Here's what I think happens with this book: I think people think it's Victorian. The title sounds Victorian, right? And it's about...I think we call tHere's what I think happens with this book: I think people think it's Victorian. The title sounds Victorian, right? And it's about...I think we call them the landed gentry*? and their dissolution, which is a major theme of the late Victorians. Lawrence even puts sort of a Victorian feel into his writing.
* which I always thought meant, you know, they had landed somewhere. Like Iceland? I always pictured well-dressed ladies and gentlemen stepping off boats. So that's a confusing thing to call them.
So I think two things happen when people read this book, or decide not to read it: a) They think it's stuffy, because on the surface it sortof is; b) The sex bits are totally incongruous - again, I think, on purpose - and people either don't realize what's happening or they do realize it and are confused by it.
Seriously, I've heard people disliking this book and I think they thought they were reading a stuffy old Victorian thing with bizarrely out of place smut shoved into it. And if you think that's what this is, then...well, that sounds great to me, but your mileage may vary.
Anyway, it's not that. It's set in the aftermath of WWI. There's a Brave New World reference.* Lawrence is a contemporary of Hemingway and Steinbeck and Faulkner; this is a modern novel. And he's talking about the death of the aristocracy, most obviously through the obvious metaphor of Chatterley's impotence. Lawrence has serious things to say about the nature of relationships between men and women, and how they're changing, and how women are taking control of their sexuality, and I think he's put it in this anachronistic setting to help make his point. He's talking about the death of the Victorian world. It's sharper than people think it is, is what I'm saying.
* Astute people might note that Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in 1928 and Brave New World wasn't even written until 1931, so wtf? Lawrence and Huxley were apparently friends, so my best guess is that Lawrence saw an early draft. It is not a We reference; the quote is, "Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in bottles, and women would be 'immunized.'" That can only be Brave New World.
Also, Lady Chatterley feels a lot of things in her womb. Every time she sees a hot guy her womb, like, twitches. I didn't realize wombs were this jumpy....more
American literature didn't get off to a fast start. Our best efforts to convince the world that Puritan sermons count as literature aside, nobody realAmerican literature didn't get off to a fast start. Our best efforts to convince the world that Puritan sermons count as literature aside, nobody really got anything decent written until Poe in the early 1800s.
Except there's this, which I found referred to fleetingly as the first viable American novel - 1797 - and I'd never even heard of it, and it's actually pretty great. (It's also based on a true story that apparently had America's panties all moist and knotted, for whatever that's worth.)
The titular coquette, Eliza Wharton, joins a long list of vile women in literature who do gross things like flirt, or show a little reticence about marrying whatever boring Casaubon everyone else decides they should marry. It never works out, so don't get your hopes up. But author Hannah Foster is less interested in indicting Eliza than everyone around her.
Eliza begins the book Emma-ish, headstrong and pleased with herself. The old guy her parents foisted on her has conveniently died before marrying her, and she cheerfully reenters the dating scene, writing that "every thing tends to facilitate the return of my accustomed vivacity." She makes no effort whatsoever to pretend this is a disappointment; she hopes only to find someone a little more interesting this time around. "These bewitching charms of mine have a tendency to keep my mind in a state of perturbation," she chatters. "I don't know how it is, but I am certainly very much the taste of the other sex."
But she's immediately directed toward the reverend Boyer, a safe guy whose love letters are crashingly boring. She prefers the company of Major Sanford, a kindred spirit who unfortunately (and pointedly) can get away with being a coquette himself because he is a dude. When she puts off Boyer, hoping to have just a tiny smidgeon of fun in her life, he storms off in a huff; her friends judge her mercilessly; she's written off as a coquette and abandoned.
As the story progresses and Eliza's options narrow precipitously, her tone changes too - from the vivacity she starts with (and she uses that word like ten times) to a glum desperation. "May my unhappy story," she finally writes, "serve as a beacon to warn the American fair of the dangerous tendency and destructive consequences of...the practice of coquetry."
So the message here isn't that Eliza is a bad person; it's that society sucks, and "vivacity" like hers will be crushed. It's a bummer message, but not a unique one: the literature of destroyed women is rich. This is a worthy entry in it. I'm not sure why it isn't more well-known; it should be....more
Iceberg Slim didn't invent the great American pimp archetype in 1969 but he codified it, he exposed it to mass culture, so he's an influential writer.Iceberg Slim didn't invent the great American pimp archetype in 1969 but he codified it, he exposed it to mass culture, so he's an influential writer. Everything from Slick Rick to blaxploitation to the pathetic "pickup artist" scene owes a debt to him. So when Robin Kelley writes for the New Yorker, "I'm always amazed when I encounter well-read people unfamiliar with Iceberg Slim," I kinda get it. But then, does influence equal value? I mean, is this a good book? Are you going to like it?
It's not terribly pleasant to read. For one thing, it uses more unfamiliar slang than A Clockwork Orange. You're gonna need the glossary in the back, or a jive translator. For another, the things it describes are unpleasant. Its narrator, who is more or less actually Iceberg Slim, has a dim opinion of women. He does bad things to them. That's an understatement.
