Something Missing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

(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!

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!

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!

1. 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)
2. 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."
3. 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."
4. 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."
5. 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

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

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

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