had shown acumen. The BBC brought electrical equipment into the Dukeries in a van and a camera followed the well-known and prescient poet Rex Ivory as he walked between flowering borders with a pair of Sealyhams borrowed from a neighbour. Despite his unrehearsed analogy between the British mental asylum and the Japanese camp, the interview was a success; because, when people have made up their minds to admire, wild horses will not get them to admit boredom.

The otherwise quite dark conclusion of the novel is lit up with some fine satire on his posthumous academic prestige, marked by the publication of a "brilliant critical biography" with the spot-on title Abnegation as Statement: Symbol aand Sacrament in the Achievement of Rex Ivory: "Dr Wadding had suspended his groundbreaking work on the Lake Poets so that Rex Ivory might benfit from critical elucidation. . . . 'My task, as I see it, is to adumbrate the sources of his entelechy.'" Perhaps, with that darting stab at an entirely different order of difficulty, Hazzard seeks to justify her own degree of elusivenss, which is, at least, in the service of human feeling.

A few of us exchanged some thoughts on Twitter as we worked our way to the end, and I think we were all equal parts startled and puzzled by the revelations about Paul Ivory's past. I wonder if we were surprised on purpose, to make a point about the layers of deceit or performance that come between us and certain knowledge of each other. It works as a plot device, giving Caro a new perspective on her own choices and relationships, but still, why that particular backstory? It seemed discordant, somehow.

The Art of Being Difficult

2011-04-04T11:18:00.001-05:00

How hard should a reader be made to work when confronting a piece of literature? At what point does an elliptical sentence become an opaque one that causes the reader to set the book aside in irritation? Or is the complex book, the demanding book, something to be welcomed like a really good mental work-out? A version of sit-ups for the brain? These questions were very much to the forefront of my mind as I was reading the latest pick for the Slaves of Golconda book group. Having wondered in yesterday’s post whether language could be too simplistic for pleasure, Shirley Hazzard’s award-winning novel The Transit of Venus, gave me the opposite experience of wondering whether language could become too weighty, too portentous, too pregnant with meaning for its own good.

The Transit of Venus is essentially a love story that spans several decades of the twentieth century, involves the romantic fortunes of a web of protagonists and moves between England and America. The main focus of the narrative falls on Caroline Bell, who, with her sister, Grace, has come over from Australia in search of meaningful experience. The Bell sisters were orphaned young, their parents drowning in a ferry accident off Sydney Bay. In consequence the girls were brought up by their older half-sister, Dora, whose vibrant negativity makes her one of the most engaging, if dislikeable characters in the novel. Dora has been required by fate to make an unreasonable sacrifice of her youth, and her revenge is never to let anyone forget it. Escaping Dora is an influential factor in Grace’s rapid engagement to a man she meets in a cinema, Christian Thrale, and when the novel opens, we are at the home of the Thrales. Christian’s father is an eminent astronomer, involved in siting a telescope in the UK. Ted Tice, displaced from his class by his mind and his education, awkward but with the strength of his own integrity, comes to stay at the house as an assistant to Professor Thrale and falls in love, deeply and irrevocably, with Grace’s sister, Caro. But Caro is not attracted to him other than as a friend; instead she begins an impetuous but passionate affair with an arrogant young playwright, Paul Ivory, who is himself engaged to be married to someone else. The fates and fortunes of this cast of characters are revealed in a series of beautifully examined tableaux that extends over many years.

The transit of Venus stands over the narrative as its guiding star. In the first pages of the novel, we are told a cautionary tale by Professor Thrale and Ted Tice, of a French adventurer who longed to see this particular, extremely rare event, when Venus partially eclipses the sun. Having been delayed by wars and misadventure that caused him to miss one transit, he waited in a form of exile for eight years until Venus should pass again, only on that day conditions were too poor for the spectacle to be seen. It would be another century before it happened again. The transit of Venus mirrors the trajectories of Caro Bell and Ted Tice, who circle each other repeatedly over the course of the narrative, but seem destined never to unite. In this first, early encounter, the love Ted feels for Caro is not reciprocated, but will he finally win her in the end? Venus, the planet of love, is notably capricious. “The calculations were hopelessly out,” Ted Tice explains about James Cook’s equally disastrous attempt to view the transit. “Calculations about Venus often are.”

The sense of complex delays that are inevitable but perplexing structures the entire narrative, which inserts into its opening scenes a seemingly casual remark about a man’s body being found after a flood. It will come back to haunt the protagonists only towards the very end. Equally gnomic is an off-hand remark about Ted Tice, accompanying the early descriptions of him, that he will one day take his own life. Perhaps if nothing else, this structure indicates the necessity for the reader to exercise great patience with the text. Hazzard slows her action down to a crawl, with each gesture and thought of her characters inviting narratorial intervention, as its significance is teased out and analysed. For the most part, I was happy to go along with this, because it produces some splendid observations: ‘nothing creates such untruth as the wish to please or to be spared something’, ‘the absence of self-delusion in itself is liberty’, ‘[i]n its first appeal, security offered an excitement almost like romance, but that rescue might wear down, like any other.’ The tone of these remarks is not so much lyrical as philosophical, but philosophical with a cosmic edge. We are given love and life through a telescope that brings us closer to these huge forces that sear through existence, but seem almost impersonal and beyond our control, spiritual in the way they inhabit us but also transcend us. I wondered at first whether the story, so focused on romance, would not be too slight for the weight of observation Hazzard brings to it, but in the end I capitulated; primary emotions, like love, desire, rage, fear, are ordinarily downplayed so we might keep living without incurring too much damage, but given their true significance, we might have to admit their overwhelming, potentially devastating importance.

However, it takes a certain kind of reading attitude to accept that characters might say things like: “She mistakes suspicion for insight.” Or, “I loathe the undernourishment of this country, the grievance, the censoriousness, the reluctance to try anything else.” Whilst the intelligence of Hazzard’s prose never falters, her protagonists risk at times becoming mouthpieces for existential insight, rather than flesh and blood people. In fact, the huge weight of significance that the narrative is made to bear makes it at one and the same time startlingly true and suspiciously artificial. We have so much contact with the discerning, interpreting writerly mind, that we can feel oddly shielded from the action, as if it takes place behind a gauze curtain of wise remarks. I passed through many emotions myself reading this; I found it surprising and profound and frustrating and sometimes disengaging and sometimes piercing. Overall it was a triumph of language, but one that came, for me at least, at the cost of emotional immediacy. But it was also a book that I longed to discuss with others, so I’m hoping my fellow Slaves will hurry up and post so I can know what they felt about it.

Next Up: Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

2011-02-13T12:26:00.002-06:00

The votes are in, and Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus is--just barely--the winner. Discussion will begin March 31. I'm looking forward to it!

Time to Choose Another Book!

2011-02-05T15:41:00.003-06:00

I am honored to have been 'tagged' to choose the shortlist for our next book choice. As a relative newcomer to the process, I thought it would be a good idea for me to go back over some previous posts and see if there were any trends in the suggestions--and there really aren't! Not just the books that actually won out in the voting but all the books put on the virtual table for consideration show what a cheerfully idiosyncratic group this is. So I decided to go with the "books I happen to be quite interested in reading right now" approach and put a cheerfully idiosyncratic list up myself. I just hope there's something on it that looks good to the rest of you! I've put in links to the Book Depository in most cases, but I think they are all pretty generally available.

1. Colm Toibin, Brooklyn. I haven't read any Toibin before, but I've heard many good things, particularly about this novel. From the jacket: "Eilis has come of age in small-town 1950s Ireland in the hard years following the Second World War. When she receives a job offer in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country behind, Elis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where her landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, however, the pain of parting and a longing for home are buried beneath the rhythms of her new life--until she begins to realize that she has found a sort of happiness. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future."

2. Laurence Cosse, A Novel Bookstore. I read about this one in the Europa Editions catalogue and it sounds fabulous: "Ivan, a one-time world traveler, and Francesca, a ravishing Italian heiress, are the owners of a bookstore that is anything but ordinary. Rebelling against the business of bestsellers and in search of an ideal place where their literary dreams can come true, Ivan and Francesca open a store where the passion for literature is given free rein. Tucked away in a corner of Paris, the store offers its clientele a selection of literary masterpieces chosen by a top-secret committee of likeminded literary connoisseurs. To their amazement, after only a few months, the little dream store proves a success. And that is precisely when their troubles begin. At first, both owners shrug off the anonymous threats that come their way and the venomous comments concerning their store circulating on the Internet, but when three members of the supposedly secret committee are attacked, they decide to call the police. One by one, the pieces of this puzzle fall ominously into place, as it becomes increasingly evident that Ivan and Francesca’s dreams will be answered with pettiness, envy and violence. "

3. Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus. The blurb: "Caroline and Grace Bell, two beautiful orphan sisters eager to begin their lives in a new land, journey to England from Australia. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonmnet, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. . . . a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stocklholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life." I've read two other Hazzard novels and been very impressed with her as a stylist; this one won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

4. Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building. From the publisher's website: "All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed "scientist of women"; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires. These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion in Alaa Al Aswany's remarkable international bestseller. Teeming with frank sexuality and heartfelt compassion, this book is an important window on to the experience of loss and love in the Arab world." I have been interested in this for some time; then I happened across the movie adaptation and broke my "no watching before reading" rule--the movie is very good, very intense! So I'm no less interested in reading the original.

5. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter I: The Wreath. This one may not be a great option as it is the first one in a trilogy. If we pick it and love it, of course, we could always read the other two! Anyway, here's the description: "Set in 14th-century Norway, The Wreath begins the life story of Kristin Lavransdatter. Starting with Kristin's childhood and continuing through her romance with Erlend Nikulausson, a dangerously charming and impetuous man, Sigrid Undset re-creates the historical backdrop in vivid detail...Defying her parents and stubbornly pursuing her own happiness, Kristin emerges as a woman who loves with power and passion." The trilogy was first published in 1920-22.

So--vote away! I'll tally up the responses by, say, next Sunday, and we'll aim to have our discussion of whichever one we choose at the end of March.

--Rohan

'The Summer Book' - Tove Jansson

2011-02-03T07:10:00.001-06:00

I am so late getting my thoughts on ‘The Summer Book’ up for The Slaves of Golconda readalong, because I’ve been having some external device + laptop issues in the last few days. Of course these wouldn’t have stopped me posting if I’d written this review right after I read the book at the begining of the month and pre-scheduled it, but I didn’t (no excuses I’ve been equal parts lazy and buried in other books). So instead of joining in with my own post I’ve been catching up on other people’s thoughts. Have I mentioned this is why I love small group readalongs so much? All these other thoughts appearing on a book you finished recently is kind of wonderful in its quiet bookishness. Now I’m putting my own thoughts out there, in the hope that the other members of the group (and you even if you didn’t readalong) will find something to enjoy here.

Tove Jansson’s 'The Summer Book’ is the story of of a young child called Sophia and her grandmother, who spend time together on an island in the Gulf of Finalnd, which Sophia’s grandmother has lived on for forty seven years. Esther Freud’s introduction to my edition explains that Sophia is based on Jansson’s niece and Sophia’s grandmother is based on Jansson’s mother (Freud's introduction is a short piece that combines facts, literary criticism and a personal story about her visit to the island that inspired the book, with Sophia Jansson).

The novella is made up of a series of chapters that are each a seperate, complete story. Maybe each one could be called a vignette chapter, as they’re quite short and capture specific moments of the characters life on the island. In any case, each chapter could be read independently, or out of sequence without any confusion. However, when read one after another in the order Tove Jansson has set them in, connections begin to form between the seperate stories.

As the novella progresses the pronounced seperateness of the individual story each chapter contains emphasises the gaps that surround these glimpses of life. Life outside of the island isn’t refferred to much, but the occassional detail is dropped in that suggests the characters have other complicated, full lives outside of immediate island life that the reader is not seeing. The contained way in which life is presented to the reader, as if little exists beyond the particular incident that they are reading about, encourages readers to feel that they are arriving in the middle of life, because they aren’t given any lead in, explanatory detail of what led to this moment. The third person narrator seems to presume readers are already familiar with the two characters lives, by declining to provide much detail from outside the immediate moments described. This lack of detail, not only intrigues the reader, making them hungry for every detail of the characters wider life, but also encourages the reader to care about the characters, because they are already being addressed with the casual lack of explanation that signals an intimate friendship. I always find this technique of telling the reader that they’re already involved and engaged with a story a powerful draw.

The vignette style also creates a sense of time passing, without often directly mentioning the time that has passed between each chapter. The absence of description of life outside the island, or life outside of the specific moments readers are allowed to see, as well as the way readers are dropped into situations with little introduction, suggests that other things have happened around the events that readers have been shown. At the same time Jansson creates small connections that remind you that while you haven’t been watching the characters their lives have been continuing, for example Sophia’s grandmother’s illness escalates during the novel and quick mentions of her condition inform readers she is getting worse, but the escalation seems to happen faster than it should from what the rest of the text describes. A simple couple of sentences suddenly makes it clear that she is actually ill, not just frail:

'They crawled on through the pines, and Grandmother threw up in the moss.

"It could happen to anyone," the child said. "Did you take your Lupatro?" '

but it seems as if she must have been deteriorating outside of what is described in the text for some time to have reached this severe stage. So I began to think that chunks of time must be passing outside of the text.

The contained nature of the individual stories in each chapter somehow emphasises the absence of writing around those moments. There are quiet hollowed out spaces you can almost feel the shape of, in between each story, even though they’re unwritten spaces. There’s a push, pull tension in this novel, where the completness of each story makes the reader more aware of these spaces of silence and the spaces accentuate the completness of what Jansson has written.

In Grandma's Footsteps

2011-02-01T10:16:00.000-06:00

I have to say there is a particular pleasure in reading about the sweet still heat of summer when we are in the depths of midwinter. It gives a person hope, you know, to be reminded of the endless summers of childhood, and their dependable charms. The Slaves chose as their group read this month, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, one of a handful of books that she wrote for adults. Jansson is far better known for her children’s books about the Moomins, which I can remember distantly from my own early reading days. In fact, for me, there wasn’t so very much difference between The Summer Book and Moominsummer Madness, say. Family and its quirky ways are fundamental to both. There’s something mythic and yet intimate going on here, something eccentric but philosophically grounded, something quite sharp and occasionally melancholy, but deeply lovable nevertheless. The Moomins used to ponder life and its meaning and wrap up their thoughts in axiomatic utterances (like Little My: ‘Possessions mean worries and luggage bags one has to drag around.’). And essentially, The Summer Book performs the same sort of metamorphosis, taking the strange and sometimes disconcerting experience of the world and making it manageable, tolerable and sometimes quite delightful.

The Summer Book recounts a series of stories about life on an island off the coast of Finland. It’s home to motherless Sophia and her grandmother, oh and also Sophia’s father only he features mostly through his absence, given that he is always writing and ignoring his womenfolk. I suppose in all fairness we should include the island itself as a character, flat, volcanic, scrubby, designed to withstand extreme weather conditions, and yet rich in wildlife and fauna, possessing its own beauty. We hear the voice of the narrator most of all in the descriptions of the island, and that voice is attentive and appreciative, viewing both the landscape and the characters that inhabit it with loving benevolence. The grandmother and Sophia are both beautifully drawn characters. Sophia is passionate, engaged, quick to fear, quick to excitement and always ready to rage against the obstacles and difficulties that befall her. Grandmother is pragmatic and slow-moving, accepting and stolid, cunning and wise. Each of the vignettes that make up the book show the two of them in a kind of tableau of learning, as Sophia meets the blunt edge of the world and has it smoothed for her by her grandmother’s wisdom. Not that Grandmother really wants to have to do this; as an elderly lady she often feels tired and ill and not necessarily up to a child’s longing for adventure. The two of them argue and clash as much as they cooperate and comply. But watching Grandmother use clever strategies to soothe, placate or instruct Sophia is definitely a key part of this book’s appeal.

What the book brings out quite brilliantly is the richness of a child’s fantasy life and how hard that can be to handle. Sophia has no knowledge of the world, only familiarity with some of its basic practices and a great number of fears and fantasies. Grandmother, by contrast, at the end of her life, has very few fantasies left to her; instead she is right up close against the reality of things. Generally, sleeping, reading and enjoying nature are all she really wants to do (I could sympathise), but she leaps into action when the summer starts to fade, and the island dwelling has to be secured for the winter months. Then she is immensely busy with things, with bringing household objects in for safety, setting out candles and cigarettes in case any visitors are forced to take shelter on their island while they are away. ‘With an odd kind of tenderness, she examined the nameplates of boats long since broken up, some storm indications that had been written on the wall, penciled data on dead seals they had found, and a mink they had shot… How can I ever leave this room, she thought?’ For Grandmother, life has been reduced down to a tide of significant flotsam and jetsam, all of it resonant with memories.

For Sophia, life is still bursting with fantasies, like what it might be that has crawled into her father’s old dressing gown and is terrifying her, or her own personal vision of religion, or what might have happened at a party to which she was not invited, or the thought that because she prayed for excitement, a devastating storm is her responsibility. In each case, she turns to her Grandmother (often angrily) in order to have her fantasies tamed and turned into images that don’t overwhelm her emotionally. Grandmother’s ability to turn Sophia’s nameless dread into stories that reassure because they invoke a known reality is a real joy to watch. This must be wisdom in its purest form; the transformation of proliferating fear into a sensible, grounded, truthful representation of what might be; the valuable use of knowledge, of what genuinely is, to boundary and contain the menace of the unknown. We love Grandmother because she understands how necessary this is for Sophia, and even when she’s not particularly up for it, she accomplishes this feat anyway. That’s real love.

Not that this is in any way a saccharine narrative, thank goodness. No the exchanges between Sophia and her Grandmother are often harsh, and both behave as ordinary, flawed, imperfect human beings. The Summer Book enchants precisely because it is so honest and innocent. Even though I’m not that keen on episodic structures, this series of short tales was perfect for its subject matter, and in fact made me think more of Eastern teaching parables than anything else. Definitely one I would reread again in the future, as a reminder that even the simplest life contains many ups and downs, but that managing them is exactly the task we must learn how to do.

The Summer Book

2011-01-31T20:29:00.001-06:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles.

I enjoyed Tove Jansson's novel The Summer Book very much and flipping it through it just now to prepare to write this post, I realized how much I would like to read it again. It's a book that works quietly, and I think it's easy to miss some of its effects on a first read. On a basic level the book is about a young girl Sophia and her grandmother, who live, along with Sophia's father, on an isolated island in Finland. The fact that I noticed but didn't ponder enough during the first reading is that Sophia's mother has recently died. This is obviously hugely important, but the book is so quiet about it:

One time in April there was a full moon, and the sea was covered with ice. Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead. The fire was still burning in the stove, and the flames flickered on the ceiling, where the boots were hung up to dry.

And that's about all the book has to say on the subject, at least directly. But the signs of the mother's death are everywhere. One of the first things Sophia says to her grandmother is "When are you going to die?" The grandmother says, "Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours." Except that it is, because the grandmother is the most important figure in Sophia's life. Her father lives with them doing some kind of work -- the introduction to the book tells me it's sculpture although I didn't figure this out on my own -- but he's not much of a presence. A little later Sophia finds a skull, and she and her grandmother hang on to it until at the end of the day, they place it in the forest where the evening light catches it. Suddenly, Sophia starts screaming. There's no explanation about why she does this, but something about the skull must finally have spoken to her about death.

The whole book works in this understated way. There are beautiful descriptions of the island and the ocean, but we learn about the characters almost solely through their words and actions. Sophia and her grandmother spend much of their days playing, and they take this very seriously. With Sophia, this is what one would expect, but the grandmother is just as serious. In one chapter, the grandmother starts carving animals out of driftwood, and Sophia is curious:

"What is it you're doing?" Sophia asked.
"I'm playing," Grandmother said.
Sophia crawled into the magic forest and saw everything her grandmother had done.
"Is it an exhibit?" she asked.
But Grandmother said it had nothing to do with sculpture, sculpture was another thing completely. They started gather bones together along the shore.

Later in the book Sophia and her grandmother explore a nearby island where someone has built a new house and posted a "No Trespassing" sign, an act the grandmother believes is rude and ill-bred. So the two of them trespass and end up getting caught: they flee into the woods behind the house but the owner's dog finds them, and they are forced to show themselves. Fortunately for them, the owner never asks what they were doing there; instead they all behave as though nothing had happened.

It's an odd scene, but the whole book is like that: it's as though the family lives in another world entirely where things are slightly different than they are in this one. It's not a fantasy world, though. The grandmother is aging and has trouble moving about, Sophia is sometimes bored and lonely, occasionally flying into rages, and the father seems the loneliest and most isolated of them all. When other people enter their world, it rarely goes well. Sophia invites a friend, Berenice, to visit the island, but she hates it there, and nobody is sorry when she leaves.

Nature becomes a character in its own right; the descriptions of landscape and plant life are beautiful, but nature can be threatening as well as scenic. There are swarming insects, dangerous gullies, droughts, and storms. One of the most dramatic chapters tells of the family getting stuck away from home during one of the worst storms anyone can remember. Sophia learns about her place in the world: she had asked for a storm and was pleased to have gotten it, until she realizes that people might die. Her grandmother tells her it's not her fault, but she doesn't do it in a reassuring way:

"God and you," Grandmother repeated angrily. "Why should He listen to you, especially, when maybe ten other people prayed for nice weather? And they did, you can count on that."
"But I prayed first," Sophia said. "And you can see for yourself they didn't get nice weather!"
"God," Grandmother said. "God has so much to do, He doesn't have time to listen ..."

It's this relationship I loved best about the book: Sophia and her grandmother obviously love each other, but in a way that is honest, real, and sometimes difficult. The grandmother never talks down to or patronizes Sophia, and Sophia uses her relationship with her grandmother to try to understand what has happened to her and to figure out her place in the world. This relationship and the sharp, clear, direct style of Jansson's writing make the book memorable.

Timeless Summer

2011-01-31T18:45:00.001-06:00

I had high hopes that Tove Jansson's The Summer Book (translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal) would melt the snow around my house and cause the flowers to bloom, or at the very least make me imagine I felt warm. But I read it during the coldest week of the year and when one is waiting for the train in -15F (-26C) with windchill making it feel like -30F (-34C), well, it's probably asking a bit much from a book to give the illusion of warmth. Even though I was not warmed, I still enjoyed the book very much.