He is somewhat repentant. Borrowing a trope from Fanny Hill and Vanity Fair, he presents Pimp as a cautionary tale, and unlike those two books he seems to mean it; he doesn't glorify his life. Much. Big Daddy Kane's mileage apparently varied.
The book competently follows your basic biopic plot arc. Naive youngster learns the game; rises to the top of the game; hubris; fall; wisdom. (The other way these stories end is the Scarface way, but since this is a memoir you already know that's not happening.) There's a noir influence: "She was brown-skin murder in a size-twelve dress." There are some trenchant and self-aware points made about what it means for a black man to pimp a black woman to a white man. So, is it good? Sortof, sure. It does a good job of being what it is. It is well-written.
So this ends up sortof in the same department as Ulysses. It's influential and effective, but you're unlikely to enjoy the actual experience of reading it. "The account of my brutality and cunning as a pimp will fill many of you with revulsion," says Slim, showing, as he often does, remarkable perception....more
Like two other Medieval landmarks, the Decameron and 1001 Nights, the Canterbury Tales are a collection of short stories drawn together by a framing sLike two other Medieval landmarks, the Decameron and 1001 Nights, the Canterbury Tales are a collection of short stories drawn together by a framing story. In this case it’s a group of pilgrims from all different parts of society, and they’re telling stories to pass the time on their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. Here he is getting killed:
[image] Fatality!
Chaucer only managed to finish 23 of a planned 120 stories, so that’s actually a pretty bad job; his big innovation was that the 23 he did finish created real, distinct characters representing a cross-section of society. The hypocritical religious figure the Pardoner, who’s basically running a protection racket for the soul - and we can see in him how jaded people have gotten about organized religion - the drunken Miller, who tells one of several lengthy fart jokes; and of course the Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s greatest creation.
[image] don't want no scrubs
She’s looking for her sixth husband; she cheerfully admits to using sex to get what she wants; she has a dim view of men except as a means to an end.
By God! if women hadde written stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse Than all the mark of Adam may redresse.
What she’s saying is that men control the narrative; when it’s her turn to speak she has a lot to say.
There are also, as mentioned, a number of fart jokes. The Miller's Tale contains perhaps history's first description of analingus as Absalon "kissed [this one lady's] naked arse, most savorously." The Summoner's Tale is an examination of the age-old question of how to divide a fart into twelve parts. Don't worry, they figure it out....more
"Why are you furiously taking notes on the subway?" is what no one asked me. "I just started The Waves," is what I would have replied, "and I'm realiz"Why are you furiously taking notes on the subway?" is what no one asked me. "I just started The Waves," is what I would have replied, "and I'm realizing that it's going to be difficult even for Virginia Woolf. I'll have to get on top of it early if I'm going to get it at all."
"Why is it so difficult?" "Have you read Virginia Woolf before?" My imaginary friend has not. "She was a modernist," I'd say. "What she was about was getting into her characters' heads, their thought processes - the experience of being alive. We call it stream of consciousness, with all its eddies and diversions. That means her writing tends to be confusing and frustrating, like you yourself. ('But'--shh.) She refuses to tell you what's happening; she leaves clues, instead, and you have to figure it out."
"That sounds annoying."
Well, yeah, it kinda is. "Why did she do that?" I don't know. The modernists were trying to do something new, and they succeeded in that. They wrote books that the average person, looking to be entertained, might dislike. They're too hard. They're for reading nerds, people who like puzzles. Of the three great modernists - Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner - none of them have ever met a plot point they couldn't obfuscate.
"Why is The Waves particularly difficult?"
As if this stream-of-consciousness writing isn't confusing and frustrating enough, modernists always (for some reason) switch perspectives. In my favorite Woolf book Mrs. Dalloway (1925), there are two main characters - Clarissa Dalloway and the PTSD-afflicted veteran Septimus. Same for James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), which stars Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus. In the later Waves, though (1931), there are six characters to switch between. William Faulkner, who had by now written his masterpiece The Sound & The Fury (1929), also switched between lots of different characters. So it's even more complicated to keep track of what's happening.
The characters in The Waves are: Louis the ambitious, self-conscious outsider, who will (view spoiler)[have an on, off, on-again relationship with Rhoda (hide spoiler)]; Bernard the likable, loquacious storyteller with a confused sense of self, who will (view spoiler)[fail to seal the deal with his first love and settle for another (hide spoiler)]; Neville the quiet, serious, bisexual (?), snobby poet; Shy, awkward and embarrassed Rhoda, who will (view spoiler)[commit suicide (blink and you'll miss it) (hide spoiler)]; Jinny who loves to be loved; And certain, pastoral Susan.
Unspeaking is a seventh character Percival, named after the knight who went after the Holy Grail, representing maybe youth and idealism, who (view spoiler)[dies off page around the halfway mark and (hide spoiler)] looms over everyone's lives.