The book takes place in summer on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. On the island during the summer lives a young girl, Sophia, her father and her grandmother. When the book begins, Sophia's mother has recently died. According to the introduction, Sophia is six. Each chapter is a slice of life, a day, maybe two, sometimes only an afternoon. There is no sense of time passing and I get the feeling that even though it seems like it is only one summer, the stories take place across many summers but with no chronology except that this happened "one May" or "in July." This gives the book a sort of timelessness and recalled to me when I was a kid and school was out for the summer how it seemed like it was going to last forever.

Sophia's father is pretty much a non-presence in the book. All he does is sit at a table and work. Sometimes he fishes. The book really belongs to Sophia and Grandmother, a young girl and an old woman with heart problems. Of the two, however, Grandmother was the star, at least she was for me. Playing, reading, napping, teaching Sophia about life, Grandmother took almost everything in stride.

There were two chapters of the book that I really loved. The first is the chapter called "The Tent." We learn that Grandmother was a Scout leader in her youth and thanks to her, girls were allowed to become Scouts and go camping and sleep in tents. They've set up a tent not far from the house so Sophia can sleep in one for the first time. Sophia naturally wants to know what being a Scout leader was like and Grandmother only gives her short, non-descriptive answers and thinks:

That's strange, Grandmother thought. I can't describe things any more. I can't find the words, or maybe it's just that I'm not trying hard enough. It was such a long time ago. No one here was even born. And unless I tell it because I want to, it's as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it's lost.

Sophia sleeps alone in the tent but gets scared and keeps bothering Grandmother who gets upset. But we find out Grandmother is upset not about Sophia but because she can no longer remember what it is like to sleep in a tent and feels "everything's gliding away." Poor Grandmother, just as Sophia is having new experiences the memory of her own is disappearing.

The other chapter I loved is "The Visitor." The visitor is Verner, an elderly man who would occasionally stop by and bring a bottle of sherry. The chapter is essentially about how when people get old their families start treating them like children, telling them what to do instead of asking. Neither Verner nor Grandmother are happy about this and they encourage each other to not give in or give up outwitting people.

There are so many more delightful moments in this book. It seems like an easy, peaceful read but scratch the surface and there suddenly is more going on than meets the eye.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Thoughts on The Summer Book--and Cowpats

2011-01-31T18:41:00.002-06:00

(cross-posted here)

I had never heard of The Summer Book--or of its author, who turns out to be best known for her children's series, the Moomin stories--before its nomination here, so I was refreshingly free of preconceptions when I started it. Yet, somehow, it still managed to surprise me! I guess the whole idea of a book about a little girl spending summers on an island with her grandmother raised subconscious expectations that it would be precious or sentimental, or (worse) both. It is neither. Instead, it is tart and precise, occasionally very funny, and at moments unexpectedly moving. When I finished it, I had the (perhaps uncharitable) thought that if an American novelist had written it, it would have insisted too hard on an uplifting story line: the grandmother's illness (treated only elliptically here) would have been more conspicuous, the quarrel with Sophia would have been harsher and more destructive, and then the end would have been a reconciliation scene putting out flowery tendrils towards nostalgia and some kind of feel-good lesson. Also, it would not have had a chapter called "The Enormous Plastic Sausage." But of course this is only speculation. Perhaps there is an American novelist who could be as ironically restrained as Jansson, even on a subject like summer.

I realized it wasn't going to be a cloying sort of book right at the beginning:

It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened. Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.

'What are you doing?' asked little Sophia.

'Nothing,' her grandmother answered. 'That is to say,' she added angrily, 'I'm looking for my false teeth.'

Gotcha! All that wonderfully tactile description, and the delicate placing of the grandmother and little Sophia in amongst it, and then false teeth! And when they find them, she puts them right back in, "with a smacking noise. They went in very easily," we're told. "It had really hardly been worth mentioning." But aren't you glad it was mentioned?

That little opening sequence sets us up well for what follows, which is a series of episodic reminsicences, each focusing on a particular moment, or theme, or problem, and each revealing (almost accidentally, it sometimes seems) some facet of the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother and their island. It's not a book that really lends itself to deep analysis or broad thematic generalizations. Instead, it's a book to be savored for the moments it gives you. One of my favorite chapters was "Playing Venice," which (as I understood it, at least) tells us indirectly where Sophia's mother has disappeared to (she's never in the book). After Sophia receives a postcard from Venice ("Her whole name was on the address side, with 'Miss' in front, and on the shiny side was the prettiest picture anyone in the family had ever seen"), she and her grandmother build their own Venice in the marsh pond out of bits of stone and marble and sticks; Grandmother even makes "a Doge's palace out of balsa wood ... [and] painted it with watercolours and gold." They imagine themselves as a family that lives in their new Venice, a father, mother, and daughter--but beneath the playful surface, something unhappy lurks:

'Look, Mama,' [Sophia] called. 'I've found a new palace.'

'But my dear child, I'm only "Mama" to your father,' Grandmother said. She was concerned.

'Is that so!' Sophia shouted. 'Why is he the only one who gets to say "Mama"?'

She threw the palace in the water and stalked away.

Grandmother makes "a hotel and a trattoria and a campanile with a little lion on top. . . . One day, there was a green salamander in the Grand Canal and traffic had to make a long detour." But then it starts to rain.

She could see right away that the whole shoreline was flooded, and then she saw Sophia running towards her across the rock.

'It's sunk,' Sophia screamed. 'She's gone!'

Grandmother sends Sophia back to bed, promising to save the palace. We know, though Jansson doesn't belabor us about it, that it's not bits of balsa wood she's worried about salvaging.

So there are moments of intensity, and like the Venice episode, they arise out of the disproportionate feelings of childhood, the lack of perspective that sometimes actually clarifies, rather than distorts, reality. There's drama--as in the chapter "Sophia's Storm":

Sophia climbed up into the tower. The tower room was very small and had four windows, one for each point of the compass. She saw that the island had shurnk and grown terribly small, nothing but an insignificant patch of rocks and colourless earth. But the sea was immense: what and yellow and grey and horizonless. There was only this one island, surrounded by water, threatened and shelted by the storm, forgotten by everyone but God, who granted prayers...

...including, so Sophia is convinced, her own, which was "Dear God, let something happen ... I'm bored to death. Amen." "All the boats will be wrecked," reflects Grandmother, "thoughtlessly." "Sophia stared at her and screamed, 'How can you talk like that when you know it's my fault? I prayed for a storm, and it came!'" There's suspense, as in the chapter "The Robe," in which Sophia's father takes the boat out for supplies and is late coming back:

There was a southwest wind when he set out, and in a couple of hours it had risen so that the wives were riding right across the point. Grandmother tried to get the weather report on the radio, but she couldn't find the right button. She couldn't keep from going back to the north window every few minutes to look for him, and she didn't understand a word she read.

Then there's Berenice, "a fairly new friend, whose hair [Sophia]admired." Not only does Berenice have trouble making herself at home on the island, but Sophia isn't altogether happy having her there either, and one day she ends up in the water.

'Did she really dive?' Grandmother asked.

'Yes, really. I gave her a shove and she dived.'

'Oh,' Grandmother said. 'And then what?'

'Her hair can't take salt water,' explained Sophia sadly. 'It looks awful. And it was her hair I liked.'

That complacently mournful remark perfectly captures the innocent egotism of childhood, doesn't it? But Sophia's not awful; she's just six. And Grandmother knows that raising her right doesn't always mean raising the tone. One day after a deep discussion about God and the devil ("'You can see for yourself that life is bad enough without being punished for it afterwards. We get comfort when we die, that's the whole idea." "It's not hard at all!" Sophia shouted. "And what are you going to do about the Devil, then? He lives in Hell'"), Grandmother restores harmony with a song that, joyfully, Sophia learns to sing "just as badly as her grandmother":

Cowpats are free,

Tra-la-la

But don't throw them at me.

Tra-la-la

For you too could get hit

Tra-la-la

With cow shit!

In spite of everything, and because of everything, and in the least saccharine way possible, it always turns out they're a perfect pair.

The Summer Book it is!

2010-11-15T14:16:00.001-06:00

Tove Jansson's The Summer Book received the most votes, so it will be the next Slaves of Golconda read. Discussion will begin on January 31st. I like the idea of reading The Summer Book in the middle of winter. I hope it will help warm me up a bit! Enjoy your reading, and see you in January.

It's time to choose a new book!

2010-11-08T19:19:00.003-06:00

It's time once again to choose a new book. I'd love to say that the choices below fit some theme, but, alas, the only theme they fit is "books I want to read and hope you will want to read too." So, vote for the book you like best in the comments, and we will have the discussion starting on January 31st. I'll count up the votes this Sunday and post the winner on Monday. Anyone is welcome to participate, so please join in!

Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale. "Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrassing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best." (Descriptions from Amazon)
Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. "In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the grandmother, “everything is complete.” In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life."
Knut Hamsun's Victoria. "When it first appeared in 1898, this fourth novel by celebrated Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun captured instant acclaim for its poetic, psychologically intense portrayal of love’s predicament in a class-bound society. Set in a coastal village of late nineteenth- century Norway, Victoria follows two doomed lovers through their thwarted lifelong romance. Johannes, the son of a miller, finds inspiration for his writing in his passionate devotion to Victoria, an impoverished aristocrat constrained by family loyalty. Separated by class barriers and social pressure, the fated pair parts ways, only to realize—too late—the grave misfortune of their lost opportunity. Elegantly rendered in this brand-new translation by Sverre Lyngstad, Victoria’s haunting lyricism and emotional depth remain as timeless as ever."
Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September. "The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen's portrait of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history. In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching—the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual."
Nella Larson's Passing. "The tale is simple on the surface--a few adventures in Chicago and New York's high life, with lots of real people and race-mixing events described ... But underneath, it seethes with rage, guilt, sex, and complex deceptions. Irene fears losing her black husband to Clare, who seems increasingly predatory. Or is this all in Irene's mind? And is everyone wearing a mask? Larsen's book is a scary hall of mirrors, a murder mystery that can't resolve itself. It sticks with you."

The Small Room - More Links

2010-11-01T15:07:00.004-05:00

I just thought I'd collect the other posts on May Sarton's The Small Room here. I know I have problems cutting and pasting my posts into Blogger, so I tend to skip it, but as there are several others who have written about the book, I thought it might be nice to have them in one handy place.

Jodie at Book Gazing

Lisa at Bibliophiliac

Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room

Pining for the West

Rohan at Novel Readings

Danielle at A Work in Progress

Have I missed anyone? Please scroll down to see more posts or click on through the links. Thanks!

The Small Room

2010-10-31T18:10:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted here.

May Sarton's The Small Room was a satisfying, thought-provoking read. I'm a sucker for academic novels, so I was delighted to find out that this book is about a young woman who travels to small-town New England to begin her first college teaching job. Lucy Winter is fresh out of grad school, although she wasn't your typical grad student: she went through her Ph.D. program merely because she wanted a reason to stay near her fiance who was in medical school. But now the engagement is over and she unexpectedly finds herself with a job. As the novel opens, she is on the train heading north to Appleton, a women's college.

What she finds is a small, close-knit community that appears to be sleepy and peaceful. She goes to a beginning of semester cocktail party to meet fellow faculty and teaches her classes for the first time, all the while trying to figure out her role in this new place. She opens her first class with a long account of her educational life, hoping to make an impression on the students, but she immediately doubts herself afterward. She wants to do a good job and is willing to take risks in the classroom, but she knows she is not entirely sure what she is doing.

Of course, she can't stay on the outside of this community for long, and, of course, it's not nearly as sleepy and peaceful as it seems. She gets pulled into its dramas and intrigues through one of her students, a star pupil of the campus star professor. When she discovers this student has plagiarized, she immediately reveals it to a colleague, an act that sets a whole train of events in motion, events that not only cause controversy, but that make the college think hard about what it is and what it stands for.

The novel is fundamentally about teaching -- what it means to be a teacher and a student and the ways the two can interact. Lucy struggles with the question of how much of herself she should share with her students. Her opening speech about her education starts things off on a personal note, but she is reluctant to respond warmly when a student shares her private troubles. She feels there should be boundaries between teachers and students, and she also knows that allowing those boundaries to drop away can be exhausting. Teaching demands a great deal of energy, and teachers need to protect themselves from giving up too much of themselves to others.

And yet strict boundaries are impossible to maintain: students are persistent in their efforts to get a personal response from Lucy, and once she stumbles into the plagiarism scandal, she is drawn even further into their lives.

The novel is also about what it means to be a woman who teaches. Early on one of the characters says, "Is there a life more riddled with self-doubt than that of a woman professor, I wonder?" The novel was published in 1961, and the question of whether it's worth while to educate women who will just get married and raise children lingers in the air. The faculty at Appleton take a strong stand on this: as one character claims, "We don't teach domestic science; we are not interested especially in producing marriageable young ladies." Lucy wonders, though, what her own commitment to the intellectual life is, and what it would mean for her to stay on at Appleton. She wants a family, but with her engagement over and her life established in a quiet town full of married couples, she is not sure that will be possible. She considered her Ph.D. program as a joke, after all; does she really want to devote her life to scholarship and teaching, at the possible expense of other relationships? As I read this, I kept thinking about Dorothy Sayers's novel Gaudy Night, which is also about women intellectuals struggling with the sacrifices the intellectual life can demand. In a culture that expects women to be wives and mothers or, if they want to take work seriously, to give up those roles, what is a smart woman supposed to do?

The novel is short and is a quick read, but it takes up a lot of great questions and offers some interesting answers. It's satisfying to watch Lucy figure out who she is as a teacher and what she wants her place in the Appleton community to be. It's also interesting to think about teaching generally -- what really helps students learn and what roles a teacher can and can't play. The novel shows well what a complicated job it is to try to inspire other people with the love of learning and at the same time to remain a satisfied, whole person oneself.

The Small Room

2010-10-31T11:41:00.001-05:00

When I first moved to Minnesota back in 1994 there was a bit of a May Sarton revival going on here. The Minnesota Women's Press put out a free newspaper every two weeks that had a book section and blurbs about what their various book groups were reading. One of the groups was a May Sarton group reading everything she had ever written. I never joined any of the Women's Press book groups because they weren't free. Held in a big room of the Press offices in St. Paul and facilitated by a "professional" the price tag was heftier than I was willing to fork over. That didn't keep me from reading any of the books though. And I did. I read about three or four of Sarton's journals, her poetry, a biography, and a couple of novels. Then I noticed everything started feeling and sounding the same and I lost interest and haven't read anything else by her until now.

The last bit, how Sarton started having a sameness about her is probably why, as I read The Small Room I kept having this feeling that I had read this book before. It seemed like I even remembered scenes from it. But combing back through my booklists I can't find this book listed as one I had read. It is possible I read it and forgot to record but I will never know for sure. The feeling that I had read the book before didn't stop me from enjoying, however.

The story takes place in the early 1960s. Lucy Winter arrives at a small New England all-girls college called Appleton to take up her first teaching position as a new professor of English literature. Lucy got her doctorate from Harvard because she needed something to do while her boyfriend went to med school. Lucy planned on marrying said boyfriend. But they break up and now she needs to work instead of be a wife.

Appleton is not a first-tier sort of college with the implication that it is partly because of the all-girls status. The atmosphere of the school is one of scholarship, however, and the professors strive to wake the girls up from their daydreams to try and take their studies seriously. When one of the girls turns out to have great potential she has the admiration and resources of the entire school behind her. One such student, Jane Seaman, is the particular protege of Carryl Cope, professor of Medieval Studies and a big fish in a small pond. Carryl is the university superstar and she invests everything in Jane's success. Poor Jane cracks under pressure and is caught by Lucy plagiarizing an essay on The Iliad written by Simone Weil. The consequences of how the incident is handled creates a perfect storm in a teacup.

The plot provides many opportunities for ruminations by Lucy, by Carryl, and others on what it means to be a good teacher. There is also a weird and disturbing subset of the good teacher question that asks whether a woman scholar can have a well-rounded life or does she have to sacrifice everything in order to have a life of the mind. There is, of course, no doubt that men can be married with children and still be good teachers. There is a married male professor with children in the book. I don't seem to recall that any of the women professors are married though Carryl enjoys a subtle lesbian relationship with the formidable Olive Hunt, an older, wealthy woman who is planning on leaving her estate to the college.

In the melee of university politics, the book also proposes a generation gap as part of the conflict. The university wants to hire a psychiatrist to provide therapy services for students in trouble. The younger generation of teachers is all for it, the older generation thinks it is ridiculous, and the middle generation is torn between the two. The psychiatrist issue is another means of examining what it means to be a good teacher.

The Small Room is an engaging, fast read. The tone is light which keeps it from being gloomy and preachy. And of course the question of what it means to be a good teacher is one that continues today; one that every new and experienced teacher no doubt wrestles with on a frequent basis.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

The Winner Is . . .

2010-08-15T11:48:00.002-05:00

May Sarton's The Small Room just squeaked by. Our next discussion will begin Sunday October 31st. Hope to see you all then!

Time to Vote: Back to the Classics

2010-08-09T12:38:00.005-05:00

Once again it is time to choose a new book to read. With summer winding down and thoughts of returning to school not far off, I thought a good, solid classic might be the perfect reading choice for cooler weather. Please cast your vote, and the winner will be announced Sunday July 15. We'll reconvene here and at the forum on October 31 for discussion.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
"Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the center is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's solitary figures. Anderson's stories influenced countless American writers including Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Oates and Carver. "

The Small Room by May Sarton
"Anxiously embarking on her first teaching job, Lucy Winter arrives at a New England women's college and shortly finds herself in the thick of a crisis: she had discovered a dishonest act committed by a brilliant student who is a protégée of a powerful faculty member. How the central characters—students and teachers—react to the crisis and what effect the scandal has on their personal and professional lives are the central motifs of May Sarton's sensitive, probing novel."

The Awkward Age by Henry James
"The Awkward Age, written at a time when female emancipation and the double standard were subjects of fierce debate, is the most remarkable example of James's dramatic method. The novel traces the experiences of 18-year-old Nanda Brookenham, exposed to corruption in the salon of her youthful, 'modern' mother, who, in maintaining a circle where talk is shockingly sophisticated, 'must sacrifice either her daughter or...her intellectual habits'. Does Nanda reach maturity and self-knowledge in the lively company of handsome, genial Vanderbank, whom she loves, and of ugly, intelligent, parvenu Mitchy, who loves her? Or is she a symbol of sterile idealism, as she clings to old Mr Longdon, with his memories of Nanda's grandmother, and of an aristocracy once untouched by money-troubles and dubious French novels?"

The Vagabond by Colette
"Thirty-three years-old and recently divorced, Renée Néré has begun a new life on her own, supporting herself as a music-hall artist. Maxime, a rich and idle bachelor, intrudes on her independent existence and offers his love and the comforts of marriage. A provincial tour puts distance between them and enables Renée, in a moving series of leters and meditations, to resolve alone the struggle between her need to be loved and her need to have a life and work of her own."

Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
"Considered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an 'expressionistic picture of New York' (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants alike. From Fourteenth Street to the Bowery, Delmonico's to the underbelly of the city waterfront, Dos Passos chronicles the lives of characters struggling to become a part of modernity before they are destroyed by it. More than seventy-five years after its first publication, Manhattan Transfer still stands as "a novel of the very first importance" (Sinclair Lewis). It is a masterpeice of modern fiction and a lasting tribute to the dual-edged nature of the American dream."

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
"Sasha Jensen has returned to Paris, the city of both her happiest moments and her most desperate. Her past lies in wait for her in cafes, bars, and dress shops, blurring all distinctions between nightmare and reality. When she is picked up by a young man, she begins to feel that she is still capable of desires and emotions. Few encounters in fiction have been so brilliantly conceived, and few have come to a more unforgettable end."

All Talk, Mostly

2010-08-01T11:58:00.002-05:00

I'm a little late on posting about Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant for the Slaves of Golconda discussion. Friday was Bookman's birthday and Saturday I usually don't blog and there was school and more celebrating with Bookman. So you see, I have a good excuse. Now to the book.

The reader is suddenly dropped in on the Lamb family arguing over a smoking fire. Very quickly we learn that Horace, the head of the family is a tightwad who allows only the smallest of fires, the cheapest of food, and keeps his five children in rags. The house belongs to the Lamb family but they have no money, the money belongs to Charlotte, Horace's wife. Also living in the house is Mortimer, a penniless cousin of Horace's who grew up in the house, and Emilia, Horace's aunt, also without income. Charlotte gave control of her money to Horace when they married and Horace rather prides himself on not touching the principal and managing to live frugally off the interest as well as having some to reinvest. Everyone, however, is miserable and Charlotte has had enough. She and Mortimer are planning to run away together.

Also in the house are the servants. Bullivant is the head house servant and Mrs. Seldon is the head cook. Each has an assistant George and Miriam respectively. George was born in the workhouse and Bullivant is trying mightily in a domineering sort of way to shape the boy up and turn him into a younger version of himself. However, George will have none of it. Miriam came from the orphanage and Mrs. Seldon is trying to shape her up into a younger version of herself as well. Mrs. Seldon uses a sharp tongue and the fear of God and has somewhat better success than Bullivant but only because Miriam is generally more compliant and without ambition. And of course, as is the usual in houses with servants, the servants know everything that is going on in the family even when all the family members don't know.

The book feels at once old and modern. Published in 1947, the story has an end of the Victorian era sensibility to it. It is clear from the gulf between Bullivant and George that times are changing. George has ambitions to get ahead. He frustrates Bullivant endlessly for refusing to accept his place in the servant class. Unfortunately for George, his ambition doesn't quite match his intelligence. Or perhaps it is a lack of skill and resources that hold him back and direct his energies into troublesome paths.

At the same time that it feels old fashioned, it feels modern. Not the story itself but the way that it is written. The book is almost entirely dialog. There is hardly anything in the way of expository narrative except the barest of directions to indicate who is speaking and where the speaker is located. There are no transitions between scenes; at one moment we are in the drawing room at the Lamb's and the next we are in the kitchen or at the grocery store of Mrs. Buchanan. It is sometimes rather disorienting. However, in a way, it puts the reader in the story, as if we are a silent servant overhearing all the various conversations. As a character in the story we do not have benefit of a narrative except the one we create for ourselves, just like in life. Life is all dialog and we create the narrative for ourselves, the stories to make sense of it all.