The story is anchored by an omniscient narrator who intervenes to describe a day - morning, their childhood; night, old age. The narrator returns to certain themes: waves, birds, snails, assegais. (Assegais? Spears. Whatever, Virginia.) In between, we get monologues by each character in which they continuously describe who they are (and aren't), in a prose-poem style. Part of the confusion is because everyone says what she really means. Where, say, Tolstoy was brilliant at showing the undercurrents of thought beneath what people say, Woolf's characters just speak the undercurrents.
And the frustration is because, in Woolf's hands, these undercurrents are terribly la-di-dah and pretentious.
"Yet these roaring waters," said Neville [at the first of two climactic dinner parties], "upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequential cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out these false sayings, 'I am this; I am that!' Speech is false!"
But nobody talks or thinks like that. Obscured is the majesty of To The Lighthouse (1927), the authority of Mrs. Dalloway, certainly the joy of Orlando (1928), sunk under a sort of grim, arch aloofness. It's often beautiful, but always artificial.
Woolf means to convey the confusion of being alive, and she means to abandon novelly efforts to force a life into a storyline. "There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon," says Bernard: "Nothing one can call an event." This is noble but there's no reason it needs to be so opaque.
Life itself is what Woolf was after, and in The Waves - her last great work and her most ambitious - she tries to describe it in all its flavors. "We differ, it may be too profoundly," says Louis, "for explanation. But let us attempt it." But this isn't Woolf's best effort.
All of that is what I would have said, anyway, if anyone had asked me why I was furiously taking notes on the subway. Which is maybe why no one asked....more
"Why should I read Jane Austen?" asked my wife. I've read all of Jane Austen now - this was my final one - so I was ready to answer.
The 1800s were all"Why should I read Jane Austen?" asked my wife. I've read all of Jane Austen now - this was my final one - so I was ready to answer.
The 1800s were all about a shift from Romantic to Realist literature, I said. Romantic novels are full of telepathy and crazy ladies in attics, and bizarre plot contrivances, and orphans who turn out to be the long-lost sons of the noblemen who happened to be acquainted with pretty ladies. Only toward the end of the century did it occur to authors like George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert to write plots that were plausible in the real world. Jane Austen alone, I said, writing way back in the 18teens - before the great Romantic masterpieces by theBrontes,Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas - seemed to predict realism. Her plots were (largely) realistic; her characters recognizable humans. It's astonishing to read her in context; she seems to be writing in the movement past the movement that hasn't even flowered yet.
"But I don't care about context," said my wife: "Context is for nerds. I'm only interested in reading books that are entertaining now, to me."
That kindof threw me for a loop.
Because Austen does feel old-fashioned. The other shift in the 1800s had to do with morals. Novels, generally aimed at young well-to-do ladies, were marketed as prescriptive: they served both as entertainment and as guides for how to behave, and that meant that they were often snobby and prudish. It was, again, not 'til later that writers like Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton started to challenge the status quo instead of enforcing it. And Austen wasn't ahead of her time here: she was a merciless status quo enforcer.
In Sense & Sensibility, sense wins. Of the two sisters - steady, diligent Elinor Dashwood (sense) and sensitive, spazzy Marianne (sensibility, which in those times meant sensitivity) - Marianne holds your interest, but Elinor drives the plot. And in the end, (view spoiler)[Marianne (in a bummer common to many Victorian novels) marries Colonel Mustard Brandon, a man she's been completely indifferent to until the last five pages. The primary relationship in the novel, honestly, is the steadily growing respect and trust between Brandon and Elinor, who would be well suited to each other, both being sensible and boring. You'd be forgiven for feeling like they got their pairings wrong. But, then, here's Austen the realist: Brandon, with his fortune, can afford to pick the prettier one, and men have been known to do so. (hide spoiler)]
Along the way Austen is merciless to women of slightly lower class than her protagonists - notably Lucy Steele, who's (view spoiler)[secretly engaged to Edward Ferrars. (hide spoiler)] To be fair, she's merciless to everyone else too, like snobbish, insipid Lady Middleton. But still: this kind of social moralizing hasn't aged well, and Austen comes off as kindof a dick. That quote that opens Pride & Prejudice,
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
She's kinda kidding / not kidding about that; she says it tongue in cheek but it is in fact the plot of most of her books, and taken as a given. Her novels are often about the dangers of falling in love with someone slightly above or below one's station. They warn of the dangers of charming young men. They suggest that perhaps the boring, older, stolid gentleman in possession of a good fortune might be a better choice.
She can be a little boring. There's not a ton of plot to her books. A few people fall in love; there are complications; most of the complications are resolved.
So, "Why read Jane Austen?" I don't really have an answer. I like her characters. They're human and relatable, flawed, "almost pretty." (Her female characters, that is. Her male characters are generally defined by their manners, incomes and illegitimate children.) They remind me that the basic concerns of humans - whom to spend time with, where to get one's money - are always the same. Now we call our Colonel Brandons "settling," but it's the same choice.
Austen is funny and perceptive. But if her novels feel familiar, you could choose to read a more recent, familiar novel - one of the millions that owe a debt to Austen - one that doesn't force you to sit through endless card games you don't know how to play, or know the difference between a barouche and a post chaise.
So my wife quit Emma after 50 pages and read The Marriage Plot instead. I was unable to convince her or myself that there's a screaming need to read Jane Austen. Can you think of one? I'd be happy to hear about it....more
Dynasty in India is what this book really is, for all its allusions to Victorian novels. But sure, yes, it's longer than War & Peace, ensuring its plaDynasty in India is what this book really is, for all its allusions to Victorian novels. But sure, yes, it's longer than War & Peace, ensuring its place on the Books Your Friends Didn't Finish list:
And it shares with War & Peace a panoramic, many-charactered view of an entire society, against the backdrop of real events - here, the 1951 abolition of the feudal Zamindari system, and the taut relationship between Hindus and Muslims in post-colonial India, which had just divided itself in two in order to pack most of its Muslims off to Pakistan.
Vikram Seth's real love is for Jane Austen, though, and the major plot is pure Austen: whom will Lata Mehra marry? The suitors include ambitious Haresh, who reads pessimistic Hardy; the poet and Seth stand-in Amit Chatterji, who (along with Lata herself) reads Austen; and the Muslim Kabir, who is in no way suitable and does not read novels (but he does act in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night).
The other major plotline involves the growing up of Lata's brother-in-law Maan Kapoor, who has an affair with musical courtesan Saeeda Bai. These two families, the Mehras and the Kapoors, twine together throughout the book, along with the Chatterjis and the Muslim Khans. It can get confusing. Here are the major characters:
MEHRAS (Rupa & dead husband) Arun (business douche) -> Meenakshi Chatterji daughter Aparna Varun (milquetoast) Savita -> Pran Kapoor Lata
KAPOORS (Mahesh and Mrs.) Pran (professor) -> Savita Mehra Maan (Saeeda Bai, best friends with Firoz Khan) Veena -> Kedarnath Tandon the shoe guy son Bhaskar is good at math
KHANS (Nawab Sahib of Baitar) Begun Abida Khan, sister-in-law politician Zainab (daughter) Imtiaz Firoz (into Tasneem, Saeeda Bai's younger sister; best friends with Maan Kapoor)
CHATTERJIS (Justice & Mrs.) Amit - poet Meenakshi (a shitty person) -> Arun Mehra Dipankar (the religious one) Kakoli (silly but fun) Tapan (nobody cares about Tapan)
EVERYONE ELSE Saeeda Bai the singing courtesan & her sister Tasneem - (view spoiler)[not a real sister (hide spoiler)] LN Agarwhal (incompetent politician) Raja of Marh (asshole with gay son) Dr. Durrani (Muslim mathematician) Kabir Durrani (potential match for Lata) Haresh (ambitious shoemaker, potential Lata match) Malati (Lata's best friend)
Whew. There are of course family trees at the beginning of the book that you should bookmark. My book club has also put together a glossary that may help you. (Thanks Kaion!) And I even made a Suitable Playlist on Spotify! It contains many of the songs mentioned in the book. The "Rise traveler, the sky is bright" song is "Uth, Jaag, Musafir."
That's a lot of stuff, and this is a lot of book. It'll fully immerse you in Indian culture, which is neat. It's not difficult; it's still a soap opera, with lots of gossip and plot, and Seth writes cleanly. I found it hard to put down when I was reading it, but sometimes hard to pick up again when I wasn't. It didn't really grab me in an "I can't wait to keep reading" way until around 75%. But I really liked it. Nothing wrong with an Indian Dynasty....more
The startling thing about The Talented Mr. Ripley was finding out what Ripley was capable of, because you found out along with him. He wants so much, The startling thing about The Talented Mr. Ripley was finding out what Ripley was capable of, because you found out along with him. He wants so much, and over the course of the book he discovers what he can do to get it.
The problem with Ripley Under Ground is that both of you already know. So there are no surprises here. You read it because you liked the first one and you want to see Ripley up to his old game.
You'll get it, but this sequel is less deadly than the first book. It's just an exciting crime story. Highsmith checks the Ripley boxes: he impersonates someone, he murders someone, there's confusion not only over who murdered but who's even been murdered (the Ripley books are like the Mission: Impossible movies for murder), Ripley is audacious and pretentious, as always. There's an art forging plot lifted liberally from Dawn Powell's Wicked Pavilion. Bizarrely, Ripley seems to have gotten less gay. But it's fun and a total page-turner. If you liked the first book you should certainly go ahead and read this; if you didn't you certainly shouldn't.