This style makes for difficult reading, not only is it hard to follow as I mentioned, but the reader remains on the outside, we are not able to get inside any of the character's heads. Compton-Burnett makes up a bit for this by having the characters say things and have conversations that bothered me at first. No one talks like that! Unfortunately I can't seem to find a passage to illustrate what I mean without making it long and providing quite a lot of explanation.

I suppose Manservant and Maidservant can be called a drawing room drama as well as a comedy of manners. There is no real plot, yet quite a lot happens. One of the characters sums it up nicely:

I suppose a good deal happens in daily life," said Charlotte. "We only have to look at what is near to us, to find the drama of existence. It seems such a pity that that is so."

And just as we began the book in the midst of a conversation about a smoking fire, we end the book in the midst of a conversation of a smoking fire. As far as everything in between, some things get resolved and some things do not. Just as there are no neat and tidy beginnings in life there are no neat and tidy endings either. The past is always with us and continually cycles around and intrudes upon the present and the future.

Cross posted at So Many Books

The Winner Is...

2010-06-13T20:16:00.003-05:00

I think it's safe to announce the winner a day ahead given that most votes have gone to Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnet.

So, our next discussion will start on July 31. Looking forward to it!

Let's Vote - Classics for Pleasure

2010-06-10T14:47:00.002-05:00

I haven’t read many classics this year so I hope you’ll indulge me as all selections come from Michael Dirda’s book, Classics for Pleasure. I was able to come up with some books that may not be the first choices when you think of Classics but they sound quite good. Here they are:

Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett. At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer. Sophy sets everything right for her desperate family in one of Georgette Heyer's most popular Regency romances. When Lady Ombersley agrees to take in her young niece, no one expects Sophy, who sweeps in and immediately takes the ton by storm.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. "Cranford" depicts the lives and preoccupations of the inhabitants of a small village - their petty snobberies and appetite for gossip, and their loyal support for each other in times of need.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. In 1851 Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are dispatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knows—gently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – When the intrepid Time Traveller finds himself in the year 802,701, he encounters a seemingly utopian society of evolved human beings but then unearths the dark secret that sets mankind on course toward its inevitable destruction.

I’ll tally up the votes and announce the winner on Monday, June 14.

Lorna Sage's Bad Blood

2010-06-01T09:50:00.000-05:00

A friend called me a few weeks back to talk about a memoir that she was reading. She liked it, but was having some issues with it at the same time. No one could recall memories from when they were five years old in such detail, she complained. And all that direct dialogue! Surely no one could remember the exact words spoken from that stage of their life. Had I believed all this when I read it?

And all I could muster was an Eh, it's all just a marketing decision now, whether a book is classified as fiction or a memoir. You just have to accept it as a story, appreciate the writing if you can, rather than getting yourself worked up over whether everything in the book actually happened. There's a lot of seepage these days.

Well, now that I've read Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, the 2001 Whitbread Prize-winning memoir, I get to eat my words. This is a clear-cut memoir, free of the fictiony trappings I've grown so accustomed to in the genre over the years.

Literary critic, author, and professor Lorna Sage, who did not allow a teenage pregnancy and early marriage to keep her from obtaining an education and embarking on a career as the norms of the times would have had it, traces her own "bad blood" to that of her maternal grandfather. A Welsh vicar with well-documented vices (he kept a diary of his affairs with which his wife periodically blackmailed him), he taught Lorna to read at the age of four and took her on his round of bars: "I was the perfect alibi, since neither my mother nor my grandmother had any idea that there were pubs so low and lawless that they would turn a blind eye to children." She saw herself as being on her grandfather's side so she never told on him.

Because the grandmother! Many women of her generation found themselves married to philandering men taken to drink. "What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her lot," Sage writes. "She stayed furious all the days of her life -- so sure of her ground, so successfully spoiled, that she was impervious to the social pressures and propaganda that made most women settle down to play the part of wife. Sex, genteel poverty, the responsibilities of motherhood, let alone the duties of the vicar's helpmeet, she refused any part of. They were in her view stinking offences, devilish male plots to degrade her. When he took to booze and other women (which he might well have done anyway, although she provided him with a kind of excuse by making the vicarage hearth so hostile) her loathing for him was perfected. He was the one who had conned her into leaving her real home, her girlhood, the shop where you never had to pay for anything, the endless tea party. It was as though he'd invented sex and pain and want and exposure. She turned patriarchal attitudes inside out: he was God to her. That is, he was making it up as he went along, to spite her and with no higher Authority to back him up."

Needless to say, being raised by such a brawling pair worked a number on Sage's mother. Used as a household drudge during the War years when she and the young Lorna lived with them in the filthy vicarage, she never managed to throw off her early influences: she couldn't cook, keep her modern council-house clean, "she had a kind of genius for travesty when it came to domestic science." Her husband willingly takes on the role of realist protector to her inept dreamer when he returns at the war's end and Sage observes: "in truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had one story between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to inhabit it. I regularly cast myself in the part of the clever, unwanted child who's sent out to lose herself in the forest, but manages nonetheless to find her own way, being secretive, untruthful, disobedient, and so on and on, as they never ceased to complain. The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too -- all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side."

But the memoirs of those raised in happier marriages are often hamstrung as well. The most interesting characters in Bad Blood are certainly the grandparents, whose stories are told at the beginning. As the dysfunction dissipates in Sage's family, despite Sage's claims of virtuelessness, the lives of the characters become less compelling to read about. The story becomes more one of growing up at that particular time, in that particular environment. Sage and her husband may have broken the rules and gotten away with it, and their daughter may well have been the future, but the bad blood they're predisposed to seems to have been less influential than that of the changing environment. That's a loss for non-fictionalized memoir writing, but heartening news for reality.

Bad Blood

2010-06-01T09:38:00.000-05:00

Most stories do something satisfying with the mess of tedium and violence that is living; they give it focus and form, tone it up, calm it down, shape it tidily, fluff it or primp it or tame its wilder edges, until you have something sleek and purring in your hands, rather than the slightly unkempt beast that life usually resembles, with a tendency to charge at you out of dark places. So what is at stake, then, in the case of a memoir? A story about life itself, as it has been lived, for one individual? When a memoir writer sets out to transform life into a story, what is the guiding principle or higher intention? What kind of order is being carved out of the chaos?

In Lorna Sage’s exemplary memoir, Bad Blood, the main thrust of the narrative seems to be to show how we are composite characters, made up of pieces of the people who raise us. But the memoir also suggests that what we do with those pieces may well be quirky or downright subversive. For half of the narrative, Sage herself stands aside, in literature as in her life, to let center stage be dominated by her colorful cast of family members. It’s only towards the latter stages of the book that she makes the reader gasp herself, by nearly succumbing to her family’s demons and then magically rising above them.

What I loved most about this book were the character portraits, as Sage has a genius for taking ostensibly repulsive people and making them human in a blackly amusing way. Her grandfather offers the first, prime example in the book. A womanizer, a drinker and a dreamer, not to mention the vicar of the middle-of-nowhere parish of Hanmer, a small town lost between England and Wales, and more importantly lost still in the 19th century, he manages to behave like a criminal while feeling like a victim. He was a showman in the pulpit and a libidinous cad with other women, but at home he was ostracized with a mixture of fear and contempt. He had a ‘violently unhappy’ marriage to Sage’s grandmother, a woman who had grown up living above a grocer’s store and could never get used to the fact that she no longer had access to unearned plenty. She was a rabid man-hater, a principle she had derived from her particular experience of marriage. Much as her husband’s adulterous pursuits gave her good reason for injury, she was far from blameless, having loathed him and shown it since their earliest days together. She gave as good as she got; having found his private diaries in which he documented his extramarital relationships, she blackmailed him for a chunk of his salary to keep her in sponge cake and trips to the cinema. Sage’s mother grew up sidelined and overlooked by the violence of emotions in the household. Worse still, one of her school friends became the mistress who would cause the greatest domestic disharmony. When Lorna was a small child, her family lived at the vicarage while her father was away at war. When he returned, so imprinted by his experiences of battle that he continued to be a martinet and a belligerent disciplinarian despite the peace, her mother was finally obliged to run a household of her own, and the madness of vicarage life rushed to the surface in a series of phobias. Food, in particular, was a nightmare, as she had a terror of anything natural: joints incinerated in the oven, vegetables were set on the stove first thing in the morning and cooked to a paste. She longed to be able to feed her family with pills. But the 1950s were in some respects a perfect age for her. Processed food was starting to make its way onto the average dining table, and fish fingers represented her ideal triumph over bones, scales, and other distasteful relics of real life.

I think it was Tolstoy who said that happy families all resemble one another. But it struck me, reading Bad Blood, that unhappy families are not so very dissimilar. There are, after all, only a few elements of ordinary disorder that find themselves arranged in different permutations. There are families in which bad emotions and bad actions rule, dominating daily life; there are families in which the older generation refuse to take responsibility for themselves; and there are families who resist change, who insist to their children that nothing can improve or fade away with the mere passage of time. It was just Sage’s bad luck to be in a family that demonstrated all of these characteristics. But what Sage makes of it is never mournful or depressing. Her voice is firm, concise, appraising, elegant but down to earth. She may have lived her childhood forced to put up with other people’s madness, but her own way of keeping even is to have seen her family members without illusion, to hold herself apart in order to get some honest perspective. The lifeline that allowed her to do this was provided by books. A voracious reader and an insomniac, Sage was given license to indulge both by the local doctor, thwarting her family who felt vicarious pride in her intelligence, but also feared it as bad blood in a new incarnation. In fact, it would be her ticket out of small town hopelessness as she was to become a distinguished professor of English literature, but not before nearly ruining it all for herself in a moment of careless ignorance.

I loved this book purely for the strength of the writing, which is vivid and fierce. It is also a beautiful study in the power of repetitions and obstacles in family life. And it is a hymn to books and their ability to provide mental and emotional space in situations that are dominated by claustrophobia. Warmly recommended for anyone who enjoys memoir.

Lorna Sage's Bad Blood

2010-05-31T18:47:00.005-05:00

1933 was the year the grandparents arrived in Hanmer from South Wales. This was how the Hanmer I grew up in had been created - how life in the vicarage got its Gothic savour, how we became so isolated from respectability, how the money started to not make sense and (above all) how my grandfather took on the character of theatrical martyrdom that set him apart. 1933, he did not fail to note, was the nineteenth-hundredth anniversary of Christ's Passion: 'This is the Crucifixion Year AD 0-33. A Holy Year.'

Lorna Sage (1943-2001) was a Welsh-born British author, scholar, and literary critic best known for her advocacy for the study of women's writing. Her 2000 autobiography Bad Blood won the 2001 Whitbread Book Biography of the Year seven days before Sage died of emphysema.

I didn't finish it.

Always a tough admission for a bibliophile to make - that you failed to complete a well-regarded work of literature. Especially when you can nevertheless understand why it's had such recognition. Lorna Sage's insight is piercing and merciless. She digs deeply through layers of dysfunction with an analytical studiousness usually reserved for the anthropologist or historian. Her grandfather's diary, the story of his rise and fall as vicar and various adulteries, is thrown open to the world, his behavior and its ramifications carefully dissected by granddaughter's pen. She's so brutally honest you can't help but wonder how her family reacted to the very public revelations of Bad Blood.

I actually enjoyed Part 1, which covers Sage's early childhood in Hanmer when she and her mother lived with her maternal grandparents. (Quite frankly, I had no idea there were rednecks in Wales.) As Sage herself recalls, her time in Hanmer had a distinctly Gothic feel. The genteel poverty of the ancient vicarage, set amid the dirt paths and tumble-down farms of an isolated village, is somehow timeless. "Perhaps I really did grow up, as I sometimes suspect, in a time warp, an enclave of the nineteenth century?" Sage muses. "Because here are the memories jostling their way in, scenes from an overpopulated rural slum." Roughly half the section is taken up by the aforementioned diary, which Sage presents as the chronicle of the "original sin" that helped destroy her grandparents' marriage and forever clouded her mother's relationship to her father. <melodrama> Under the roof of the decaying vicarage, skeletons lurked in the dark recesses of the musty closets and worked their dire influence on several generations of impoverished aristocrats. </melodrama>

I love Gothic literature.

Following both her grandfather's death, Lorna, her parents, little brother, and grandmother left the vicarage for a brand-new "council house." It was then that the story lost what had made it so interesting (for me, anyway). We have departed the quaint Welsh village and landed in Levittown. "My parents, though, were moving into a new council house up the lane from Hanmer, a house designed for the model family of the 1950s ads: man at work, wife home-making, children (two, one of each) sporty and clean and extrovert." It was certainly inevitable: the Sages have progressed from the enduring folkways of Hanmer to the American-style twentieth century. And certainly, many readers Lorna's age have identified strongly with this aspect of her memoir. Says one Amazon UK reviewer:

Wickedly funny in parts, this book also speaks for a generation of women born in the Forties, who unknowingly were part of a huge social experiment. Unlike many of our mothers who left school at 14, or were educated at home by private tutors, we all went on to university, armed with our S-level distinctions and County Major scholarships, under the aegis of a visionary Labour Government. Many of us took the academic route (like Sage): Firsts, PHds, university lectureships. Others had equally creative lives. My friend, Gail Bracken, and I were the only pupils in our village school to pass the 11+ and go on to the A-stream of the local grammar school. Like Sage, we studied Latin, played hockey and read voraciously. The opportunities ahead of us seemed limitless. Sage's intelligence, resilience, beauty and courage shine out from every page of this haunting, atmospheric, almost hallucinatory piece of writing. Brilliant and brave.

The impression I get reading reviews online is that many people saw their own childhoods reflected in Lorna Sage's. For me, however, it just got boring. These are ordinary people living in an ordinary suburb. I couldn't bring myself to care all that much.

And so I abandoned Bad Blood on page 128, at the opening of the chapter entitled "Sticks." Again, I do feel guilty about it but I had other reading commitments and decided to cut my losses. Oh well. Better luck next time.

This Book and I Could Be Friends

Previous Reviews:

October 2009: Woman in Black

Bad Blood

2010-05-31T18:07:00.004-05:00

For our discussion this time around the Slaves took a step away from the usual selection of a novel and chose to read a memoir, Bad Blood by Lorna Sage. While I enjoy reading a well written memoir, and this one definitely is that, I never quite know what to say about them. A person's personal story is not quite the same as a novel so I fall into thinking things like, "wow, what a weird family guess mine isn't as weird as I thought."

I could recount for you Sage's life - growing up in a small Welsh border town in a vicarage run by her philandering grandfather during WWII, a grandmother who lived in a fantasy world where she believed she was of a higher class and deserved to be catered to so never lifted a finger to clean a thing leaving all that to her daughter whose husband was away at the war. Other than being attached to her grandfather and getting some education and a love of books from him, Sage was pretty much left to run wild. The educational system was set up to train girls who were going to get married and have children and boys who were going to be manual laborers. But Sage persevered even after she became a teenage mother. She married the child's father and together they went off to college and were saved by education. After recounting her life, what do I say about it?

I can note that Sage's family life while growing up was all about keeping up appearances. Her grandmother was always concerned about what kids she played with even though Sage was as poor and dirty as the lower class poor and dirty kids she was warned away from. Grandfather, at first excited about his living at the vicarage soon became disillusioned by the small town especially after his affair with the nurse was discovered and Grandmother, his wife, made his life a living hell. But the two remained married and he performed his duties as vicar until he died.

Once the was is over and Sage's father returned, they moved into a tiny council flat and gave the appearance of being a traditional family especially with the addition of a brother for Sage. Sage's mother would buy smart suits on layaway from the consignment shop to wear for a life she didn't have and make family dinners of pre-packaged processed meals. Sage's father worked all the time running his own business and never really seemed part of her life even though they would make public appearances as a family. Her younger brother is not mentioned much at all.

At the conclusion of Sage's memoir are we supposed to take away some lesson? Maybe how education is redemptive? Or a general feeling for the times? Perhaps there is no lesson to be learned at all. Perhaps it is only about understanding someone else's truth in order to better see our own?

If you would like to see what the other Slaves thought of the book, visit the blog. And, if you want to follow along and even contribute to additional discussion, join us in the forum.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

The Winner Is....

2010-04-11T12:53:00.002-05:00

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage - by a whisker from the Edith Wharton.

I'm thinking we will reconvene here on the 31st May for posting and discussion, yes? Let me know if I've miscalculated, and happy reading in the meantime!

Time To Choose Again!

2010-04-07T10:31:00.002-05:00

Family Life (Difficult Children)

I adore putting book lists together, and it’s always a treat to pick for the Slaves. I thought we might go for a theme this time, so here are some difficult relationships between children and their carers (synopses from the back covers):

A High Wind in Jamaica – Richard Hughes

Published to great acclaim in 1929, this classic and bestselling tale did away with sentimental Victorian visions of childhood and paved the way for later works such as Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Set against a tropical landscape and the ever-present sea, A High Wind in Jamaica tells the story of a family of English children who, on being sent back to England from Jamaica by their parents, fall into the hands of pirates. As this voyage of innocence continues, the events which unfold begin to take on a savagely detached and almost haunting quality.

Bad Blood – Lorna Sage

Winner of Whitbread Prize for biography. ‘In one of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, Lorna Sage brings alive her girlhood in post-war provincial Britain. From memories of her family and the wounds they inflict upon one another, she tells a tale of thwarted love, failed religion and the salvation she found in books.’ ‘Lorna Sage may be the proof we need that literature really can make something happen…Bad Blood tells a story about books as passports out of a childhood hell.’ Marina Warner, Independent.

The Children – Edith Wharton

On a cruise ship between Algiers and Venice, Martin Boyne, a bachelor in his forties, befriends a band of unruly, precocious children, kept together as a ‘family’ by the efforts of the eldest, Judith. The seven Wheater siblings, grown weary of being shuttled between mother and father, are eager for their parents’ latest reconciliation to last. Outraged at the plight of the ‘homeless’ and fought-over children, Boyne finds himself increasingly drawn to their enchanting, improper and liberating ways. Among the colourful cast of characters are the Wheater adults, who play out their own comedy of marital errors; the flamboyant Marchioness of Wrench; and the vivacious fifteen-year-old Judith Wheater who captures Martin’s heart. With deft humour, Wharton portrays a world of intrigues and infidelities, skewering the manners and mores of Americans abroad.

Fierce Attachments – Vivien Gornick

In this gripping memoir, Vivan Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, she grows up in a household dominated by her mercurial mother. Next door lives Nellie, a beautiful red-haired Gentile, whose disturbing, sensual presence provides a powerful antidote to the sexual repression which underpins her mother’s romantic myth-making. These women with their opposing models of ‘femininity’ continue, well into adulthood, to shape Vivian Gornick’s struggle to define herself fin love and in work. Now in her middle years, she walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, talking, arguing and remembering the past. Each is a wonderful raconteur, and as they tell and retell stories, they bring to life the dramas, characters and atmosphere of the tenement block. But what emerges from these evocations is yet another story – Vivian Gornick’s unflinchingly honest account of an attachment that remains as fiercely loving and difficult today as it has been throughout her life.

The Ten-Year Nap – Meg Wolitzer

For a group of four New York friends, the past ten years have been defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated to believe that they and their generation would conquer the world, they nonetheless left high-powered jobs to stay at home with their babies. What was intended as a temporary time-out has turned into a decade. Now at forty, with their kids growing up, Amy, Jill, Roberta and Karen wake up to a future that is not what they intended. Illicit affairs, money problems, issues with children and husbands all rear their heads, as the friends wonder if it’s time for a change. ‘Very entertaining. The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can nail a contemporary type, scene or artefact with deadeye accuracy.’ Scotland on Sunday.

I’ll call in the votes on Saturday 10th April!

W.G. Sebald's Vertigo

2010-03-31T20:18:00.000-05:00

Crossposted at Of Books and Bicycles

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. Vertigo is my second book by W.G. Sebald; I wrote about The Rings of Saturn here, and I liked that book quite a lot, even though it left me feeling a little bewildered. Now that I have read Vertigo, which is written in a style similar to The Rings of Saturn, I'm less sure what I think of Sebald. Both books are very smart and very thought-provoking, but in both books there's an emotional distance that leaves me a little cold. This seems less true in The Rings of Saturn, but in Vertigo I found it hard to remember what was going on and to keep track of my place in the various stories; this has a lot to do with the fact that Sebald moves quickly and seamlessly from narrative to narrative in a way that is disorienting at times, but I think it also has to do with the emotional distance of the narrator(s). There wasn't enough drawing me into the stories and making me care about what was going on.

Now, I love idea-driven books, whether fiction or nonfiction, so I feel like Sebald should be a favorite writer of mine. But Vertigo makes me realize that an idea-driven book needs to be emotionally compelling as well, because it's when my emotions are involved that I'm most inspired to take time to consider the ideas the writer is working with.

But to back up a bit, Vertigo has four sections, each one telling a different story, or, more accurately, a different series of interconnected stories. Each section is different, but they all deal with memory, sadness, and feelings of disorientation and uncertainty -- the kind of vertigo created by feeling all the sudden alienated from oneself and the surrounding world. The first section describes Stendhal's life, touching on his experiences in war and in love (Sebald never uses the name "Stendhal," though, calling him by his real name, Marie Henri Beyle, and it wasn't until I had finished the section and finally got around to reading the book's back cover that I realized who I had just read about). As a young boy, Beyle marched with Napolean and his army, and as an older man, he tried to remember details of that march. Sebald describes the difficulties Beyle encountered reconciling his memory with the landscape he sees as an older man, thus setting up his theme of the unreliability of memory.

From there the book moves to the story of an unnamed narrator (most likely Sebald himself) who travels around Italy, exploring history (we learn about Casanova, among others) and trying to manage his feelings of uneasiness and uncertainty. Then in the third section we follow Franz Kafka for a while (also suffering emotionally), and finally we return to Sebald as narrator as he describes a journey back to his hometown in Germany. Again, as in the Stendhal section, the narrator describes what it's like to return to formative places as an older person and to confront the difference between reality and memory.