Kafka is the author of frustration. He writes about frustration, he's frustrated about writing, The Castle breaks off mid-sentence, he asked Max Brod Kafka is the author of frustration. He writes about frustration, he's frustrated about writing, The Castle breaks off mid-sentence, he asked Max Brod to burn his work but he knew Brod wouldn't do it. Kafka knew he would be frustrated in frustrating his frustrated book about frustration. What's it all about? I don't know, you're not supposed to know, not knowing is the point. There's no decoder ring. In The Trial K. doesn't know how to defend himself, he doesn't even know what he's accused of, he just knows he's guilty. In The Castle K. doesn't know the way to it, he doesn't even know what the Castle is, he just knows he wants in. "If only you didn't always, like a child, insist on having everything served up right away in edible form!" His first translators the Muirs thought it was about God, they made it into a creepy Pilgrim's Progress. There might be a pilgrim but there is no progress. This new translation by Mark Harman knows better than to guess what's what. "No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won't see a thing." Everyone is corrupt. Sex is ever-present, threatening, icky. Kafka never finished a novel but The Trial is more finished. It feels over, at least. This book ends in the middle of a sentence, the middle of a scene, it feels like it was maybe two-thirds done. This is frustrating. I like The Trial better and his short stories best. Kafka famously had trouble getting through public readings because he kept cracking up. K. doesn't get it. "'What are you complaining about?' asked K. 'We are complaining,' said Jeremias, 'that you cannot take a joke.'"...more
For his first book in 1952 Kurt Vonnegut made an entry in a long string of dystopian novels stretching back to (where else) Eugene Zamyatin's 1921 claFor his first book in 1952 Kurt Vonnegut made an entry in a long string of dystopian novels stretching back to (where else) Eugene Zamyatin's 1921 classic We. It's not the best entry.
These books all deal with futures in which social class has ossified and production has mechanized. They deal with the automation of society, and with socialism (in wildly different ways).
Vonnegut was a socialist. The way he deals with it is boring. The long section in the middle set at a company team-building retreat seems padded, even before we get to the complete play contained in it. And (as usual) he has no idea what to do with women. The new machines take away work from both genders: mechanical work for men, dishwashing for women. Seriously, that's it. Lead character Paul Proteus's wife is a shrew (although she does, in fairness, get one scene that's not bad).
Shitty Wives in Literature Edith Stoner Mildred Montag Dominique Francon Rosamond Vincy Anita Proteus
Vonnegut's point - that people need to work to feel useful - seems surprisingly valid. I say surprisingly because not having to work sounds fine to me. But we continue to see unemployment as a great personal embarrassment, and we continue to more or less invent stuff for people to do. My job is about three levels removed from anything that could remotely be considered useful. So, decent point: simplistic and boring execution.
Vonnegut famously graded his own books. His best book by a long shot, Slaughterhouse-Five, gets a cocky A+, as (more arguably) does the okay Cat's Cradle. He gave Player Piano a B. I think he was being generous....more
Where have you gone, Cormac McCarthy? Blood Meridian is an apocalyptic masterpiece, and twenty years on folksy Ed Tom Bell, played inevitably in the mWhere have you gone, Cormac McCarthy? Blood Meridian is an apocalyptic masterpiece, and twenty years on folksy Ed Tom Bell, played inevitably in the movie by Tommy Lee Jones, is dispensing Buckaroo Banzai homilies like this:
It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you.
He's gone sentimental in his old age. Conservative.
These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses...well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you. But what if you'd of told em it was their own grandchildren? Well, all of that is signs and wonders but it dont tell you how it got that way.
Back away, kids, gramps has been at the moonshine again.
Look, there's nothing irredeemably wrong with this book. It's a crackerjack action story, at least until around the three-quarter mark where it commences to never stop ending. ("You know what this book needs is an old guy rambling for like 75 pages," says an old guy.) Before that there are exciting shootouts and suspenseful sequences. I'm giving it four stars because I had a good time reading it. Llewelyn Moss will do for a hero: you hope he gets away with that terrifically bad decision he's made. (Which, technically, involves water not money.) Chigurgh is a terrific villain, with his bolt pistol and his coins.
But he's a henchman. He is no Judge Holden. He's a servant of the judge. He has a sort of psychotic Zen to him: at times he allows a coin toss to dictate his actions.
"Call it," he says to one terrified man in the best scene of the book. "Well I need to know what it is we’re callin here." "How would that change anything?"
Compare that to a coin scene in Blood Meridian, where the judge tosses a coin that flies in a circle around the fire and returns to his hand. Chigurgh is human.
And this book is a henchman to the awful majesty of Blood Meridian. The Road is the same way: McCarthy's got his usual tricks, his shocking violence and cruelty toward people and punctuation, but both books deliver essentially corny messages. He's made a bold attempt to acknowledge that women exist, but about the most he can think of to say about them is that they seem nice. "That's my heart yonder," says Ed Tom to his horse. "It always was." Barf, gramps. Now in his 70's, he's come to a conclusion about the armageddon he wrote twenty years ago: "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners."
McCarthy's worldview hasn't really changed. It's still bleak. It's just that he's gone from showing it to whining about it. If this is good manners, I miss the judge....more
The Collector is about a guy who kidnaps a young lady and keeps her imprisoned in his basement. The two main characters are well-drawn. The woman, MirThe Collector is about a guy who kidnaps a young lady and keeps her imprisoned in his basement. The two main characters are well-drawn. The woman, Miranda, is intelligent and resourceful. She thinks clearly and unsentimentally about her predicament and she never gives up. She's a little bit awful and pretentious, and I'm not sure whether Fowles intends me to think that. (Probably.) The man - Frederick Clegg, whom she calls Caliban - is pathetic, more dangerous than he knows.
The book, the first written and the first I've read by John Fowles, is about more than that. Miranda is an artist; Caliban has no feel whatsoever for art. She tries and fails to get through to some kind of soul in him, through (among other things) art. He understands possession (collection!) but not appreciation. The first half is narrated by him; the second half repeats the first half from her point of view. (A bit of the tension does drop out here.) While retelling the story Miranda also reminisces, in a secret journal, about another older man she knew out in the world, a True Artist type. (Like many True Artist types, also a womanizer and a twat.) Like Stephen King in Misery, Fowles wants to talk about the nature of art and non-art. The allegorical aspect of the book feels a little icky. Why do so many men choose despoliation as metaphor? Miranda ends up deciding that, should she ever get free, she'd (view spoiler)[like to get with the older artist, despite her lack of attraction for him. Is this Prospero? Ew. And why are both her options men? (hide spoiler)]
Michael Schmidt accuses John Fowles of writing "books that appeal to the general fiction market and to the academic theorist." I don't know why this is an insult, but it appears to be intended as one. Gore Vidal sniffed that "Fowles is regarded as a sort of Daphne du Maurier with grammar," and I don't know why that's an insult either. (Also, I don't at all understand the grammar dis.) The idea is that Fowles challenges you just enough to make you feel smart and no farther. Whatever. I found this book both thought-provoking and entertaining, which seems like a win to me.
Appendix: Things You May Want To Know 1. 73,000 pounds in 1963 is equivalent to about 1.1 million pounds today, or 1.676 million US.
2. I cannot figure out what "Scotch love" is. I assumed it meant butt stuff, because generally when you prepend "Scottish" or "Welsh" to anything it means butt stuff, but Urban Dictionary has nothing for me.
3. Here are Cezanne's apples: [image] Call me Caliban, because I fail to see how they're "everything about all apples and all form and colour." They just look like apples to me. ...more
Other peoples use writing to record the past, but this invention has killed the faculty of memory among them. They do not feel the past any more, for
Other peoples use writing to record the past, but this invention has killed the faculty of memory among them. They do not feel the past any more, for writing lacks the warmth of the human voice. With them everybody thinks he knows, whereas learning should be a secret. The prophets did not write and their words have been all the more vivid as a result. What paltry learning is that which is congealed in dumb books!
says Mamadou Kouyaté, the griot, or oral storyteller, who's reciting this story. It's the 800-year-old story of Sundiata (pronounced Soonjata), the greatest king of Mali and the greatest conqueror since Alexander.
Here's the story: this one king is ordered by prophecy to marry this ugly lady, the ugliest hunchback in the land, which he does but she refuses to fuck him until finally he says whoops my bad I'm actually supposed to sacrifice you, not fuck you, and she gets so scared she passes out and then he fucks her while she's passed out, so, like, good plan? This is gross but no grosser than a bunch of stuff from the Edda. Their son is Sundiata.
Sundiata is super lazy: at seven he still isn't walking, just sitting around eating. When other kids get near him he punches them without even getting off his ass. Finally, when he realizes that his dead father's first wife is humiliating his mom about it, he gets a huge iron rod and struggles mightily to his feet. His immense strength reminds you of Cu Chulainn, the hero of the Irish epic The Tain.
That first wife, an evil stepmother of sorts, understands Sundiata as a danger to her own son Dankaran Touman, who has taken the throne, so she plots Sundiata's death. Being only ten he flees with his mom and half brother Manding Bory. They are pursued by the stepmother, who continually tries to have them murdered. They travel to Guiana and much of northern and Eastern Africa. They are and are among Muslims.
Meanwhile the evil sorcerer King Soumaoro takes over Mali, defeating cowardly Dankaran Touman. Sundiata returns to Mali to defeat Soumaoro. There is a great battle just like in medieval epics like Song of Roland: cavalry and archers. Sundiata's half-sister plays a crucial role in exposing Soumaoro's Achilles heel. There's a roll call like in The Iliad (also: Bring It On).
I'm naming similarities to other epics, but I don't mean to imply that this isn't a specifically African saga. It has African touches - like, when envoys from Mali are searching for hiding Sundiata, they pose as merchants selling Malian produce (gnougnou), waiting until someone is excited to buy it. This person, they figure, may know how to find Sundiata.
Soumaoro gets a sortof weird, murky, ambiguous ending. Other griots tell different endings, apparently. That's a weird thing about oral tradition, right? While it's theoretically possible to pass on a completely faithful, canonical version of a story orally, it's not realistic. So these are by nature evolving stories, with regional differences. There is no definitive version.
The other thing about oral tradition is that it restricts knowledge to those who orally deliver it. Mamadou Kouyaté says "Mali keeps its secrets jealously. There are things which the uninitiated will never know, for the griots, their depositories, will never betray them. ... I took an oath to teach only what is to be taught and to conceal what is to be kept concealed." We're talking about the control of knowledge here. Literacy (and written things to read using it) gives power to the people. So I'm suspicious of the whole concept of oral tradition.