Many of these sections describe powerful emotional experiences -- panic, disorientation, sadness, despair -- and yet it is all described in a flat, emotionless tone. Perhaps what this does is call upon the reader to do more imaginative work to fill in the blanks and to realize for him or herself just what it is the narrator is going through. Certainly the book asks for the reader's participation in figuring out how the four sections connect and what the various vignettes within each section contribute to the overall meaning. And yet I didn't feel inspired to do the work the book seemed to be asking me to do. Perhaps this is my fault, perhaps not, I'm not sure.

At any rate, Sebald is certainly doing interesting things in his writing. I haven't yet touched on the pictures that he includes -- black and white photos that relate to the surrounding text but are without captions, so the reader gets to think about the relationship of narrative and picture. Again, Sebald gives us material and then asks us to do the work of fitting it all together. The project is an interesting and admirable one, and I only wish I had fallen in love with the results.

Vertigo

2010-03-31T19:06:00.001-05:00

Vertigo by W.G. Sebald is a curious book made up of four parts that fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The book is filled with literary, musical, and art references, so many in fact that I didn't have time to look them all up.

Part one on Vertigo sets up everything else for the rest of the book. It is a biography of sorts of Marie Henri Beyle, also known as Stendhal. But I did have time to look up Stendhal's biography and Sebald takes some liberties with it but in the scheme of things it doesn't matter. What does matter is that from the start of the Beyle section we are plunged into thinking about the vagaries of memory, how they cannot be trusted, how "in reality, as we know, everything is always quite different," how memories can be displaced by things like photographs.

Memory is dodgy throughout as when the narrator that is Sebald but not Sebald eventually returns to the town in which he grew up only to find what he thought he remembered and knew about it and the people is not necessarily true. He also sees people who aren't really there during the course of his travels like Dante and King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

We also have, beginning in the Beyle section, the introduction of Stendhal's theory that love is a "protracted crystallization process." Sebald carries the argument about love throughout the book as we get the story of Cassanova's incarceration and escape from prison and later Kafka's idea of love which is almost counter to Stendhal's:

Dr. K evolves a fragmentary theory of disembodied love, in which there is no difference between intimacy and disengagement. If only we were to open our eyes, he says, we would see that our happiness lies in our natural surroundings and not in our poor bodies which have long since become separated from the natural order of things.

But these ideas about love, far from pertaining only to love, are expanded by Sebald to encompass meditations on memory and identity. Our wandering Sebald narrator who is trying to get over an unexplained difficult period in his life, seems to be trying to crystalize his memories. With crystalized memories things can become fixed including himself and the people he knows or knew, the past and the present as well become stable. But crystallization is impossible when it comes to memory because of memory's instability. Our narrator, and by extension the reader, is in a constant state of vertigo.

Kafka's exhortation to open our eyes also means eyes are everywhere in the book. There are several pictures of people but only of their eyes. The narrator visits an optometrist. He is also an art aficionado who, when studying Pisanello, the paintings "instilled in me the desire to forfeit everything except my sense of vision." But our narrator's eyes looking out a train window see only a gray landscape where there is disengagement but no intimacy and the natural surroundings certainly don't make him happy.

Vertigo is a heady book and even though it is written in very simple and unadorned language, it must be read slowly and carefully. So many pieces are interconnected and recur in unexpected places I am sure I missed quite a lot of them. The whole book is like a giant jigsaw puzzle for which you don't have a picture of what it looks like when it is done. The reader is left to sort through the pieces looking for patterns to ultimately find there is no way to fit all the pieces together, no way to come to any conclusion and bring an end to the vertigo. In spite of this I found the book satisfying. I read a library copy but I think I'd like my own copy someday so I can reread it and mark it up making annotations and cross references and taking my time to look up everything. It won't stop the vertigo, but it might produce an even more lovely whirling kaleidoscope.

This book was a Slaves of Golconda group read. I know quite a few Slaves couldn't make it through for various reasons. If you have read the book or just want to see what we're saying about the book, visit the Slaves blog and our discussion forum.

Oh, and I found a couple of good reviews of the book. One from Salon and one from The New York Times (requires free registration to view).

Cross-posted at So Many Books

The "Winner"

2010-02-12T14:07:00.001-06:00

Geez, you all didn’t make this easy! There is a three-way tie with three votes each for Naipaul, Sebald and Calvino. I thought about doing a random pick from the three but since Jodie, even though she voted for A Bend in the River, mentioned that she was also really tempted by the Sebald, I went with that as the tie-breaker, sort of like instant run-off voting.

So it’s Sebald’s Vertigo for Wednesday, March 31st.

Happy reading!

Let's Get Outta Town!

2010-02-05T11:15:00.001-06:00

I have the pleasure of offering up choices for the next Slaves of Golconda discussion. Maybe it is a symptom of cabin fever due to the winter doldrums that have descended, but all the books up for vote have some sort of journey at their center. It was hard to come up with a list of books that probably most haven’t read yet. One thing I can say though, there is a good diversity of style to choose from. I gleaned these titles from searching The Globe Corner Bookstore website a fantastic site if there ever was one and a bookstore I would love to visit should I ever find myself wandering around Harvard Square. Unfortunately their book descriptions aren’t always the best, so those I got from Amazon (click the title links for more complete book descriptions). Here’s the list:

Vertigo by W.G. Sebald. “This exquisitely composed work also undertakes a disorienting, if less somber, journey through historical and personal memory. The first-person narrator travels through Europe during the 1980s, spurred on by history's ghosts and his own melancholic yearning for adventure. Having left his base in England to explore Vienna, Venice and Verona, he concludes with a bittersweet pilgrimage to his hometown in southwestern Germany”

The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner. “Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Then a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mother's birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal that he is not quite spectator enough.”

The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic. “This novel poses some interesting philosophical questions--who are you, what are you, and what are your memories when your country has disintegrated and even your language has been politicized out of existence? That's what has happened to the narrator and protagonist, Tanja Lucic, ethnically a Croatian, formerly a Yugoslav. Exiled by the Yugoslav ethnic wars of the 1990s and then abandoned by her husband in Berlin, Tanja lands a one-year post at the University of Amsterdam. Her students, with one exception, are fellow exiles enrolled to maintain their refugee status.”

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. “Reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, A Bend in the River chronicles both an internal journey and a physical trek into the heart of Africa as it explores the themes of personal exile and political and individual corruption.”

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. " ‘Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.’ So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images.”

Cast your votes. I’ll count them up on Friday the 12th. Discussion will start March 31st.

Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper

2010-01-31T20:05:00.001-06:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles.

Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper was an enjoyable book in moments and a puzzling book in others; it’s one of those books I can’t quite figure out how to respond to, and I’m not sure another reading would help. There’s a lot I liked in the book, but what puzzles me about it is that given the books that appeal to me most, I should love this one, and it turns out I don’t, quite.

I admire its form and structure most; it’s the kind of novel where not much happens and instead we have someone sharing her thoughts with us the entire way through. The main character is called Pompey, and she writes in a way that seems spontaneous, telling us whatever is on her mind at the moment. We hear about her job — she works as a secretary for a certain Sir Phoebus – her love affairs, her friends, her family — especially her aunt, the “Lion of Hull” — and her thoughts about society, literature, and politics.

Basically, there is no form or structure (as far as I can tell), and instead it’s a loose-flowing stream-of-consciousness monologue. Novel on Yellow Paper reminds me most of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist, where there is a structure and plot, but these are so basic they hardly count and the real point of the book is the voice. The pleasure of the book comes from listening to the main character share his thoughts. That’s what we’re offered in Smith’s book — a chance to get inside the main character’s head a little bit.

However, now that I think about it a little more, I’m not sure how much we do get inside Pompey’s head. It’s feels a little more like she uses words to charm and entertain us and to tell us about herself, but in such a way that she hides as much as she reveals. Words are as much a shield for her true self, or a cloud in which to hide, as a way to reveal herself.

She certainly is amusing and charming, and she has funny quirks that make her voice very distinctive. This passage illustrates her use of repetition and rhythm and also shows how frank and open she can be (or appear to be):

Oh how I enjoy sex and oh how I enjoy it. There have been many funny things about sex in my life that have made me laugh and so now I will tell you.

There was once a woman called Miss Hogmanimy. That was certainly a queer name. That was a name you would certainly want to get married out of. But this woman was very queer and wrought up over babies and the way babies are born, and she gave up her whole life going round giving free lectures on how babies are born. And it certainly was queer how ecstatic she got about this way how babies are born, and always she was giving lectures to young girls of school or school-leaving age. And all the time it was mixed up in a way I don’t just remember with not drinking, not drinking alcohol, but just carrying on ginger beer, kola and popgass. And so well this Miss Hogmanimy she got up in our school, now I think it was our school, chapel and so there she was in this school chapel, giving a lecture with illustrating slides to young girls on how babies are born …

…to listen to Miss Hogmanimy you’d think just knowing straight out how babies was born was to solve all the problems of adolescence right off. You’d come out straight and simple and full of hearty fellowship and right thinking if you just got it clear once and for all how babies are born. There’d be no more coming out in spots and getting self-conscious about the senior prefect, nor getting a crush on the English mistress, nor feeling proud and miserable like you do at that time, before you get grown up. There’d be none of this at all if you just knew how babies are born. So there she was.

Pompey is great at this kind of amusing light satire. There is a wonderful section on women’s fiction where she describes the typical “Fiction for the Married Woman,” which is all about learning to be happy with housewifely duties. The section is funny, but there is anger underneath the light surface. She decides that describing fiction for the unmarried woman is just too painful:

I cannot tell you about the stories for unmarried girls, the ones that are so cleverly and coyly oh. And they are so bright and smiling and full of pretty ideas that are all the time leading up to washing-up. You will know how they go but I cannot tell you. I am already feeling: No, I should not have said all this. It is the ugliest thing that could ever have been conceived, because it is also so trivial, so full of the negation of human intelligence, that should be so quick and so swift and so glancing, and so proud. And you Reader, whom I have held by the wrist and forced to listen, I am full of regret for you, because I have forced you to listen to this.

As I type out these passages, I’m thinking about how much I like them and how much I liked quite a few sections of the book. The phrase “so full of the negation of human intelligence” is just great, as is the apology to the reader (I wrote about another great section here).

The problem is that in between these sections I felt impatient and occasionally irritated. I couldn’t follow the way her mind worked very well, and the picture of who Pompey is and what her life is like remained hazy. I wanted a more coherent picture to come together, even if that took a while. I love voice-driven novels where plot is not the focus, but I think I need just a bit more coherence, direction, and forward-movement than I got here.

I also just don’t know anybody who talks like Pompey does or who thinks like she does, and I found her a little hard to believe. I suspect, to be really simple and non-literary-critical about things, that Pompey and I probably wouldn’t be friends. With this kind of novel, I want to be able to imagine having a conversation with the main character, and I’m having trouble imagining it here.

So, to sum up, it’s an original, puzzling, strange, frustratingly quirky book I would have loved to love.

You can read other posts on the novel here and join in the discussion at the forums here.

Smug-pug, c'est moi

2010-01-31T13:39:00.001-06:00

Have you ever encountered a voice in fiction that's so like that of someone you know in real life that you're totally freaked out? To the point that you can't stop supplying a projected subtext to the work at hand that you know isn't warranted or at all fair? To the point that the entire novel is tainted by an unwavering sense of foreknowledge as to what you'll have confirmed about the author once you seek out the biographical material, no matter how often you tell yourself not to confuse the writer with her creation?

Such was my experience with Novel on Yellow Paper.

I'd gone into it expecting much enjoyment--I've had a fondness since high school for "Not Waving But Drowning," the one Stevie Smith poem I'd read but had never forgotten. But Pompey Casmilus is such an aural doppelganger to this, ah, real-life counterpart of mine, who continually puts me in the smug-pug foot-on-the-ground role as I'm called upon to save her yet again from drowning, that I found no charm in Pompey's voice--I've become immune over the years to such techniques and no longer appreciate freewheeling tangents meant to detract and delay us both from dealing with the problem at hand. (And that's a pity: I'm Southern and ordinarily love a good tangent.)

My apologies to my fellow Slaves. Maybe I can read this one again some day with a more disinterested ear.

Charming and Frustrating

2010-01-31T11:28:00.000-06:00

Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith was first published in 1936. Supposedly the novel was written as a result of Smith being told by a publisher when she submitted a book of poetry that she should go and write a novel instead.

Pompey Casmilus works as the secretary of Sir Phoebus at a magazine publishing company. She is frequently bored and so decides to write a novel. She writes it on yellow paper so as not to get it confused with the correspondence she types up and sends out for Sir Phoebus. We are warned by Pompey from the get go that this is not going to be regular novel for she is a "foot-off-the-ground" person and her novel will follow suit. So we can't say she didn't warn us.

The novel has no true plot. Things happen to be sure. Pompey visits a boy she likes, Karl, in Germany and is appalled by what she sees there. She decides later that she can't marry her boyfriend Freddy only to agree to marry him when he proposes and then ends up depressed when Freddy decides he can't marry her and breaks off the engagement. There are stories about girlfriends and a horse named Kismet that she rode once. There are loads and loads of literary references and Pompey has a particular passion for Racine's play Phedre. I thought at first there might be some connection between the novel and Phedre but as far as I can tell there isn't.

The novel is also liberally sprinkled with untranslated French and German and I kept thinking I should look up at least some of it but never did. I'm not sure in the end that it would really have made that much of a difference.

Pompey is both a charming and frustrating character. Sometimes she makes me laugh, like when she is telling about her friend, Harriet, and Harriet's boyfriend:

And Harriet is a darling and listens to him and comforts him for the sins of the whole world, which he must have upon his shoulders. But which were never meant for his shoulders at all. And he is suffering from this development-arrested-at-the-university. But Harriet is very adult, and is suffering from no arrestment in development.

And other times she just goes on and on and I got tired of her incessant voice however charming it is.

The book is very much like a conversation but it is a one-sided conversation where the reader, even though often addressed, is not allowed to get a word in edgewise. We are meant to sit and listen and keep our mouths shut as Pompey rattles on about whatever seems to come to her mind. She is one of those people who always has something to say about everything and keeps going on no matter what because silence would be unbearable.

I wonder if keeping the silence at bay might be the point? In spite of the incessant cheerfulness of Pompey's voice she speaks of being sad, of tragic occurrences, and very often of death. Maybe for Pompey silence equals death so she talks and talks and talks to fill the void because she is terrified of the void. I'm not sure, just a thought.

Novel on Yellow Paper is definitely a book like no other I have ever read. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Even an old New York Times book review didn't help. The book is not exactly a comfortable experience so I can't say I liked it. But I did like it in many respects and those outweigh the overall frustration and confusion.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Literary Tourette's

2010-01-31T10:28:00.000-06:00

‘For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale.
Oh talking voice, that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, how point you with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?’

Some books are all about the voice, and never more so than Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. In it, Pompey Casmilus, a cumbersome name hard to reconcile with its sly, mercurial, skipping persona, recounts her life as it occurs to her – we hear about her work as a private secretary, about her days lived tranquilly with her aunt, the noble Lion, her failed love affair with Freddy, who wants the kind of marriage and orthodox existence that fleet-footed, butterfly minded Pompey cannot countenance, and about a moving constellation of friends and acquaintances, even odd German strangers who try to pick her up on trains (‘So then he leant across, very magnetic in the eyes and said: I know everything you are thinking. Phew-oops dearie, this was a facer, and a grand new opening gambit I’d never heard before. I could only think to say: Well, well, well.’) And no matter what the subject, whether death, religion, Nazi Germany, lost love or Russian drama, Pompey’s voice plays and toys with it, casting it around in her curious combination of slang and quotation and foreign idioms, all thrown in for light-hearted if serious-minded fun. If you like the voice, this is a book you’ll love, but if you don’t like it, then as Pompey herself predicts ‘Foot-on-the-ground person will have his grave grave doubts, and if he is also a smug-pug he will not keep his doubts to himself, he will say: It is not, and it cannot come to good.’

Stevie Smith is best known for her poetry, and perhaps best of all for the poem that begins:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

I must say that whole tracts of my life would have to pass by unarticulated if I hadn’t had the phrase ‘not waving but drowning’ to hand. This is Stevie Smith’s particular talent, the throwaway remark that lands a hefty punch, a casual joke that reveals something peculiarly profound. Her poems, like her prose, are often superficially artless, catchy as a music hall lyric, bound up with a strange chameleon grace that bends them in and out of different speaking voices. Her life was notably identical to Pompey Casmilus’s – she lived a maiden’s existence with her aunt, having lost her parents early, she was private secretary to two magazine publishers for twenty years, and she had many friends whom she loved dearly and satirized shamelessly. Late on in life she discovered a talent for live poetry reading, where her girlish, charming and expert performances always won over her audience. According to critic Ian Hamilton ‘To hear them chuckling over her cute spiritual despairs was a fine bonus for her old age, and she took particular pleasure in upstaging the beatniks at the avant-garde poetry rallies she for some reason kept getting invited to throughout the 1960s.’ There was enough that was genuine and startling about Smith’s work to hook her reader, but there was a fine, laughing, ludic quality to her writing too, that faced up to hardship and sorrow but never quite took them seriously.

I really loved this book, although I didn’t always understand it, or follow Pompey’s rollercoaster of thought with sympathy. But she sounded so like my students when they are off on a riff, naïve and knowing, erudite and yet childish. I couldn’t help but laugh at her silly slang and her razor sharp perceptions. I’ll tell you who else she reminded me of, and that’s Gertrude Stein. The singing phrases and contorted yet rhythmic repetitions were so like Stein’s translations of the spoken voice into prose. But Stevie Smith’s preoccupations are far more metaphysical than Stein’s, her voice more lyric and whimsical. By the end of the novel, I felt the key to it was the ‘rhythm of visiting’ that is so precious to Pompey that it prevents her from marrying.

‘I have traveled and come and gone a great deal. I am toute entière visitor. That is what I am being all the time. […] That is the very highest pleasure to me, that it is a visit that comes to an end, that may recur, that may again come to an end and be renewed. The rhythm of visiting is in my blood.’

Inside Pompey’s mind and, therefore, on the yellow pages of her novel, there is nothing but endless visiting, as thoughts and memories arise and go away, some abandoned the moment they get too boring for Pompey to care, some cherished and waved off with regret. No topic may dominate, no emotion or mood may reign supreme. Instead, all is transience and charm and serious distraction. Just like the moment when Pompey’s grief about Nazi Germany is immediately and wholly replaced with book lust when she spots her sleepy train companion abandoning his copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We are all waving and drowning, waving and drowning, on an endless loop, Stevie Smith suggests, and if we can permit ourselves to grow accustomed to it, that very ambivalence may be our saving grace.

And the winner is ...

2009-11-21T12:03:00.002-06:00

Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith. We will discuss the book beginning on January 31st. I hope you enjoy it!

Time to choose again!

2009-11-14T17:53:00.001-06:00

It's my turn to choose a book for the Slaves of Golconda readng group. As I was thinking about what to put on the list of choices, I remembered reading about a course called "Transatlantic Women Modernists" that Fernham is teaching and finding myself jotting down a bunch of books to add to my TBR list. So I thought perhaps others would find the list interesting too. My choices are drawn from that syllabus or this list.

So please vote on which book you would like to read by Friday, November 20th, and I'll tally the results. I thought it might make sense to delay our discussion until the end of January, instead of the end of December, so the discussion will begin on Sunday, January 31st.

Nella Larson's Passing. From Amazon: "The tale is simple on the surface--a few adventures in Chicago and New York's high life, with lots of real people and race-mixing events described ... But underneath, it seethes with rage, guilt, sex, and complex deceptions. Irene fears losing her black husband to Clare, who seems increasingly predatory. Or is this all in Irene's mind? And is everyone wearing a mask? Larsen's book is a scary hall of mirrors, a murder mystery that can't resolve itself. It sticks with you."
Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper. From Wikipedia: "Stevie Smith's first novel is structured as the random typings of a bored secretary, Pompey. She plays word games, retells stories from classical and popular culture, remembers events from her childhood, gossips about her friends and describes her family, particularly her beloved Aunt."
Jessie Fauset's There is Confusion. From Amazon: "Jessie Redmon Fauset's first novel shows a prescient awareness of the black middle class's quest for social equality in the early twentieth century and of the limited vocational choices confronting both black and white American women in that era. Set in Philadelphia some 60 years ago, There Is Confusion traces the lives of Joanna Mitchell and Peter Bye, whose families must come to terms with an inheritance of prejudice and discrimination as they struggle for legitimacy and respect."
Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show. Here's the beginning of Amazon's description: "Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848."

I hope something here strikes your interest! Everyone is welcome to join us. Leave your email in the comments if you would like to join the group.

Hauntings

2009-10-31T13:38:00.000-05:00

On Halloween, it’s interesting to wonder what exactly it is that makes things scary. The Slaves of Golconda have read The Woman in Black this month and it is a classic ghost story that combines all the usual elements – a lonely, isolated house linked to the mainland by a causeway over marshes that flood, local villagers who refuse to speak of the place, tragedies of the past recounted in a bundle of letters, and a ghostly figure in black with a ravaged, wasted face who is out to seek evil revenge. It’s well known territory but sometimes even the most reliable of literary codes and conventions can fail. My son saw the West End production of The Woman in Black on a school trip and I asked him how it was. ‘It was good, and quite scary in parts,’ he said. ‘But there was one moment when the characters were supposed to be saving a dog from quicksand, and there were only these two actors on stage, and no real dog, so watching them trying to pull an invisible dog to safety was quite funny really.’ It’s a terrible bit in the book, one that has real dramatic tension, but I could quite see how it would take some acting skills to express the peril of a drowning dog on a London stage with no dog in sight. Fear, like pain, relies enormously on the power of the imagination to anticipate consequences. But unlike pain, which is best evoked by the instrument that will inflict it, fear needs a dose of the unknown to be effective. We have to not know what will happen next, to be radically uncertain, before fear can really take hold.

Having read so many other wonderful reviews of the book (and just click over to the site if you want to see them), I felt I should do something different and think about what it is that lies beneath the figure of the ghost in literature. The word ‘ghost’ itself originates in the German Geist, which is defined as a spirit, an inspiring principle. To be human is to have a spirit or a soul, and the difficulty of confronting our mortality often leads to the belief that what must remain after death is this very spirit. But ghosts in stories show themselves to be more than just any old human spirit, hanging around still once the party is over. Ghosts are always in limbo, and they induce anxiety or they set tasks for those still living. Literary criticism borrows the mathematical term ‘the indivisible remainder’ to talk about them – it means the bit that gets left over, the small, niggling element that remains when every other part of the equation is finished, after all the other numbers have neatly folded in on themselves and disappeared. Ghosts represent the indivisible remainder of life; problems unresolved, and emotions of fear, rage, horror, distress, that are too big for the grave to swallow them up. The neat and tidy borderline between life and death becomes blurred by the appearance of the ghost, as does the boundary between what is real and what is fantastic. They are there to trouble what ought to be most certain to human life by suggesting that something will always elude cooption into the clear-cut or the fenced-in. It’s one reason why ghost stories so often begin with a scene of exquisite comfort – roaring fires, a happy, assembled company, houses locked up tight against the winter chill. Even, maybe especially, in the most secure environment, fear and horror and grief can find its way in, seeping through the cracks and chinks in the best domestic armour.

But the appearance of the ghost is not always understood as an intrusive threat to mental and emotional serenity. The experience of being haunted is usually described as being indistinguishable from the experience of mental anguish, and associated with melancholia, alienation and anxiety. (Arthur Kipps in The Woman in Black has to be on his own, in the dark and cold, cut off from the possibility of rescue and invaded by a sense of despair for the black fear to really descend on him). But this is often only as an imperative to action. Many ghosts come to awaken an ethical imperative in the haunted, to ensure justice for the future as well as appeasement for the past. Whatever has been left undone, whatever cannot be subsumed into family or social history, becomes the burden of the next generation. The Gothic genre is particularly keen on this ambivalence between horror and justice. The vindictive, chain-rattling ghosts of its tales haunt family homes in order to indicate the presence of a terrible secret, usually one that threatens the legitimate transfer of an inheritance. If there’s one thing the Victorians were really afraid of, it’s that the family bloodline would be corrupted, the money diverted and the house passed on to the undeserving.

So most ghost stories, of whatever kind, press for resolution and closure. For uncovering secrets, healing old wounds and tidying up the essential human boundaries. And they derive their fear factor from the great nebulous unknown that surrounds human anguish and the unexplained pull of the past. What we don’t know DOES hurt us, often in surprising ways.

the woman in black by susan hill

2009-10-31T13:02:00.003-05:00

Malevolence. Something grand about the word, and the way it flows off the tongue. I think of Maleficent in Disney's Sleeping Beauty, the evil fairy who seeks to take the life of Princess Aurora on her sixteenth birthday in vengeance for not being invited to a party. Yes, a little over the top but that is the appeal. A villain who is powerful beyond the constraints of mere mortal existence, who has an appeal outside of the conventionally acceptable. Someone who indulges our desire for the fun of a good fright at a removed and safe distance from actual peril. The word malevolence is on my mind today not just because of Halloween, but because I just finished Susan Hill's classic ghost story, The Woman in Black, a book where the word malevolence serves as a literal refrain in the prose.

The Woman in Black is a quick and compelling ghost story that should be read in one sitting if at all possible. The book begins in the safety and happiness of a family at Christmas sharing ghost stories beneath the lit Christmas tree. However, the father in this family refuses to offer a story, not seeing the fun in such an exchange. It is soon revealed that he has real ghosts to exorcise from his past. He vows to do just this by writing the entire story down rather than burdening his family with these disturbing truths from his youth.

As a young solicitor, Arthur Kipps is given the task of visiting the remote Eel Marsh House to attend the funeral of a longtime firm client and settle her estate. At the funeral, he glimpses a woman he assumes to be a fellow mourner, but is set ill at ease by her sickly appearance and the dated clothes she wears. He feels compassion for her but does not yet suspect the reality of her presence. He feels a mild sense of foreboding as the town's people refuse to discuss the house or the circumstances that bring him to Crythin Gifford. The next day, after he is left at the remotely located house of the deceased client, he begins to realize the eeriness of his present circumstances when he spies the woman in black again, this time on the estate's old burial grounds.

"In the greyness of the fading light, it had the sheen and pallor not of flesh so much as of bone itself. Earlier, when I had looked at her, although admittedly it had been scarcely more than a swift glance each time, I had not noticed any particular expression on her ravaged face, but then I had, after all, been entirely taken with the look of extreme illness. Now, however, as I stared at her, stared until my eyes ached in the sockets, stared in surprise and bewilderment at her presence, now I saw that her face did wear an expression. It was one of what I can only describe - and the words seem hopelessly inadequate to express what I saw - as a desperate, yearning malevolence; it was as though she were searching for something she wanted, needed -must have, more than life itself, and which had been taken from her. And, towards whoever had taken it she directed the purest evil and hatred and loathing, with all the force that was available to her."

I will stop there as who really wants spoilers with a story like this? The Woman in Black is not the best book I have ever read, but it is really good fun. The story is well-delivered in a manner that lightly mirrors both the language and the ghost-telling conventions of the time in which it was set. Hill does a wonderful job with the atmospherics (you will feel the threat of the very specifically described personified and menacing fog), and, if read at one sitting, you will feel the dread than terror of the protagonist yourself. Yes, you may see the ending coming 40 pages before it actually arrives. Yes, you may be frustrated at the young solicitor's stubborn determination to return and sleep over at the house he senses contains some undetermined evil. But that is all part of the fun isn't it? Happy Halloween!

The Woman in Black

2009-10-29T20:23:00.000-05:00

I’ll admit I’m a newbie when it comes to ghost stories. I’ve read some, I’m sure, but it was a long, long time ago, and I don’t remember any details. So I don’t have much of a basis of comparison to work with here. What this book taught me, though, is that the circumstances in which one reads a ghost story matter a lot. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is only 150 pages long and probably should be read in as close to one sitting as possible. When I had the chance to sit down with this book for more than a few minutes at a time, I got caught up in the atmosphere and enjoyed myself. When I read only small pieces of it before putting it down again to go on to something else, I became too distanced from the story to feel much of the spookiness and suspense.

I did enjoy the illustrations in my edition of the book (the one pictured above); the black and white sketches helped create a sense of what the almost other-worldly landscape must have looked like. I enjoyed the atmosphere the book created more than the story itself; the story is fairly simple and straightforward and not so difficult to figure out, even for someone like me who is generally very bad at figuring things out. But Hill does atmosphere very well, and I liked the descriptions of the town where the people obviously have deep, dark secrets; the house separated from the town by a causeway that is under water when the tide is in; the absolutely unforthcoming driver who carries the main character back and forth; and the terrifyingly shifty and treacherous quicksand reminiscent of the shivering sands in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

The story is told by an older man, Arthur Kipps, who is surrounded by his happy family but haunted by memories. He decides to write his story down to try to make his ghostly memories disappear once and for all. The story he has to tell takes place when he was much younger, an innocent and confident young man, eager to make his way in the world. He receives an assignment to sort through the papers of a woman who has recently died, a Mrs. Drablow who lives on the coast and who, he discovers, no one in the town wants to discuss. While at Mrs. Drablow’s funeral, Arthur sees a woman who has seemingly come out of nowhere and who suffers from a some kind of a wasting disease. He asks about her later, but it turns out no one else has seen her, and no one will answer his questions about her. He brushes this aside and continues on with his work, but, of course, this is not the last he sees of the mysterious woman.

And then we are plunged into a familiar dynamic: Arthur knows he is getting himself into a very strange, very creepy situation, and the more time he spends at Mrs. Drablow’s house the more this feeling is confirmed, but he is determined to do his work well, no matter what the consequences. Why should he let a ghostly woman dressed in black keep him from completing his task? Why should he be afraid of spending the night in Mrs. Drablow’s house, even when he knows it is haunted?

Well, he learns why. I liked the fact that — and now I will get to some spoilers — the plot revolves around a mother who is forced to give up her child born out of wedlock. To separate a mother and child is to violate the natural order to such a horrific extent that a terrible revenge is sure to follow. Hill makes clear that the fate of women who have made “mistakes” in love may vary, but it is never good:

A girl from the servant class, living in a closely-bound community, might perhaps have fared better, sixty or so years before, than this daughter of genteel parentage, who had been so coldly rejected and whose feelings were so totally left out of the count. Yet servant girls in Victorian England had, I knew, often been driven to murder or abandon their misconceived children. At least Jennet had known that her son was alive and had been given a good home.

The community has a whole has had to pay a high price for this cruelty. Individual families might perpetrate the wrong on an immediate level, but it is a cultural sin and the culture pays.

On a lighter level, I also liked the role the dog Spider played. Spider was probably the character I cared about most, in fact. The scene where she almost gets lost in the quicksand is the most harrowing one in the book. One of the most frightening things I can think of is a dog who is thoroughly freaked out and frightened for reasons we can’t understand. Surely that dog knows something we don’t?

I didn’t think this was a great book, but I thought it was a competent one, and it makes me a little more curious than I was before about other ghost stories and about what else Susan Hill has written.

If you would like to read more posts on the book, check out the Slaves of Golconda blog and the discussion forums. I hope to see you there!

Curious

2009-10-29T18:17:00.001-05:00

I had high expectations for The Woman in Black by Susan Hill because it seems so many blogging book people loved it. Well, I must say I was disappointed. There were three things that combined to make me not care for the book:

There is so much foreshadowing and foreboding for the first half of the book without anything happening that I began to wonder how the actuality could meet the build up. I grew skeptical instead of anticipatory and the more hints of doom that were tossed out the more I doubted so that something really spectacular was going to have to happen in order for things to turn around for me. When the woman in black finally made an appearance my response was, that’s it? I tried to rescue it by thinking how I would feel if I saw something unexplainable like that, but I just couldn’t manage it.

It also didn’t help that as soon as Arthur began reading Jennet’s letters I figured everything out except for one or two minor details. Thus any kind of surprise that could have been had in later revelations was nonexistent.

I could not shake the feeling that I had read this book before even though I am 99% sure I have not. Nor have I seen the movie. This distracted me throughout the book because part of my brain was off trying to figure out why the book was so darn familiar.

So let’s leave my dislike of it behind and look instead on an essential feature of all scary stories: curiosity. There was plenty of curiosity on display in Arthur, our intrepid narrator. If he hadn’t been curious about why everyone was so tightlipped about the Drablow estate he had come to deal with there would not have been a story. And what about the noises coming from the locked room? If he wasn't curious we'd never know what was in there and the story would end. All horror stories need someone who is curious in order to move the plot ahead.

The curious, it seems to me, are generally the ones who are innocent, ignorant, or just plain stupid. In Arthur's case it was a combination of innocence and ignorance. The townspeople of Crythin Gifford were neither ignorant nor innocent because the town had been so affected by what happened at the Drablow house. It therefore took an outsider to tell the story.

You and I sitting and reading (or watching a movie) in a safe and cozy place have it easy. We can call the character who dares walk into the haunted room crazy because we have the luxury of the events not happening to us. But guaranteed, as much as we may protest and say "I'd never go in that room," if we ever found ourselves in a similar situation we very likely would find our curiosity overbalancing our fear. Because that's the thing about people, we may be utterly terrified but at the same time we want to know what is behind that door or out in the fog. Our curiosity gets the best of us. That and, perhaps, a bit of disbelief or skepticism regarding what is happening. It could not be real. Could it? Even Arthur questions if the things he saw and heard were "real" and that leads him to doubt reality altogether. Once we begin to doubt reality we are done for.

I may not have enjoyed the story of The Woman in Black but it did get me thinking a little on what makes scary work or not work. So in that sense, the book isn't a complete loss.

Cross posted at So Many Books

The Woman in Black - Susan Hill

2009-10-29T14:47:00.003-05:00

The stage adaptation of ‘The Woman in Black’ is probably one of the scariest things I’ve ever been to see. Screams came from the stalls whenever the woman in black appeared on stage. During the final scene in the haunted house, there was an inward hiss of breath, as the people sitting close to the stage tried to brace themselves for the appearance of the woman in black, who would surely violently attack Arthur Kipps as he surveyed the devastated nursery. But she never appeared, Arthur creeps around the room in silence, then flees the house and somehow that was more terrifying than anything else that has happened during the performance. Our tension was denied a release and we all kept our guard up until the end of the performance, which just meant that our nerves were more easily tweaked by the shocking finale.

This restraint and simplicity is exactly what makes the original novel so terrifying. Simple, everyday sounds and sights are perverted by the malevolent ghost who haunts the house Arthur is sent to, after his solicitor’s firm is told that a client of theirs has died. A row of small children, the sound of a pony and trap, a noise from Arthur’s childhood, all these things take on sinister associations as the mysterious lady in black uses them to show Arthur her power. These are tiny things, by themselves, but as they are repeated throughout the novel the reader learns to equate them with fear and evil, filling them with a horrifying significance and potency.

The images and sounds that Hill chooses to repeat, in order to create this building effect of horror are sparse and simple, for example the clip clop of a pony’s hooves is a crisp, ringing sound. It’s hard to describe why this particular simplicity of sound or image conjures such fear, without unpicking the years of cultural baggage that each reader loads them with, but my best attempt would be that they are pared back to the absolute core of a sound, or image and that the pure, undecorated reality of them strikes the emotional nucleus of the reader. Arthur’s narrative, which is generally full of energetic delight in nature and the surrounding landscapes, is descriptive, but sharply so, conjuring exact images that are easy to visualize, for example ‘I saw a blackbird on a hollybush a few feet away and heard him open his mouth to pour out a sparkling fountain of song in the November sunlight’. He also describes his observation of the ghostly apparitions with similar clear, piercing detail that does not over or under explain what he sees. This creates sobering moments of sinister simplicity, almost anxious tranquillity if that’s even possible, for example:

‘Lined up along the iron railings that surrounded the small asphalt yard of the school were twenty or so children, one to a gap. They presented a row of solemn faces with great, rounded eyes, that had watched who knew how much of the mournful proceedings, and their little hands held the railings tight, and they were all of them quite silent, quite motionless.'

This style of description, measured and methodical, but also evocative and precise forces the reader to fully absorb the details of the scene and crystallises the pictures in the reader’s mind, transmitting the full horror of a particular scene.

Can there be more great stuff in such a short book? Well yes, there’s the narrator Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor sent to the sleepy market town of Crythin Gifford, to venture across the marshes and sort through the paper’s of Mrs Drablow, his firm’s recently deceased client. At heart Arthur is an energetic, sensible man keen on nature and bicycling, with no time for dark hints and superstitious tales. Yet, more and more he feels the hypnotic quality of the landscape around Mr Drablow’s house, the ‘glittering, beckoning, silver marshes’ and the sadness that lingers in the house.

What struck me most about Arthur is that while initially he believes himself too sophisticated to be influenced by tales and strange occurrences, he is sensible enough to trust the evidence of his own senses and to know that there’s no point in being courageous around spirits. That’s something that sets him apart from the narrator of ‘The Mist in the Mirror’ (which I read a month ago) who is so stubborn and prideful that he alienates the fearful reader, who would quite happily run away from ghosts. Arthur is a hero the reader can identify with and feel proud to spend time with, even as he flees the ghostly woman.

Last night, thoroughly freaked and happy that Spider the dog has made it out alive I shoved this book between the heaviest two volumes I could find. At the start of the RIP challenge I said I wanted to be gloriously scared and ‘The Woman in Black’ has accomplished that. If I was Joey I’d be keeping this book in the freezer.

The Woman In Black

2009-10-29T13:24:00.002-05:00

It's been a rough October. Could someone please open the discussion, and I'll jump in in a day or two. Many thanks, Slaves!

Susan Hill's Woman in Black

2009-10-29T06:40:00.005-05:00

They had chided me with being a spoil-sport, tried to encourage me to tell them the one ghost story I must surely, like any other man, have it in me to tell. And they were right. Yes, I had a story, a true story, a story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion. But it was not a story told for casual entertainment, around a fireside upon Christmas Eve.

Susan Hill's The Woman in Black opens on Christmas Eve, a holiday when death, darkness, and the grotesque are furthest from the mind. (I'm not familiar with British Christmas rituals but telling ghosts stories seemed very odd. Maybe I'm just being Americentric?) The time of year for that stuff is October and the celebration of Halloween, which I remember one of my English professors discussing in a lecture analyzing Euripedes's The Bacchae. Many cultures, he said, have a holiday set aside as a time for release and liberation, when people can behave in ways they usually don't. (Another example would be Mardi Gras.) Christmas, by contrast, is a season for giving and politeness, when the dark or unsavory side of things comes up only as a problem to be solved through kindness and generosity. Something evil or frightening that appears in December is an intrusion, like the encroachment of the dead into the world of the living.

The Woman in Black is the story of one such a disturbance, not only between ghosts and humans, past and present, but also between fiction and reality. Arthur Kipp, who narrates the tale retroactively in old age, is a brash, young attorney who has been sent by his firm to organize the estate of the late Alice Drablow, a widow who had lived alone in Eel Marsh House, isolated out on a swampy causeway. The place is rumored to be haunted by a "woman in black," whose appearance always foretells the death of one of the town children. Kipp believes none of this, naturally. I had "the Londoner's sense of superiority in those days," he admits, further confessing to viewing the townsfolk as simple bumpkins who had unfairly demonized Mrs. Drablow.

Doubtless, in a place such as this, with its eerie marshes, sudden fogs, moaning winds and lonely houses, any poor old woman might be looked at askance; once upon a time, after all, she might have been branded as a witch and local legends and tales were still abroad and some extravagant folklore still half-believed in.

It actually sounds too good to be true: ghosts in this place? Huh, who would've guessed?

At first glance, Susan Hill seems remarkably unoriginal, but that was probably the point. The Woman in Black is a self-conscious ghost story (beginning with the title), akin to how Scream was metafictional satire. Arthur Kipps, in his attempts to understand the mystery of "the woman with the wasted face" and Eel Marsh House, constantly refers back to the fictional genre of the ghost story and, to a lesser extent, Gothic/romantic suspense. He notices, for example, how the wraithlike "woman in black" does and does not exhibit features typically associated with ghosts (she wears old-fashioned clothing but appears solid). He recognizes the abandoned graveyard and monastic ruins next to Eel Marsh House as having a clichéd Romantic ambiance and being precisely the kind of place where some Edgar Allen Poe type would enjoy sitting and composing "cloying sad verse." There is even a nod to "the madwoman in the attic," a timeworn Gothic trope used most famously in Jane Eyre.

Like Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game, Susan Hill's The Woman in Black functions on two levels: as an entertaining story and as a play on genre. I wonder if years of ghost/Gothic/horror novels and films have severely dampened our ability to come out with a ghost/Gothic/horror story that takes itself seriously and doesn't seem too much like fiction come to life. But I think the familiar elements of the genre have true staying power, and The Woman in Black is a great example of a tale that's been told yet still has the potential to thrill and delight.

The weirdest thing happened while I was reading this book. I got it from the library and it looks like the last time it was checked out was May 19, 1992. Anyway, a perfectly preserved maple leaf just fell out from between the pages! It actually freaked me out! Wonder where it came from? Was it put there deliberately?

This Book and I Could Be Friends

Envelope, please...

2009-09-16T14:56:00.000-05:00

And the winner is (by a hair) The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. Happy reading.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

2009-09-10T12:21:00.023-05:00

I've been asked to select some titles for the next Slaves of Golconda. At first I hadn't the ghost of an idea. I mean, it really was murder coming up with a theme. It was a devil of an assignment that haunted me. I think you now get the drift.

Autumn is here at last. The nights are growing cooler and soon leaves will turn their most brilliant hues - their last hurrah before...Death. Why do we love to be frightened? In what was my most recurrent nightmare, I was being chased by a frightful, demonic figure. As I tried to flee, my feet became leaden and I slogged forward knowing that right behind me breathed a beast. I was always just outside his reach. And then one night I discovered that I could run as fast as the wind with one...big...catch. I had to turn around and run backwards, thereby forcing myself to face the creature that roared and raged, ready to devour me. The nightmare never returned after that night. I had learned to face my fear, and by facing it I had defeated it. Perhaps that is why stories of mystery and suspense, of ghosties and ghoulies and monsters under the bed hold a certain goose-pimply charm for us. So, in honor of Halloween (my favorite holiday) I thought a little mystery, murder, mayhem or "things that go bump in the night" might be in order. Follow me....if...you...dare!

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THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD by Agatha Christie

First published in 1926, and considered to be one of Christie's most controversial mysteries, the Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks all the rules of traditional mystery writing. A widow's suicide has stirred rumors of blackmail, and of a secret lover named Roger Ackroyd, who was found stabbed to death in his study. The case is so unconventional that not even renowned detective Hercule Poirot has a clue how to solve it. For many Agatha Christie fans, this was her masterpiece.

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THE MALTESE FALCON by Dasheill Hammett

The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel - one of the best ever written. It is also a brilliant literary work, as well as a thriller, a love story, and a dark, dry comedy.

It involves a treasure worth killing for, Sam Spade - a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, a perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammet's coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers. (from Google books).

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THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Published in 1886, this is one of the best known of Stevenson's novels. It concerns the way in which an individual is made up of contrary emotions and desires: some good and some evil. Through the curiousity of Utterson, a lawyer, we learn of the ugly and violent Mr. Hyde and his odd connection to the respectable Dr. Jekyll. A brutal murder is committed. The victim is one of Utterson's clients, and the murder weapon a cane which Utterson had given to Dr. Jeykill. And so, the lawyer becomes entangled in the strange world of the physician who has created a drug that separates the good in human nature from the evil - and the despicable Mr. Hyde.

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THE WOMAN IN BLACK by Susan Hill

Set on the English moor, on an isolated cause-way, at a mansion in the bleak, flat wetlands - with no neighbors in sight, the story stars an up-and-coming young solicitor who sets out to settle the estate of Mrs. Drablow. Routine affiars quickly give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister than any nightmare.

Often compared to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, the book starts peacefully and builds to a frightening crescendo that, according to one reviewer on Amazon, "will haunt" you."