But anyway, that horse is well out of the barn because I just read a book. I thought it was great. It was an exciting story; it was interesting to compare it to other medieval epics, with which it shares a remarkable number of similarities. I'm glad someone finally wrote it down....more
I'm suspicious of dystopias. They present extreme visions of the world, in order to illuminate issues with the real one; that's all fine, but in orderI'm suspicious of dystopias. They present extreme visions of the world, in order to illuminate issues with the real one; that's all fine, but in order to get to those extreme worlds people have to act in extreme ways, and I end up not buying it. I guess I'm not great at suspending my disbelief.
I didn't have this problem with Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's detailed imagination and the force of her vision just swept me entirely in. It's perfectly constructed, always exciting, and - wonder of wonders - uses its dystopic setting to make real points about today, just like dystopias ought to do. And there's nothing particularly unbelievable* about any of this. Atwood was writing when apartheid was still a thing; America itself is only 150 years out from slavery, which institutionalized rape.
The idea is that America has been taken over by a fundamentalist Christian sect who are super into "family values" (remember those?). Women who have done terrible things like get married twice are punished by becoming handmaids - pregnancy machines for aging powerful men who are almost certainly sterile themselves, which puts the handmaids in an awkward position. Our unnamed heroine is no heroine, but she is wicked good at Scrabble. This was the least believable part of the book for me. No one spells "zygote."
I first read this book in high school, hoping for sexy parts. There are not sexy parts. The description of a handmaid rape - the wife positioned at her head, holding her hands grimly while the husband plows away - is...not sexy parts.
I hated the epilogue, btw. Reads like Cliffs Notes mixed with fan fiction....more
You can see why the Color Purple ran up against censorship in the eighties. It's firmly against organized religion, although it's spiritual in its ownYou can see why the Color Purple ran up against censorship in the eighties. It's firmly against organized religion, although it's spiritual in its own hippie way. It's pretty gay: Alice Walker defines a "womanist" (her term for black feminists, which has caught some traction) as a woman who, among other things, "loves other woman, sexually and/or nonsexually," and she seems to have a fluid idea of female sexuality.
It's pro woman in the same way its contemporary Handmaid's Tale is. Neither book is anti-male; both protagonists like some males quite a lot, although many others are dangerous. But both emphasize relationships between women. (I suppose we could mention that there are zero black people in Handmaid's Tale and no white people in Color Purple, so there's that difference.)
The narrator is Celie, a young woman who's got a tough row to hoe. She gets raped on like page one. She gets pretty much shat on by the whole world except two women, musician Shug and sister Nettie, who get to work on a pretty dire self-esteem problem.
Celie speaks in a heavy dialect, so that takes some getting used to; it's a tough act to pull off and I think Walker totally nails it. I didn't find Celie's voice difficult or condescending; when she emerges with some startling burst of poetic wisdom I believe it. "What the world got to do with anything, I think." It sounds like it's meant to: something smart said by someone smart in a certain dialect.
There's a subplot featuring Celie's sister Nettie going to Africa that fails to engage me as much as the main story. I understand what Walker's up to: she's widening the scope. And she may feel that we need a break from Celie's voice. But we don't.
The story is basically over when pants enter the scene. There are lots of pants. The last quarter or so of the book I could maybe do without.
It's an unapologetically radical book. Walker is not here to pander to anyone. I totally dug it....more
Every season of life is an edition that corrects the one before and which will also be corrected itself until the definitive edition, which the publis
Every season of life is an edition that corrects the one before and which will also be corrected itself until the definitive edition, which the publisher gives to the worms gratis.
This really speaks to me. because I've gone through like twenty editions of myself - not because of demand, just that previous ones were like riddled with typos.
I've read de Assis before, and it's great to revisit his weird, modern style. Writing in the late 1800s, De Assis is the Pushkin of Brazil - the father of their literature. Traces of metafictional Borges and magical realism can be seen. He doesn't so much break the fourth wall as refuse to acknowledge its existence. His narrators, his world, the very idea that you're reading a book, are all unreliable.
"And now watch the skill, the art with which I make the greatest transition in this book," he says, before making a totally awkward transition...
Strip away the tricks and Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas - also known as Epitaph of a Small Winner - tells a small story. A guy leads an uneventful life. There's a love interest. Stars are crossed. The action is conventional. But you could say the same about Ulysses, and where would that get you? The book isn't about the story - it's about the book. It's narrated from beyond the grave. Bras Cubas rambles, aggrandizes himself, changes his mind. "Maybe I'll leave out the previous chapter," he says. "Among other reasons because in the last lines there's a phrase that's close to being nonsense." Then he singles you out - "seventy years from now, [you] leans over the previous page to see if [you] can discover the nonsense." I laughed because I'd just finished doing exactly that. I have no way of knowing if Bras Cubas actually did leave the previous chapter out.