Are you game to take a sojourn (perhaps foolishly) into Eel Marsh House? What awaits you there? If you do, will you ever be the same? (I'm getting all spine-tingly just thinking about it.)

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Happy Halloween! Oh, I haven't learned how to link yet - but you can always Google. Shall we try for October 29th to begin the discussion rather than Halloween? After all, we might want to dabble in spirits of another sort on the 31st!!

Small Town Dreaming

2009-09-01T09:34:00.001-05:00

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'It was amazing about girls, how lofty and complacent they became when they got out in public with a man – any man – while a fellow shrank and felt ridiculous and prayed for the ordeal to end. It was amazing about women anyway, Grace over there, snickering behind her hand and Jen, stony-faced, remote, and Nettie, bending over his knes to pick up a handkerchief, fussing around in her seat, brushing her ankles against his and then hastily drawing them back, pressing her plump arms against him, then moving primly away.... God, how he hated the whole lot of them, Morry thought, the way they knew how to make a man squirm from old Mrs Delaney on down to the littlest girl. It was their function in life, making men feel clumsy and stupid, that was all they ever wanted to accomplish....'

Dawn Powell's novel, Dance Night, is concerned with various forms of rancour. Set in Ohio, in a small town sprung up around the dominant factory, it assembles a cast of naturally disadvantaged folk, adolescents, orphans, neglected wives, desperate young women and a whole lot of men who are obliged to live with the death or gradual decline of their ambitions. Everyone would get out if they could, if they had the money, or the education or the courage to do so. The railway bisects the town and the continuous thunder of the carriages is a temptation and a taunt that ultimately dies away into distant dreams. And so the inhabitants of Lamptown carry on with their diminished hopes and unruly desires, trying to squeeze what life they can out of small town claustrophobia. Smoking, drinking and doomed relationships take centre stage, with all excitement focused on the Thursday nights at the casino, where the dance master, Mr Fischer, offers classes and acts as master of ceremonies.

This is fundamentally the story of Morry Abbot, the most awkward, ungainly and emotionally disadvantaged of them all. He's a young man from a dysfunctional family in a novel that doesn't know of any other kind. His mother, the milliner of the Bon Ton hat shop, he loves, and Elsinore, in her absent, empty way is fond of him, too. But her hands-off care is no counterbalance to his father's ugly scorn. Charles Abbot is no good, a travelling salesman with a woman in every town, he returns to his family ever few months to exercise his demonic power over them. He sends a message in advance 'The Candy Man will visit you', as a threat rather than a promise. Elsinore loathes her husband and has fallen into a deep and all-consuming fantasy about Mr Fischer that keeps her locked inside her own head for most of the time. Nettie is the vicious young woman who also works in the store, and who acts like the worst kind of younger sibling to Morry, telling tales on him, ruthlessly pointing out his faults, demanding his punishment from his parents. Small wonder, then, that Morry wants out. He has a head full of romantic ambitions about becoming rich and famous and a disquieting yet compelling relationship with the young orphan girl, Jen St. Clair, who lives over the way. He's attracted to Jen because of her native courage and determination. And the worshipful audience she pays him makes him believe that one day he might amount to something.

If there's a dominant theme of the novel it's the quest for love in a strata of society depicted as being emotionally crippled. It begs the question of whether love is directly influenced by freedom, optimism, hope, potential. In the absence of these things, when self-love isn't a viable goal for many of the novel's inhabitants, love becomes something else altogether; competitiveness, lust, the engagement of fascinated hatred. There's a curious quirk that emerges time and again in Powell's characters, whose behaviour becomes a negative blueprint for the thing they think they want. In this way the extravagance of Morry's dreams match the intolerable constraint he suffers under, just as Nettie's endless carping is an expression of her desire for Morry, and Elsinore's fantasies about Fischer are there to balance out her horror of her husband. The drive for life repeatedly implodes in the protagonists of Dance Night, mutating into some dark, twisted alternative.

Whilst this may sound a sad or unappealing tale, it isn't like that at all. Powell writes exquisitely, and the ruinous landscape of Lamptown is transformed in her hands into constant action and vitality and a rich, evocative sensuality. Those nights at the dance hall are glittering jewels strung across the narrative, with the taut thrum of desire acting as the wire that holds them together. The novel shows how even under the most reduced circumstances, people find ways to thrive and to flourish, how even prisons of the soul provide security and stability and dependable company. And besides, if the inhabitants of Lamptown were free to act as they wish, they wouldn't have their dreams; if there's one thing this story insists upon, it's the power of dreams to keep us motivated, patient and hopeful.

I very much enjoyed this book, but was intrigued to find, yet again, another episodic narrative. Not a great deal happens in the novel, even though there's a death, several couplings and friendships broken and made. It's strange, the sensation of stasis that dominates, but perhaps it's a consequence of Lamptown being itself the most important character in the story. Lamptown may grow and even become prosperous, but there's no sense that it will change or develop; it won't be anything more than a one dimensional working class town that invites its inhabitants to dream and desire, to graft and to wish, and to never grow up. I was going to write a whole lot more about episodic narratives, as I've been thinking about this a lot, but I've run out of space here. So I'll devote the next post to it. In any case, I'll be seeking out more of Dawn Powell's work. Apparently her later novels are satires, and I can imagine her darkly amused voice working well in that context. Thanks to the Slaves (where you'll find several more reviews of this novel) for bringing another fine author to my attention.

Dance Night

2009-08-31T20:39:00.001-05:00

Dawn Powell's 1930 novel Dance Night has me thinking about what it would be like to live in a small town with very little education, very few job opportunities, and only vague ideas about what life is like in other places. The characters in the novel go to the movies regularly, but other than that, the chief source of information they have about the world outside their town comes from traveling salespeople and a dancing master, and the reach of these people is very small. The people who travel the farthest and would therefore have the most information are also the book's most despicable characters. So everyone else is left with vague dreams and a strong pull to stay right where they are, doing the things their parents did.

Dance Night tells the story of Morry Abbott, a young man who is trying to figure out what he wants to make of his life. He lives with his mother behind the millinery shop she owns where he feels increasingly uncomfortable with the overwhelming femininity of the place. He is trying to find his way into the masculine worlds of the factory and the bar, but his youth and inexperience leave him uncertain and embarrassed. The novel also tells the story of Jen, a 14-year-old who has been abandoned by her mother and taken in by a local family. She feels isolated and alone and misses her younger sister, left behind in an orphanage. She turns to Morry for some companionship, and he is drawn to her, attracted by her hero-worship, but also repelled by her obvious neediness.

What has stayed with me about the book is all the unhappiness and the longing and the misunderstandings that haunt just about every character. Morry doesn't know what to make of the young women who surround him who make fun of him but also, very confusingly, flirt with him. Morry's mother is married to a man who is hardly ever home, but who makes her life miserable when he is. She is also desperately in love with the dancing master, who is hardly aware of her presence. The mother's friend is having an affair. Her assistant torments Morry but also wants to be seen with him. The most important man about town, the one with all the money and property, moves through a series of superficial relationships. No one, it seems, is content, and nobody has much of an idea of what to do about it.

The townspeople do have one outlet -- their weekly dance night, which begins with a dancing lesson, followed by the dance itself. Everyone, from old to young, looks forward to these evenings as a time to bring some lightness into their lives, but enjoyable as they are, they are also scenes of sexual competition and jealousy.

And there is also the problem of work. Morry gets a job in the factory and feels proud of himself for a while, but before too long he sees how builders are developing the town, has his own ideas of what kind of houses the town needs, and joins forces with a local architect to try to make his dream houses a reality. He becomes a big man about town himself, making plans and talking them up to the townspeople, shuttling about from person to person trying to make things happen. All this is immensely satisfying for a while, but it's also precarious and uncertain, and for all Morry knows, it could collapse on him.

Morry senses that his world is changing and that there are opportunities out there -- opportunities that could transform his life, if only he could get a proper hold on them. It's a place where hard work and industry and vision can take him places, but he just can't quite seem to make things work for him. His friend Jen is also full of dreams; she wants to sing and dance on stage and to live a busy and exciting life in some big city. But the problem, again, is how to make it happen. How can these people escape?

The picture Powell paints of a small town in changing and uncertain times is a grim one, but the portrait seems so real and the characters are so compelling that the book is a fascinating read. It makes me very glad I'm fortunate enough to live in an entirely place and time. Of course, we have our own uncertain times to deal with, but I think for a lot of people, it's become easier to imagine a way out of claustrophic small towns.

Dance Night by Dawn Powell

2009-08-31T20:29:00.003-05:00

I have a picture in my mind of what Depression era America must have been like, no doubt aided by Dorothea Lange's famous documentary photographs of the period. Dusty dry towns awash in shades of brown, people with little money and few opportunities. If Dorothea Lange has given me the visuals, then Dawn Powell has given me the words. Dance Night's Lamptown, Ohio is as drab and dreary as any town that Lange may have photographed, and Powell has captured the small town claustrophobia of it in the days just before the Depression.

"But Lamptown! All railroad tracks and factory warehouses and for a
park nothing but clover fields with big signs every few yards."

"Rows of gray frame factory boarding houses on dusty roads in the east
and to the west the narrow noisy Market Street--choose your home between these
two sections."

Lamptown isn't so much a place to settle down in as a place to get out of, and most of the characters in Dance Night dream of bigger and more exciting lives elsewhere (elsewhere usually being NYC) but are caught in their tiny, oppressive lives with little chance of anything more than dreams. Dance Night centers around Morry Abbott, a young man on the cusp of adulthood who lives with his mother, Elsinore, above the Bon Ton Hat Shop that she owns. Morry's father Charles is mostly absent, which is actually a blessing in disguise as he's resentful of his son and jealous of perceived indiscretions of Elsinore. If thoughts are sins, she might be guilty, but he's mostly off the mark. He spends most of the year on the road as a traveling candy salesman, which is an ironic job for a man as disagreeable as he is. Postcards with the message "the candy man will visit you on..." mark his impending visits and are dreaded by both mother and son.

Morry spends much of his time alone in his room reading adventure stories or across the way with Jen St. Clair, an orphan, who's been adopted by the Delaneys, less for altruistic reasons than as an extra pair of hands to help with the housework. Mrs. Delaney's son runs the local bar and billiard room. Several years younger than Morry, Jen looks up to and admires him and eventually will fall in love with him. Time and again, however, Morry is run off by Mrs. Delaney who thinks of him as a good for nothing only out to ruin a nice, young girl, which in turn makes Morry angry with Jen. It's Jen's optimism and their mutual wish to escape that always brings him back. Her plans are always grand and she seems set to achieve them, the first being to get her younger sister out of the same orphanage from which she was adopted.

Morry is a senstive youth who feels a closeness to his mother that isn't always reciprocated. Elsinore has her own problems that she's always wrapped up in and will often gaze past her son as if he's not even there. He's not like other young men in Lamptown and often his intentions are misunderstood. He has ambitions, but it's always through the impetus of others that he's spurred in to action--from getting a job at one of the local factories to romantic liaisons. His dreams are always bigger and more accessible when they can be bounced off Jen, who always murmurs appreciation for them. He becomes more significant in not only her eyes but his own. Their romantic fumblings come to little yet he's unhappy when other men show her attention. They have a complicated relationship, but their lives are intertwined almost without each realizing how much.

Dance night refers to the weekly Thursday night dances held at the Casino Dance Hall complete with orchestra and handsome dance instructor who goes from town to town leading the dancers and giving lessons. It's the week's highlight for the town's residents who have little else in the way of entertainment. Things are beginning to boom for the little town of Lamptown, a town built around the railroad and filled with factories that employ most of the population. As outsiders come in to invest in the factories and in real estate, Morry becomes involved with a local architect. His grand plan involves building luxury homes for the wealthy who will settle in Lamptown and turn it into a first class town, but outside investors seem content to put up cheap, slapdash housing each one like the next, because 'that's what people want'. When the architect sells out to the outside investors, Morry is crushed and realizes finally it's time to move on.

Dawn Powell's story is gritty and doleful yet never totally despairing, and it ends on what I felt was a note of optimism. The story is told in a series of vignettes, but it still progresses in a brisk pace with fully fleshed out characters who aren't in the least perfect, and full of foibles, at times annoying, yet are complex in their makeup and in their interactions with each other. Even the secondary characters are rounded and interesting--Nettie, who works in the Bon Ton Hat Shop and is meddlesome and nosy but always prim and proper otherwise. Or Mrs. Pepper the corsetiere who's involved in a clandestine affair with the dance instructor, a married man, whom she can't live without. Each character has their dreams and desires but you doubt they will ever make much of them.

I think Dawn Powell was a talented writer, and some of my favorite passages are filled with wonderful imagery of the trains passing through to more appealing destinations fueling Morry and Jen's desires to get out.

"Morry and Jen looked quickly at each other--this was the thing that always
bound them--trains hunting out unknown cities, convincing proof of
adventure far off, of destiny somewhere waiting, of things beyond
Lamptown."

Dawn Powell got out of Ohio and found adventure elsewhere. I like to think Morry and Jen did, too.

Cross posted at A Work in Progress

Reading Reminder!

2009-08-28T22:44:00.004-05:00

Just a little reminder that the Slaves will be discussing Dawn Powell's Dance Night on Monday August 31. Feel free to post your thoughts here. I've already set up a new topic at the forum. Please join in the discussion whenever you have a chance.

If you are interested in joining the Slaves please leave a message in the comment area along with your email address. If you already have left a message and did not receive an email--I'm unable to see the email addresses in Blogger--you will need to leave it in the actual comment. I will send out an invite so you can post here, and you can easily register for the EditBoard forum--it just takes a few minutes. Thanks!

August Read: Dance Music

2009-06-19T20:55:00.005-05:00

Dawn Powell's Dance Night it is. Discussion of the book will begin Monday August 31. Anyone is welcome to join in the discussion. If you're not currently part of the group but would like to join, please leave a note in the comment area (with your email address please) and an invite to post here on the Slaves Blog will be sent. Thanks!

Time again for a new book!

2009-06-12T21:25:00.025-05:00

Iliana has asked me to select a few book choices to read next. I've been wanting to read more American authors this year, and I'm hoping these titles will be of interest to the Slaves as well. I had a hard time deciding--I wanted to choose books everyone would have access to and that were still in print. I also wanted to stick with early twentieth century women authors. I believe all these authors are respected but not much read these days. I had other authors in mind as well, but unfortunately some titles were out of print (or their books were simply too pricey). So I ended up with four choices:

Dorothy Canfield's The Home Maker

"Although this novel first appeared in 1924, it deals in an amazingly contemporary manner with the problems of a family in which both husband and wife are oppressed and frustrated by the roles that they are expected to play. Evangeline Knapp is the perfect, compulsive housekeeper, while her husband, Lester, is a poet and a dreamer. Suddenly, through a nearly fatal accident, their roles are reversed: Lester is confined to home in a wheelchair and his wife must work to support the family. The changes that take place between husband and wife, parents and children, are both fascinating and poignant. The characters are brought to life in a vivid, compelling way in a powerful novel more relevant now than when it was first published. The Home-Maker is one of those 'time lost' novels whose recovery will entertain and intrigue whole new generations of readers." Persephone Books has reissued this title, but there is also an inexpensive American edition available as well.

Edna Ferber's So Big

"Winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, So Big is widely regarded as Edna Ferber's crowning achievement.A rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges."

This was made into a movie three different times.

Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes began as a series of short sketches published in Harper's Bazaar. Known as the 'Lorelei' stories, they were satires on the state of sexual relations that only vaguely alluded to sexual intimacy; the magazine's circulation quadrupled overnight. The heroine of the stories, Lorelei Lee, was a bold, ambitious flapper, who was much more concerned with collecting expensive baubles from her conquests than any marriage licenses, as well as being a shrewd woman of loose morals and high self-esteem. She was a practical young woman who had internalized the materialism of the United States in the 1920s and therefore equated culture with cold cash and tangible assets. The success of the short stories had the public clamoring for them in book form." It was a runaway bestseller. Even Edith Wharton called it 'the great American novel."

Dawn Powell's Dance Night

"Dance Night portrays working-class Lamptown, Ohio, at the turn of the century. It's a hardscrabble place, filled with bitter factory girls whose dreams are unattainable. Every Thursday is dance night at the Casino Dance Hall, where residents escape their workaday lives, if only for fleeting moments."

Powell's novels had been out of print, but she was championed by the likes of Gore Vidal and Tim Page. Vidal wrote that Powell was a "comic writer as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens." Powell considered Dance Night her best work. It is one of her earlier novels based on her childhood and adolescence in small town Ohio and is a coming of age tale. Her later novels set in Greenwich Village are more satirical. I had a hard time deciding which group to choose from.

I'll count votes on Friday June 19. If there are no objections, would it be okay to move discussion back to the end of the summer? Would August 31st work for everyone? None of the novels are more than 350 (most far fewer) pages. This would give everyone time to get the book and read it in a nice leisurely manner.

The Slaves of Solitude

2009-06-01T19:37:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles.

I think I may be a new Patrick Hamilton fan. I found his novel The Slaves of Solitude (which is the latest Slaves of Golconda pick) really dark and sad, but in a satisfying kind of way, the kind of satisfaction you feel when you've faced something difficult head-on, without flinching. The picture the novel paints of life generally, but especially life during war-time, is of isolation, irritation, boredom, misunderstanding, and deprivation.

The novel tells the story of Miss Roach -- we learn in the middle of the novel that her name is Enid but the narrator never calls her this -- who is 39 and single and has moved from London to the outer reaches of the suburbs to escape the bombings of World War II. She lives in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a boarding house, and commutes to her secretarial job in the city. The atmosphere in the Rosamund Tea Rooms is depressingly claustrophic, and most of the novel is set here, or, when the scene changes, it's to take us to a nearby pub where people drink to escape or to take us out on the streets where Miss Roach walks, again, in order to escape.

What she's escaping, besides the general claustrophia, are her fellow boarders, one of whom, Mr. Thwaites, is an absolutely horrible person. He terrorizes Miss Roach and intimidates everybody else. Here's how the narrator describes him:

In his large, flat, moustached face ... in his lethargic yet watchful brown eyes, in his way of walking and his way of talking, there could be discerned the steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic quality of the lifelong trampler through the emotions of others, of what Miss Roach would call "the bully." That steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly's wing, with which as a boy he would have twisted another boy's wrist, with which as a man he would have humiliated a servant or inferior, was upon him as he now looked at Miss Roach; it never entirely left him.

Miss Roach hates Mr. Thwaites, but it never does her any good; he can always win any argument they have and can always get a reaction out of her and force her to answer his questions even when it's the last thing she wants. He's a nightmare -- the kind of person you wouldn't mind strangling, and who knows you feel that way and enjoys it.

Into this situation come two new people who offer a chance for some diversion and change, and possibly even improvement. Given the darkness of the initial scenes, though, we should be suspicious. One of these is Vicki, a young woman born in Germany who has lived in England for many years now, but who is still under suspicion because of her accent and her origin. Miss Roach stands up for her and befriends her, and then brings her into the boarding house, thinking that not only can she help Vicki, but Vicki might help her by changing the atmosphere in the the Tea Rooms.

The other is an American soldier who flirts with Miss Roach and soon enough becomes "her" soldier, implying that he wants her to return to America with him and help him run his laundromat business. Miss Roach is uncertain what she thinks of all this, but so little has happened to her of any interest at all, that she goes along with it in a bemused kind of way, just to see.

But her hopes are dashed as she figures out what kind of people Vicki and her American soldier really are. The rest of the novel charts just how bad these relationships can get.

What I particularly loved about this book is the way Miss Roach is such a careful observer of the people around her and the way the narrator takes time to describe the characters' words and emotions so closely. It's a story told through small scenes and little conversations, the kind of novel where tone of voice and word choice and facial expressions carry most of the plot. It's a novel about war, but not about battles and armies; in fact, Miss Roach avoids hearing war news whenever she can. Rather, it's about how war infects everything, right down to the words people use in everyday conversation and to the words on street signs:

To the endless snubbing and nagging of war, its lecturing and admonitions, Miss Roach was subjected from the moment she left the Rosamund Tea Rooms in the morning to the moment she returned at night, and these things were at last telling upon her nerves and general attitude.

Immediately she stepped forth into Thames Lockdon ... the snubbing began with:

No Cigarettes

Sorry

in the window of the tobacconist opposite.

And such was Miss Roach's mood nowadays that she regarded this less as a sorrowful admission than as a sly piece of spite. The "sorry", she felt certain, had not been thrown in for the sake of politeness or pity. It was a sarcastic, nasty, rude "sorry". It sneered, as a common woman might, as if to say "Sorry, I'm sure", or "Sorry, but there you are", or "Sorry, but what do you expect nowadays?"

This passage indicates the book's sensitivity to language, which is another thing I loved about it. Miss Roach is always thinking about the language other people use and how that language tells her something about who they are. This is especially true of Vicki, who irritates Miss Roach horribly by using out of date slang in an effort to keep from sounding too German. And Miss Roach is very sensitive about the language people use to describe her, hating it when people imply she is an "English Miss," too prim and proper and uptight to have any fun. And she can't stand it when people make fun of her name. One of the book's worst moments is when Mr. Thwaites says,

"Enter Dame Roach! ... Dame Roach -- the English Miss! Miss Prim. Dame Roach -- the Prude ... the jealous Miss Roach."

The thought that Vicki might have overheard this horrible string of words is enough to make her sick.

So, no, this is not a happy book, but it captures the hardships of wartime, and also of loneliness and sadness and solitude, beautifully, brilliantly well.

Ditto

2009-06-01T08:58:00.003-05:00

I'd like to say ditto to everything Stefanie said. I, too, found Slaves of Solitude a little difficult to get into, but once into it I found it to be a very engaging character study and a good read. Hamilton spent a lot of time developing his characters and was obviously very masterful at it. He wanted us to relate to and empathise with Ms. Roach, which I did, and despise the self-absorbed Vicki and the school yard bully, Thwaites, which I also did. As for Lieutenant Pike, I feel certain he was destined to return to America and open that laundry, but I'd be willing to bet money that the future Mrs. Pike (if there was to be one) would soon sadly discover that she was saddled with a boozy womanizer, and so become yet another Slave of Solitude. As often happens, one can be quite alone even when surrounded by people.

Muffled, Blundering and Muttering

2009-05-31T16:28:00.002-05:00

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton is about one of those really nice people who tend to get pushed around or find themselves in uncomfortable situations because they rarely stand up for themselves and who also find themselves rather alone because they also tend to be bland in the personality department. Miss Roach is such a nice person. She is thirty-nine, single, mousy but not completely unattractive, believes in propriety and manners and doing the right thing. She wants to think the best of people and so gives them the benefit of the doubt when behavior, manners, or words are rude or mean.

Miss Roach began her career-life as a schoolmistress, fresh from university and full of passion, energy and ideas. She was not prepared for reality. When faced with it, she quickly abandoned all her idealism. As a schoolmistress she was liked but not very good and eventually she ended up working for a publishing firm in London. As the book opens it is the tail-end of 1943 and Miss Roach is living in a boardinghouse in a small town outside of London because she is terrified of the bombs. She takes the train into London for work and returns to the boardinghouse at night and generally tries to avoid thinking and reading about the war as much as possible.

The boardinghouse, known as the Rosamund Tea Rooms, presents a certain kind of hell for someone like Miss Roach. Ruled over by the petty tyrant Mr. Thwaites who has chosen Miss Roach as his special victim, it is a dreary and dull place that drags a person down. The other boarders try to provide support to Miss Roach as Mr. Thwaites pokes and prods and takes verbal swipes at Miss Roach during meals and tea, but they are all ineffective. Why Mr. Thwaites has chosen Miss Roach to bully is a mystery. We can only surmise that it is because he knows he can. Miss Roach cannot or will not defend herself, get angry, talk back, ignore, or counterattack. She is too nice.

Into Miss Roach's dull life comes the American, Lieutenant Pike, stationed in town while the Allies build up their forces for a second front in the war. Lt. Pike drinks too much but takes a shine to Miss Roach who neither likes nor dislikes him but goes along because it is better than not going along and because it is something that breaks the monotony of her days. But Lt. Pike is nothing compared to what's about to come along.

Miss Roach, being the nice person she is, made friends with a German woman, Vicki Kugelmann, when she defended the woman from anti-German attacks from some people in the town. Vicki had lived in Britain long before the war started and was a British citizen. Miss Roach felt it her obligation to defend the woman who seemed like she was unable to defend herself, and who Miss Roach imagined, could use a friend. So they met for coffee on Saturday mornings and sometimes for the occasional dinner. Miss Roach, thinking she was helping Vicki, suggested that Vicki come live at the Rosamund Tea Rooms. But when a room comes open and Vicki moves in, she turns out not to be the shy, needy person Miss Roach had imagined and Vicki had played up. Instead, Vicki turns out to be a bitch.

Miss Roach doesn't know what to think at first so she tries to overlook all the evidence that Vicki is not like she supposed. One thing leads to another and finally Miss Roach is pushed into a corner and has to fight back or lose every last shred of self-worth. What happens? What does Miss Roach do? Does Vicki get her comeuppance? And what about Mr. Thwaites? I won't say. You have to read the book to find out.

Overall I enjoyed the book. It's not exactly a page turner and took awhile before I felt engaged by it, but it was worth the time. It's a quiet book which is surprising for something set in the middle of World War II. But books set during a big war don't have to be about fighting and death and depravation. Certainly the war affected the lives of the characters, but the events of the war are not central to the book. There might be bombers flying overhead but people are people and life goes on. The bullies and bitches do their thing and the nice people do theirs.

Given the book's title, I could go on about how the characters are "slaves of solitude," and it would be true. Each of them are wrapped up and separate from each other. An image from early in the book sums it up nicely. Miss Roach is on her way home from the train station at the end of the day. People carry flashlights to find their way around in the dark because of the enforced blackout conditions. As Miss Roach makes her way along the river to the boardinghouse she observes,

She heard a couple of frozen people muttering and blundering behind her, and another couple muttering and blundering ahead of her. A solitary firefly-holder came blundering by her. The earth was muffled from the stars; the river and the pretty eighteenth-century bridge were muffled from the people; the people were muffled from each other.

Muffled, blundering, and muttering pretty much describes all the characters in the book in one way or another. It sounds pretty depressing, and it could be, but Hamilton offers something bigger than a firefly glimmer at the end of the book, a purification of sorts that allows a couple of the characters redemption from boardinghouse hell, a brief respite before the hell of war is let loose over London, on the beaches of Normandy and in the sky over Japan.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Next Book For Discussion...

2009-04-19T17:47:00.003-05:00

It looks like our next book will be The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton.

Let's begin posting our reviews and discussing on Sunday, May 31. If you aren't currently a member of the group but would like to participate, please let us know in comments--we'll send you an invitation so that you'll be able to post on the blog.

Thanks for voting and looking forward to the discussion!

Time to Choose A New Book

2009-04-10T22:05:00.011-05:00

For our next book selection I turned to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and Classics for Pleasure to get some ideas. So a bit of a mix with a classic, a short story collection, book in translation, etc. I hope you'll find something here you like. Here are the choices:

If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino (259 pages). This is a novel about the urgency, desire, and frustration bound up in the practice of reading novels. The novel, which is nonlinear, begins with a man discovering that the copy of a novel he has recently purchased is defective, a Polish novel having been bound within its pages. He returns to the bookshop the following day and meets a young woman who is on an identical mission. They both profess a preference for the Polish novel. Interposed between the chapters in which the two strangers attempt to authenticate their texts are 10 excerpts that parody genres of contemporary world fiction, such as the Latin-American novel and the political novel of eastern Europe.

Life Like by Lorrie Moore (192 pages). In these eight exquisite stories characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can’t quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.

Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett (320 pages). At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?"

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (256 pages). Iris Murdoch’s first novel is a gem – set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets with frantic philosophers. Its hero, Jake Donaghue, is a likable young man who makes a living out of translation work and sponging off his friends. A meeting with Anna, an old flame, leads him into a series of fantastic adventures. Beneath the surface of the narrative lies a wealth of philosophical questioning: Murdoch contests existential ideas of freedom; she asks what it means to be in love; and she rigorously questions what makes a good writer and what constitutes good art.

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton (272 pages). England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter. Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That's when Miss Roach's troubles really begin. Recounting an epic battle of wills in the claustrophobic confines of the boarding house, Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude, with a delightfully improbable heroine, is one of the finest and funniest books ever written about the trials of a lonely heart.

Let's leave the voting open until Thursday (16th) and I'll let you know which book "won" on Friday, April 17. Our discussion will then start on May 31st.

The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

2009-04-06T10:52:00.002-05:00

I've cross posted my thoughts from dgr scribbles but am not used to the blogger site so my apologies if this is in the wrong font or you'd prefer not to have links back to my site, I'll quite understand and please could someone edit accordingly:-)
Many thanks
Lynne

The arrival of a book by Stefan Zweig is always a time for celebration chez dovegrey ever since I first discovered his writing the day I decided to explore some of the authors whose books had been banned in Nazi Germany. I think this in turn was a trail that had opened up after I had read Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi. It sounds like an odd reading trail to follow but I was intrigued, what had been so controversial about these books and their authors, I wanted to know.
I had unwittingly already read books by a few but I had never heard of Stefan Zweig and so began that little addiction and Pushkin Press to the rescue with The Royal Game, Twilight, Moonbeam Alley and Fantastic Night & other stories read in quick succession.
The Post Office Girl, translated by Joel Rotenberg, arrived from Sort Of Books, one chapter and I was instantly in it for the home run. The setting is perhaps classic Stefan Zweig, mittel Europe between the wars and Christina the Post Office girl of the title living a dull, miserable existence in rural Austria. Working in the Post Office by day and caring for her invalid mother the rest of the time Christina Hoflehner's life is a grey and joyless relentless grind until a letter from her mother's sister, who has fared altogether better in the marriage and wealth stakes, invites Christina to share a fortnight's holiday with them. Klara has suffered sudden onset pangs of guilt at her serial neglect of her sister over the years and this gesture towards her neice will surely make amends as she and gruff husband Anthony van Boolen travel from the US for a relaxing high society sojourn at a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps.
Christina's is the generation in Europe that stood to lose the most from the Great War and the sense of resentment and dissatisfaction is profound in this book,

'Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless, and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete...the war stole her decade of youth. She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness.'

By the age of twenty-six Christina has already prepared to hunker down and accept her lot, until of course she samples life at the glittering Palace Hotel. Exposed to the silken smooth world of money and luxury, where the furniture gleams and the carpet suspires Christina steps in to sample a way of life that she eventually realises will change her forever.
It was always going to be a moment of extreme cruelty when the clock struck midnight and this Cinderella is catapulted back into the harsh reality of life at home, the cramped, musty little box-like garret flat smelling of vinegar and a lifetime of the dull day job and caring for her dropsical mother with the bloated feet.
The happily ever after bit will surely rely on the entrance of a cheekily handsome prince on a white charger galloping in stage left, so when the only man on the horizon is Ferdinand, a thin, bitter and angry down-at-heel survivor of the Russian front, wearing not a gold encrusted doublet and a pair of natty hose but a worn-out inverness coat, you start to worry for poor Christina and wonder quite what the rescue plan might be.
Right that's it, no more plot, enough is plenty, not a word more.
Stefan Zweig was a great friend of Freud so expect plenty of 'who am I really' deliberations and some wonderful character development in Christina but I also came away with a very clear idea of the despair, blame, anger and hatred that fuelled and propelled a generation towards another war. The portents couldn't be outlined with more precision as Stefan Zweig focuses on the inequalities and injustices that pervaded people's lives. If you know anything about Stefan Zweig's personal life also be prepared to identify other more sinister portents about which I will say no more either.
This was the archetypal page-turner of a book, the best I have read by Stefan Zweig to date even, people I cared about and just had to know how they fared so highly recommended.

Cross posted from www.dovegreyreader.co.uk - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 | Permalink

The Post-Office Girl

2009-04-01T19:55:00.001-05:00

What stands out most to me about Stefan Zweig's novel from the 1930s, The Post-Office Girl, is rage. The novel starts off calmly and meticulously, however -- extremely so, with careful and precise descriptions of the Austrian post office where the main character Christine has worked for many years. Every item has its proper place and every item, down to every pencil and every sheet of paper, has been accounted for. The governmental bureaucracy knows everything about this place and controls everything. Stuck in the post office for the foreseeable future, Christine feels like an old woman with nothing to look forward to in her life. The tragedy is that she is only 28.

Into this stultifying atmosphere comes a surprise telegram, and it is one that will transform Christine beyond all recognition. It is from her aunt who wants Christine to join her at a posh Swiss hotel for a two-week vacation. Christine is initially reluctant -- what's the point? she thinks -- but she goes and what she sees there is a revelation. She has known she is poor -- she has spent her life barely scraping by trying to support herself and her sick mother -- but she realizes it now in a visceral way. She sees so much money so carelessly spent, and she realizes that just the tiniest fraction of the money swirling around her would have set herself and her mother up comfortably for the rest of their lives. Quickly, she's caught up in the social whirl, enjoying the attention brought by her youth and beauty, augmented by the fashionable clothes her aunt buys her.

She has become a new being, and it now seems impossible to return to the old life. But, of course, she has to return, and it's here that the anger starts to seep in. Why should Christine slave her life away? Why should some people have so much money and others so little, for no discernable reason except for luck? What's the point of working so hard, day after day, for nothing but the chance to keep doing it until the day she dies?

It's largely the war, World War I, that has caused Christine so much suffering. By the time we meet her in the novel, she has achieved a small amount of stability, but the path that led to this point was very rough. She has had to watch family members die as a direct result of war and has had to push herself to the breaking point just to survive. And now she looks around her and wonders just what the point of it all is.

The second half of the book takes us in new directions that I don't need to describe here, but it follows the ideas the first half introduces to their logical -- and chilling -- conclusions. One of the things I admire about the book is the way Zweig takes Christine through some remarkable transformations, and yet they all feel plausible and right. I was willing to believe everything that happened, even the startling conclusion.

The book asks some difficult questions -- about inequality, about struggle, and about whether the value we place on hard work and honesty really makes any sense in a world where those who deserve happiness often don't get it and those who enjoy wealth and comfort often haven't done anything to earn it. The book also describes the devastation war can bring to people who never wanted war in the first place and who had no say in the matter. There's a lot of anger here, but every bit of it seems justified.

A Study Of Self

2009-04-01T09:15:00.001-05:00

As a first time Slave, I wasn't sure how the posting went. Here is a comment I made to Litlove's original post: (I think I get the hang of posting now.)

Your review of the artist as an artist is excellent. I knew he had committed suicide, but your review provided me with another dimension to the man behind the artist. (I do not necessarily agree with you that a belief in the humanity of the human race is seldom in evidence. But, that's a discussion for another day.) As for the book, I was impressed that Zweig could write about despair as clearly and grippingly as he could about joy...euphoria even. He was obviously a master at painting emotion. However, Zweig describes only the zenith and the nadir of fortune - but nothing in between. Although I truly found it hard to put this book down, there was something disturbing, almost annoying, about both Christine and Ferdinand. In varying degrees, what began for me as feelings of sympathy and empathy for each, eventually turned rather sour. I began to believe that Christine's apparent self-consciousness was rather more a self-absorption, not unlike the young wealthy crowd she so much aspired to. Whether you believe yourself to be entitled to the heavy cream at the top, or whether you feel forever destined to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop - it's still all about you. Teaming up with Ferdinand could not have been a worse blend for her - he saw the world as bleakly as she did. The best solution these two hopeless people could devise was suicide or larceny. Either way suggests a lack of effort and responsibility. Certainly poverty and failed dreams are difficult to overcome, but not impossible. We don't have to look too far to find someone who has it worse than we do. In the end, I just wanted to tell them to grow up and stop complaining about how awful life was treating them...to "do something about it." Something more productive than shooting themselves. If I had not already heard that Zweig took his own life, I would not have been surprised to learn of it after reading this novel. There is much about despair here, with the only hope presented being death or a life of dishonesty and fear. I loved the work itself; I am not fond of the message I found in it.

The Post-Office Girl: Something is Gone Forever

2009-03-31T21:23:00.000-05:00

Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular writers of the first half of the 20th century and the most-translated German-language author of the 1920s and 30s, completed two manuscripts and sent them off to his publishers shortly before he and his second wife, living in exile in Brazil during World War II, took their own lives. The Post-Office Girl was found among his unpublished papers, "in considerable disarray," according to the eventually published Rausch der Verwandlung's afterward.

I mention this first since The Post-Office Girl as it is concludes in an open-ended manner; Zweig may well have intended a third part to the story that wouldn't leave the reader guessing.

The portion of the novel that we have tells the story of a pair of young people who have had their lives profoundly diminished by the Great War and its aftermath.

Christine, the postal clerk in an Austrian backwater, ekes out a living, sharing with her invalid mother what presumably would have been an attic storage room in earlier times --the war has left a housing shortage in its wake and few jobs. She was a lively, happy girl of 16 when the war started; twelve years later she is without father, brother, expectations, or youthful desires. When Christine is unexpectedly summoned to vacation in the Swiss Alps with an American aunt she's unaquainted with, she approaches the trip as "just more work and responsibility."

"She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness," the narrator tells us.

It is only upon arrival, after her aunt has styled her hair, outfitted her in becoming clothes and jewels, that Christine realizes that life has pleasures to offer and she transforms into a popular carefree beauty, Christiane von Boolen, with "sheet lightning in her blood," a presumed aristocrat who only has a snatched moment here or there to wonder who she really is.

Midway through the vacation, Christine's humble roots are exposed and her aunt, afraid that her own sordid past will be uncovered and her reputation damaged, abruptly tells Christine that in the morning she's being sent back to the provinces.

All night Christine sits motionless in the chair by the table, her thoughts revolving dully around the feeling that everything is over; not an actual pain so much as a drugged awareness of something painful going on deep down--the way a patient under anesthesia might be aware of the surgeon's knife cutting into him. She sits there in silence, empty eyes on the table, but something's happening, something beyond her benumbed awareness: that new creature, the manufactured changeling that had taken her place for nine dreamlike days, that unreal yet real Fraulein von Boolen, is dying in her. . . . The gloves on her hands, the pearls around her neck, everything belongs to that other one, that murdered doppelganger Christiane von Boolen who is no more, yet lives on. . . . All she knows is that something has been taken from her, that now she must leave that blissfully winged self to become a blind grub crawling on the ground; knows only that something is gone forever.

Life back home is worse than before; she knows what she's missing. Visiting her sister in Vienna, she meets Ferdinand, her brother-in-law's war buddy.

Ferdinand also knows what he's missing. Born to wealth that's turned to ashes, he wasted his own youth in the war and then in a Siberian prison, losing the use of two of his fingers in the process. His dreams of becoming an architect will never come to fruition; he cannot find more than odd jobs and the government has its ways of assuring he'll never receive any disability or financial assistance.

Drawn together by shared bitterness and lack of hope, kindred spirits Christine and Ferdinand eventually decide to take their own lives, but Ferdinand realizes they have another way out of their meaningless lives--if they're willing to risk failure:

. . . "Christine, we have to start thinking of everything now, I told you it won't be easy, the other way would have been easier. But on the other hand I've never known, we've never known, what it is to be alive. I've never seen the ocean, I've never been abroad. I've never know what life is--always thinking about what everything costs means we've never been free. Maybe we can't know the value of life until we are."

Whether Christine and Ferdinand take the risk, or in an unwritten portion of the book develop moral compuntions to counteract how justified they feel in acting, the reader just doesn't know.

The Post-Office Girl was my first exposure to Stefan Zweig, but it won't be the last. I'm thinking I may give his fictionalized biography of Marie Antoinette a try. . .

(cross posted at pages turned)

The Cinderella Who Wasn't

2009-03-31T19:14:00.001-05:00

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig is a Cinderella story of sorts except she isn't rescued from her poverty after the clock strikes midnight and all the beautiful things are lost.

Christine, the post-office girl, is whisked away to a posh resort in the Swiss Alps on the invitation of her aunt who is feeling guilty for not helping her sister's family during World War I. Christine gets a glamor makeover, new clothes, and a borrowed aristocratic reputation. For eight days she gets to experience the freedom and pleasure that money brings. Her exuberance and gratitude combined with her artlessness make her a popular breath of fresh air among the young and the old. But the petty jealousy of a "friend" who reveals to all that Christine is really a penniless girl from a village near Vienna, prompts Christine's aunt to hastily send Christine back home.

The aunt, you see, is an imposter herself. She used to be as poor as Christine but through planning and scheming and the patronage of wealthy men, she was able to remake herself and land a wealthy Dutch husband who has no idea about her true past. Terrified that Christine will inadvertently lead the unforgiving spotlight of money and class to focus on her, she uncompassionately sends Christine home offering her nothing but a bald-faced lie.

Christine is devastated. She sinks into a deep depression until she is revived by Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran she meets through her brother-in-law. Ferdinand understands her loss and longing. Together they find a certain comfort in their mutual unhappiness and hopelessness which leads to a surprise ending.

Reading Christine's story is like watching the Wizard of Oz where everything is black and gray at the beginning and end, but in Oz, everything is in glorious technicolor. But technicolor turns out to be like crack and it is surprising how fast Christine becomes addicted. Her aunt's intended kindness in the invitation to the Alps turns out to unintentionally be even more cruel than neglecting her family during the war when she could easily have helped. The really sad thing is that Christine could probably have found some modicum of happiness had her aunt never sent the invitation. In Christine's village there was a man, equally as poor as her, who shyly but truly loved her.

The Post-Office Girl was a good book. It was not an uplifting read though. But are books about class, money and morals ever uplifting especially when they are about a person who learns what she is missing?

The Post-Office Girl

2009-03-31T18:24:00.002-05:00

I finished The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig last night and the first words out of my mouth were “wow.” I didn’t expect that ending at all but it was perfect and has made me think constantly about the characters as I went about my day today. What did I think happened afterward? There are so many scenarios I can envision but let me start at the beginning so you’ll know what this book is about.

Christine Hoflehner lives in a small town in Austria and works for the post office. Every day it’s the same, work to make a meager living, take care of her invalid mother and live with nothing to look forward to. The Great War has left the family without some of their family members, without money and without dreams.

It seems that all around life is the same for everyone in the small town. Every thing is regimented and Christine’s days all fall into a pattern.

“Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thousands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the canceling desk with the same swiveling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceler onto hundreds of thousands or millions of stamps with the same brief thump. Probably the wrist will even learn to function better and better, ever more mechanically and unconsciously, detached more and more completely from the conscious self. The hundreds of thousands of letters will always be different letters, but always letters. The stamps different stamps, but always stamps. The days different, but each one lasting from eight o’clock until noon, as the years come and go, always the same, the same, the same.”

Can’t you just feel the desperation at the monotony? Christine’s fortune is about to change though when she receives a telegram from her aunt, who due to a scandal had left the country and stayed out of touch for many years. Aunt Claire is now married to a wealthy man and as they take their vacation in the Swiss Alps they invite Christine to join them.

At first the young woman is a bit hesitant to go but upon arrival and after she is taken under her aunt’s wing, and is shown how to dress and how to live a different kind of lifestyle, a new Christine begins to emerge, a confident young woman who is finally living life.

“In her giddiness, unable to imagine that everyone isn’t burning with enthusiasm, isn’t in a fever of high spirits, of passionate delight, she’s lost her sense of balance. She’s discovered herself for the first time in twenty-eight years, and the discovery is so intoxicating that she’s forgetting everyone else.”

Unfortunately Christine’s newfound exuberance will be cut short. A bit of vile gossip and before she knows it, she’s back in her old life. But having tasted something new and so wonderful will only make her former existence even more unbearable to endure. The second part of the story is filled with all the hopelessness and bitterness that fill Christine’s thoughts but strangely this doesn’t feel like a depressive story. What happens next is that there is quite a bit of suspense as Christine meets a young man who is also filled with the same kind of desperation she feels and their lives will take some unexpected turns.

I really loved this story for the writer’s ability to capture such highs and lows in the characters and for giving us a picture of what Europe must have been like for many people after the Great War.

I have to say that in the couple of years that we’ve had this online book discussion group going on we’ve read some amazing literature and every year at least one of the Slaves choices ends up on my Favorites of the Year list. I’m sure this book will be on it for ’09.

Cross Posted at Bookgirl's Nightstand

Stefan Zweig

2009-03-31T11:47:00.001-05:00

In lieu of a review as I mismanaged my reading schedule, a few biographical details about Zweig. Stefan Zweig is a little-known author these days, although when he was alive and at the height of his fame, he had to barricade himself in his house at Salzburg to keep his legion of fans at bay. His books were translated across the world, although he was better known for his biographical writings (on Erasmus, Balzac, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, Kleist, Tolstoy, Dickens) than his fiction. He was also a friend of any number of famous cultural figures, including Freud and Rilke – after a conversation with Rilke he wrote ‘one is incapable of any vulgarity for hours or even days’. This excitable, idealistic Zweig is much in evidence in his youth. As the rich second son of a millionaire textile manufacturer, he was able to devote himself to the causes that interested him, and art was the guiding star of his life. He had joined with a group of aesthetes in Austria during his teenage years and was devoted not just to the concept of art but to a vague, if stirring, political belief in a united, harmonious Europe. He declared himself not Austrian, but a European, and in this optimistic frame of mind reported that ‘The world offered itself to me as a fruit, beautiful and rich with promise.’ It seems scarcely conceivable that less than thirty years later, he and his second wife would die in a joint suicide pact.

Part of the problem – although by no means all of it – was that Zweig was Jewish. Initially he didn’t think this counted for anything. His family was not religious, but they were prosperous, educated and assimilated. His memory of his youth was entirely free from anti-Semitic slight; indeed his race was something that he entirely discounted. Not that he was ignorant of the Jewish question, rather he dissociated himself from the Ostjuden, the Eastern Jews who were migrating from a hostile Russia into what would eventually become an even more dangerous Western Europe. Such distinctions were not destined to last. By 1933 the Nazis were burning his books, in 1935 an opera by Richard Strauss, The Silent Woman, was closed down after only two performances because Zweig had written the libretto. In 1938, the Nazis destroyed his library in Salzburg, but by that point, Zweig had been driven into exile in London. He had begun to believe that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was directed at him personally and he never really recovered from this paranoia.

But other discontents were stirring. It was in the thirties that his 20-year marriage to one of his fans, Friderike (they met through the letters that she wrote to him), broke down when he fell in love with his new secretary, Charlotte Altmann, who was a clichéd twenty-seven years younger. In her biography, Friderike explained how Zweig longed for space and for silence to create, something that her two children and her sociable lifestyle prevented him from enjoying. Zweig begged for a divorce on the grounds that he wanted to regain his ‘student’s freedom’, although within the year he had married Lotte. It might have been peace that Zweig was after, but given the brief interlude between this point and his suicide, peace regained clearly didn’t hit the spot. Instead it might be a blissful return to a former point in time that really appealed, nostalgia for his student days confused with a longing for a youthful, optimistic state of mind that he could no longer summon up. It would not be the first time that a man, feeling something had turned inexorably sour in his life, decided that a change of woman might provide the answer.

If it wasn’t love that went wrong on Zweig, if that was a smokescreen for a deeper discontent, we might look instead to the strongest guiding force in Zweig’s life, which was his belief in humanism. Humanism is a kind of moral philosophy, a perspective on life that affirms the dignity and worth of all people and the supreme belief in human intelligence as the source of all solutions to the problems that beset mankind. It proposes the need for a universal morality that would guide and inform all human conduct, but chooses not to trust to the supernatural or the spiritual for answers. The ultimate goal of humanism is to make life better for all individuals, but it doesn’t necessarily believe that is easily achieved; instead it looks to the community to work together to provide support and sustenance.

There is something beautiful and idealistic and almost noble about the humanistic stance. It’s also managed to be the dominant moral philosophy in the Western world between the Renaissance and, oh around about the end of World War II. All those years, people believed they held the key to the good life in their hearts, if they looked carefully enough. They believed as well that life was continually getting better, and that eventually, man would reach a state of perfection. Humanism was also deeply bound up with culture and the arts, the finest expression of humanist knowledge. Humanism had its problems, undoubtedly, not least of which was that this was a philosophy created by, held by and explored by men; half the world was rigorously excluded from its all-encompassing claims. But there is a nobility to it that our modern day philosophies lack. Now we’re in the era of post-humanism – the belief that the answers to all our problems lie beyond the human domain, in the world of technology and science. We’ve given up on ourselves as the agents of our own rescue.

Stefan Zweig believed in civilization – that beautiful faith in intelligence and artistic understanding to promote harmony, insight, communal well-being. He believed that there was a natural understanding between people of similar education and ability. He was thrilled to be part of an intricately interconnected group of artists whose mutual acclaim he assumed to be second nature. We might call him naïve, as much artistic achievement was ever fueled by jealousy, rivalry and enmity. But there is a fragility that Zweig always identified in his fictional characters as well as his biographical ones, a recognition that civilization might not always be the solution, that one might be too nice, too charming, too civilized for one’s own good. It provided the real spike of interest in his work, but it may also have tormented him in reality. The jury is out as to why Zweig and Charlotte took their overdose of barbiturates, in what should have been a peaceful exile in Brazil in 1942. Zweig ought to have had some inkling that the Nazis were not going to be allowed to overrun Europe as he feared. But the Second World War destroyed, for many artists, some fundamental belief in the humanity of the human race, and the possibility that truth and beauty might make a better world. Certainly those beliefs have been rarely in evidence ever since. The enormity of such a loss might well be behind the enigmatic words Zweig wrote in his final note, thanking the people of Brazil and saluting his friends:

‘May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.’

The next book for discussion will be. . .

2009-02-18T18:25:00.002-06:00

Stefan Zweig's The Post-Office Girl.

Let's begin posting our reviews and discussing on Tuesday, March 31. If you aren't currently a member of the group but would like to participate, please let us know in comments--we'll send you an invitation so that you'll be able to post on the blog.

Time to select the next book!

2009-02-11T08:18:00.002-06:00

Litlove asked me to prepare the next round of possibilites for the Slaves and I present them to you here. I don't believe there's any overriding theme to my selections other than that I'd like to read all of them this year and would love to have some company to discuss them with when I do.

Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia

One reviewer called this "a kind of post modern, sci-fi Bildungsroman or novel of education." Another compared it to Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. Sputnik Caledonia's the story of an imaginative kid who wants to become Scotland's first cosmonaut who later finds himself living in a dystopian world with black holes. Crumey won the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award for Sputnik Caledonia. It's yet to be published in the U.S., but it's readily available in paperback via The Book Depository. I have to say it just looks like fun--of the head exploding variety--especially if Stefanie will help us with the physics.

Janet Hobhouse's The Furies

According to the publisher, "The four generations of women described in Janet Hobhouse's autobiographical novel rival the 'Furies' of Greek mythology in their capacity to love and hate with vengeance. At the heart of the story is a mother/daughter conflict that at times revolves around an innocent love affair between romantic co-conspirators and at others is a bitter and deforming contest of wills." Hobhouse died of ovarian cancer while still editing The Furies. Its been on my tbr list for years.

Doris Lessing's The Sweetest Dream

Doris Lessing substituted The Sweetest Dream for the third volume of her autobiography, although she claims no parallels to actual people in the novel. London in the 1960s, the nuclear disarmament controversy, contemporary Africa, and, according to reviewer Laura Miller, a merciless detailing of "the hypocrisies and selfishness of the party members and barricade manners" Lessing "knew during her days among Britain's radicals."

Stefan Zweig's The Post-Office Girl

And another NYRB classics reprint, of which the editor says: The Post-Office Girl is fastpaced and hardboiled—as if Zweig, normally the most mannerly of writers, had fortified himself with some stiff shots of Dashiell Hammett. It's the story of Christine, a nice girl from a poor provincial family who gets a taste of the good life only to have it snatched away; and of Ferdinand, an unemployed World War I veteran and ex-POW with whom she then links up. It's a story, you could say, of two essentially respectable middle-class souls who wake up to find themselves miscast as outcasts, but what it's really about, beyond economic and psychological collapse, is social death. Set during the period of devastating hyper-inflation that followed Austria's defeat in 1918, Zweig's novel depicts a country grotesquely divided between the rich and poor, so much so that it has effectively reverted to a state of nature."

Richard Marsh's The Beetle

This is the wild card of the bunch. I'd never heard of Richard Marsh's The Beetle before yesterday. A late-Victorian horror novel, it outsold Dracula in its day and it might be interesting to discuss why the Bram Stoker's become a classic and this one's faded into (no doubt deserving) obscurity. According to Amazon, "From out of the dark and mystic Egypt come The Beetle, a creature of horror, 'born of neither God nor man', which can change its form at will. It is bent on revenge for a crime committed against the devotees of an ancient religion. At large in London, it pursues its victims without mercy and no one, it seems, is safe from its gruesome clutches."

~~~~

Which should be our next selection? Vote for your choice in comments; I'll give everyone a week to make a decision and will announce the results on Wednesday, February 18.

Grafting the soul

2009-01-31T21:00:00.001-06:00

I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger.

~~~
The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single, and that our one existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end. When we say, 'I have been here before,' perhaps we mean, 'I am here now,' but in another life, another time, doing something else. Our lives could be stacked together like plates on a waiter's hand. Only the top one is showing, but the rest are there and by mistake we discover them.

~~~
Escape from what? The present? Yes, from this foreground that blinds me to whatever may be happening in the distance. If I have a spirit, a soul, any name will do, then it won't be single, it will be multiple. Its dimension will not be one of confinement but one of space. It may inhabit numerous changing decaying bodies in the future and in the past.

~~~
Poisoned or not, the mercury has made me think like this. Drop it and it shivers in clones of itself all over the floor, but you can scoop it up again and there won't be any seams or shatter marks. It's one life or countless lives depending on what you want.

~~~
The future and the present and the past exist only in our minds, and from a distance the borders of each shrink and fade like the borders of hostile countries seen from a floating city in the sky. The river runs from one country to another without stopping. And even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.

--Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
~~~

As you can gather from the quotes above, in a novel brimming with mythology, fairy tale, history, and metaphysics, (in a year that I want to spend quite a bit of time on mythology), I was most taken by the metaphysics. The earthy giantess Dog Woman, who raised dogs for fighting in 17th century London and did not hesitate to kill hypocritical Puritans who crossed her path, often appalled me; her dreamy foundling son Jordan, a fantasist who sailed the world, did not.

But are the Dog Woman and Jordan of the 17th century the same characters as the ones who show up in present day London at the end of the book, the pretty young chemist camped in protest by the side of a poisoned river and the Nicolas Jordan who joins her there? Have souls transmigrated across the centuries or has one of the characters merely engaged in "rich imaginings"?

I'd prefer the transmigration. Unfortunately, there was something about Sexing the Cherry that made me feel like Eustace Scrubb who'd read the wrong books for the adventure at hand. How can I sprinkle the coal-dust over the milky invisible ink in Winterson if I've never read Orlando, or Angela Carter? I wondered early on if the entire book was supposed to be a celebration of the transportive powers of the imagination, but too often I found the commingling of the different genres more off-putting than engaging. For a short book, I checked to see how many pages remained way too often.

I'm looking forward to discussing this one much more than attempting to write about it.

Not Really About Sexing the Cherry

2009-01-31T19:37:00.001-06:00

I’m trying to warn you that this post says very little about Winterson’s book Sexing the Cherry, so if you want a discussion of the actual book, as opposed to an analysis of my feelings about it, I would check out the other posts on this blog. There is just something about this book, and about Jeanette Winterson’s writing generally, that doesn’t sit very well with me, and I suspect this problem has more to do with me than with the writing itself.

To back up a bit, I first read Winterson during my very first semester in grad school when we were assigned her novel The Passion. I liked the book, and I decided to write a paper on it, one which made some connections between Winterson and Virginia Woolf and drew some conclusions about modernism and postmodernism. That was interesting, and I was pleased to be able to write about Woolf, whom I had fallen in love with just a couple years before. And then I read a couple other Winterson books, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body, and while I liked Oranges, I liked Written on the Body a little bit less, and then as time went on and I thought about Winterson now and then, I started to like her work less and less, and then I became profoundly ambivalent about it, and now after reading Sexing the Cherry I’m beginning to think Winterson is just not a writer who works for me.

I now think I was trying to like what I felt I was supposed to like, back when I read The Passion in grad school. I did experience some genuine pleasure in reading the book, but I felt some uncertainty about it too, and I didn’t listen to that part of my response because … well, because everyone else loved it and because it seemed so smart and hip. Winterson has a lot to say about our unstable identities, the uncertainty of space and time, the mixing of past and present, and all that stuff is so very postmodern, and I was all into postmodernism, and so of course I was going to like this book.

But … there’s something about Winterson’s writing that doesn’t work for me, and I’m trying to pinpoint what it is. It has something to do with the fact that her books seem like they are written for the sake of the ideas rather than for the sake of the characters or plot, and I’d prefer it if they all fit together seamlessly. But this can’t be the entire story, because I do like idea-driven novels very much, and if the ideas are interesting enough and the writing is good, I don’t mind if characters or plot are sacrificed. And, actually, Sexing the Cherry has some great, memorable characters (I liked Dog-Woman quite a lot) and is mainly lacking plot, and plot is most often the last thing I care about in a book.

Another factor is that I’m not really fond of the fantastical, magical-realism stuff in Winterson’s work. I’ve read some Rushdie and Garcia Marquez, and now that I think about it, I felt the same sense of queasy uncertainty when I read them. Yes, they are smart, yes, they are great writers, and yes, they are important, but no, I can’t say I love their work. I guess — and I kind of wish I didn’t feel this way — that I want realism to be realism and fantasy/science fiction/fables/fairy tales to be their own thing. Generally I’m all for people breaking the rules, but it appears there are limits to my tolerance of disorder and rule-breaking and boundary-crossing and genre-bending.

And then there’s the mean-spirited, grouchy, cynical side of me that doesn’t like the light-hearted, playful, celebratory tone of the book. The moments I liked best were the darker ones — the passages about how Dog-Woman and Jordan misunderstand each other or the descriptions of religious violence. I wasn’t so fond of Jordan’s fantastical travels or the twelve princesses or the speculations about the fluidity of identity and the centrality of love. And I don’t really like the prettiness of the language either.

But here I’m starting to go off the deep end a little bit, and you can see how I just don’t get along with this book and should probably just stop now. I do understand, in an abstract, detached kind of way, how other people can like it; maybe this is just one of those matters of taste, kind of like the way I don’t like potatoes but I understand that most people do, and I’m fine with that.

Sexing the Cherry

2009-01-31T18:39:00.002-06:00

I was excited when we chose this book because Jeanette Winterson is a writer I had wanted to read before but I’d often heard her writing could be difficult to get into, so I figured being able to discuss this with a reading group would hopefully give me a greater understanding.

The story is set in the seventeenth century and its two main characters are the Dog Woman, a gigantic and fearsome creature, and Jordan, the child she rescues from the Thames.

In a creative tale that mixes time travel, fairy tales, historical events and a touch of magic, Jordan follows his dreams and travels the world with Tradescant, one of the gardeners of King Charles II court.

“Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time.”

The novel is told in alternating chapters and while I preferred the narrative of the Dog Woman because it was so unexpected and bold, one of my favorite sections was when Jordan meets the 12 princesses. This is Winterson’s retelling of the Brothers Grimm story with a feminist perspective. Unlike the Grimm story, where it is up to the Prince to choose a princess, here the young women decide their fate.

The women in this novel are no simpering misses, instead they are powerful and assertive. The Dog Woman recounts tales of sexual adventure in the same manner as brutal acts she has committed.

Truly, I think the Dog Woman will go down as one the most memorable characters in fiction that I’ve ever come across. While I can’t say I loved this story, I’m definitely glad I’ve finally read it. I found it ambitious and grand for such a slim novel.

Cross posted at Bookgirl's Nightstand

Sexing the Cherry

2009-01-31T16:47:00.009-06:00

It was with a little trepidation that I approached this month's Slaves of Golconda read, Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry. I don't always work well in the abstract; it's generally a struggle for me. Give me a nice straightforward story any day of the week and I'm happy. I mean what do I do with a story where Winterson "fuses history, fairy tale, and metafiction into a fruit...of memorably startling flavor" (so says the NYT)? I must say that in this case I was pleasantly surprised. It was all so wonderfully over the top, completely outrageous (at least that's how it felt when reading it) that it was sort of thrilling to read something so different than what I'm normally used to. What Winterson does with language is marvellous, but what I liked most were the visual images she created. It was at times completely far fetched, but at the same time so totally vivid I found myself lost in the story (but in a good way). Where does someone get the imagination to do that?

This is a very slim novel, but chock full of action and imagery. In 1630 an infant boy is fished out of the Thames River by the Dog Woman. It seems only fitting that he should have an appropriate name but neither Thames nor Nile will do. So Jordan it is. Now the Dog Woman once had a name, but she's forgotten it. She's an interesting character, a giantess who breeds dogs (thus her name) and can outweigh and unseat Elephants (I imagined an elephant sitting on a seesaw type seat and when the Dog Woman sat down on the opposite end the elephant flew into the air) and has pox marks on her face so large that they provide a home for fleas. She's a lusty character full of life and a die-hard Royalist (must say here I felt a bit bad for the Puritans). As disturbing as her appearance may be, don't be fooled, she's a mother with a mother's caring heart.

Jordan and the Dog Woman take turns narrating the story, which is like one of those Chinese boxes that folds in on itself and can be opened and righted once again. The Dog Woman is firmly grounded in the reality of the 17th century set against a background of the tumultuous and bloody Civil War, while Jordan travels through time and space telling us of the fanciful and fantastic. The story really is part historical fiction, and fairy tale, as well as a meditation on time and space with a fair amount of philosophy thrown in as well. Winterson is obviously interested in accomplishing a variety of things, and no doubt this can be read from various viewpoints and on different levels-- including ecological and feminist (and maybe even a few others). I imagine this must be a veritable feast for a literary critic or an English major, but since I'm neither I just enjoyed the colorful ride and will leave the peeling back of layers to the professionals.
Some of the scenes really stuck me and I think will stick with me for some time to come. Jordan attends a dinner party where the family wouldn't allow their feet to touch the floor. So looking through doors you see no floors but bottomless pits with furniture "suspended on racks from the ceiling."

"To dine here is a great curiosity, for the visitor must sit in a gilded chair and allow himself to be winched up to join his place setting. He comes last, the householders already seated and making merry, swinging their feet over the abyss where crocodiles live. Everyone who dines has a multiplicity of glasses and cutlery lest some should be dropped accidentally. Whatever food is left over at the end of the meal is scraped into the pit, from whence a fearful crunching can be heard."

There is also a city that floats above in the clouds.

"The city, being freed from the laws of gravity, began to drift upwards for some 200 miles, until it was out of the earth's atmosphere. It lay for a while above Africa and then began to circle the earth at leisure, never in one place for long, but in other respects like some off-shore island. The citizens had enormous poles made to push themselves off from stars or meteors, and in this way used their town as a raft to travel where they wanted. They did not know it, but when every person pushed with their pole, they created a vacuum that sucked up anything in its wake. The force was very powerful, and all over the world there are stories of entire picnics that have disappeared from checked tablecloths, and small children who have never been seen again."

As you can see this is a very playful story and in many instances laugh out loud funny. It's not a book that's really very easy to write about as there is simply too much going on. If you're still curious to know more, however check out the excellent posts here to get some other perspectives. If you've read Sexing the Cherry please feel free to join our discussion. I think I may have to check out Jeannette Winterson's other work.

Cross posted at A Work in Progress.

The Fine Art of Grafting

2009-01-31T09:30:00.001-06:00

If the number of page points I stuck in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry is any indication of how much I liked the book, well then I liked it very much. It certainly made me think. And I very much enjoyed the playfulness of the text as well as its humor.

The title does not refer to some sort of sexual slang or innuendo. It actually refers to determining the sex of a cherry tree. The fine art of grafting--a method of asexual plant propagation in which two plants are joined together--is at the root (excuse the pun) of what the book is about. Grafting is practiced for many reasons, one of which is hardiness. For instance, if you want a fruit tree or a rose that is not particularly hardy to your growing zone, you might try grafting. The root stock of a hardy version--for instance in MN I might choose a rugosa rose for my rootstock because it is hardy in below zero weather--becomes the base for a rose that is not very hardy here--a delicate tea rose perhaps. The resulting plant is a tea rose growing on the roots of a rugosa rose. The roses are tea roses and the plant is considered a tea rose. The grafted plant is two halves that require the other half in order to survive. The flower bearing canes of the tea rose need the hardy rugosa roots so it can survive the winter. The hardy rugosa roots need the energy and nourishment provided by the leaves of the tea rose. Cut the two apart at the graft and both halves will die.

What does this have to do with the book? Everything really. The book takes place in two time periods, London during the reign of Charles II, and the current day. And the characters, both Jordan and the Dog-Woman are alive in both. The book plays with time too, but that would require an entire other post to talk about. Sticking to the idea of grafting, the character of Jordan in old London and the character of Nicholas Jordan in modern London, can be seen as a graft. Which is the root and which is the plant is arguable because Jordan might be all in the imagination of Nicholas and Nicholas might be the part of himself that Jordan goes in search of.

It doesn't really matter which Jordan is what part of the resulting grafted plant. It only matters that together, the two halves make a whole. One can make speculations on the necessity of imagination for survival as well as the need to integrate soul and body, or the shadow self, or the practical self with the dancing part of the self. If the book can be said to have a plot, this, to me, is it: the journey to become a whole person.

There are so many elements in this book that make it interesting; time, as I mentioned, fairy tales, myth, and fantasy. There is also the element of the quest and the hero. It is a complex book that is written in a deceptively simple style. It is not without its faults. Some moments seem forced and the character of Dog-Woman is too educated for her class and station in life in many respects and too ignorant in others (can a woman who breeds dogs for a living really not know anything about sex?). But the faults are minor chaffings easily ignored in the overall scope of the novel.

Feel free to join in or follow the discussion at our new discussion forum.

Cross posted at So Many Books