I like Dom Casmurro best; the actual plot engages me more. But who am I to say? "The main defect of this book is you, reader," Bras Cubas warns me. Maybe my next edition will do better....more
Here's Richard Wright going door to door in the 1920s Jim Crow South trying to sell his dog for a dollar because he's starving. A white lady offers hiHere's Richard Wright going door to door in the 1920s Jim Crow South trying to sell his dog for a dollar because he's starving. A white lady offers him 97 cents and, feeling some distant surge of fury inside, he turns her down, goes home with his dog and his hunger. A few days later (view spoiler)[the dog gets run over by a coal truck, (hide spoiler)] and this book is a bummer. This is not quite 100 years ago, this hellish world he's trying to claw out of. The degradation required of black people in order to survive is a nightmare.
So this skinny kid teaches himself to read, borrows a lone sympathetic white guy's library card, forges a note from him. He makes sure the note includes a racial slur, to make it more believable; it's crucial that the librarian not guess the books are for himself. He dives into Dostoevsky, Dreiser, Gertrude Stein.
The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different...
In buoying me up, reading also cast me down, made me see what was possible, what I had missed. My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter, surging, almost too great to be contained. I no longer felt that the world around me was hostile, killing; I knew it.
If you've ever wondered how reading can be an act of revolution, this book will lay it all out for you. Jim Crow depended on the ignorance of black people. As Wright started to see other perspectives, he understood how the system oppressed him and he started to see that things could be different. Reading was war for him. He tried to hide what was happening behind the shuck and jive, but it was impossible; white people could sense that he had become dangerous.
"Why don't you laugh and talk like the other niggers?" [his boss] asked. "Well, sir, there's nothing much to say or smile about," I said, smiling. His face was hard, baffled; I knew that I had not convinced him..."I don't like your looks, nigger. Now, get!" he snapped.
And he does; (view spoiler)[he gets to Chicago, where he joins up with the Communist party only to find that while their ideals are noble, the reality is just more fitting in. (hide spoiler)] Here, as in Native Son, Wright slows down quite a bit; the back third of each book gets extremely talky. He sucks you in and then he's like "Now that I've got you, let's talk about Communism." But even with the - let's face it - boring stuff, this is still the best description of life under Jim Crow I've ever read. Wright is not just a self-made man but a man who has made himself in the face of an entire system dedicated to keeping him unmade; it's pretty inspiring stuff. And he's succeeded in turning himself into one of the great writers of the century.
Perhaps, I thought, out of my tortured feelings I could fling a spark into this darkness...I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.
Mission accomplished, Wright. Sorry about your dog....more
I've been fooled twice now into thinking Nella Larsen isn't a great writer. She is. She controls her story perfectly; she gives you exactly the informI've been fooled twice now into thinking Nella Larsen isn't a great writer. She is. She controls her story perfectly; she gives you exactly the information you need at exactly the right time. Her stories are carefully constructed, each one building steadily towards a wallop. They make a huge impact. There's no fat, nothing that doesn't exactly need to be there.
There's a six-floor walkup in one scene of Passing; the characters complain about it, and one makes a racial comment about it. It's there for a reason; Larsen is positioning you, making sure you know you're six floors up, because one of the characters will have to come back down. It's extremely careful and effective, but it doesn't seem positioned. It just does its job.
What she doesn't have time for, particularly, is sentences. She comes out with stuff like this:
This, she reflected, was of a piece with all that she knew of Clare Kendry. Stepping always on the edge of danger. Always aware, but not drawing back or turning aside.
And you're like jeez, that's...clunky. It gets you where you need to go - Clare, who passes as white and has married a racist, is capable of anything. But it's not pretty.
I was reminded of something Steinbeck said:
I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory.
He had no time for punctuation; he was uninterested in the craft of writing. Prose is a cracker. You don't need it to be interesting; you just need it to hold the cheese.
Nella Larsen has a lot of cheese. Don't let the cracker fool you....more
“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
T“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
That's the famous mission statement from Christopher Isherwood, who steadfastly refuses to fix it - to tell you what it's all about. It's intriguing. One finds oneself naked with a younger person. Why has the person become naked? What is the person's goal? This seems unusual. It's all a little bit oblique. It's intriguing but frustrating. Does anyone know what's going on? Not to flap my hands helplessly and whine "Fix iiiiiit," but only one of us is getting paid for this.
In the middle of the last century Isherwood wrote what Edmund White called some of "the only serious, non-pornographic accounts of gay experience I came across back then." That's brave and useful from a historical perspective; it's lost the transgressive thrill now. I live in Brooklyn. I can't go to the bodega without tripping over serious, non-pornographic gay experiences and their huge fucking strollers.
Which, believe me, I realize how lovely it is that I get to be bored by all this. But - all triumphing over small-mindedness aside - we're still reading a book here, and it turns out that it's yet another one about a middle-aged white male college professor. He has oblique experiences. The book's over before it's begun. It's quiet and subtle. It's sad but it's so buttoned up that no flesh shows. It's quite passive. I'm not saying I want it all fixed, exactly, but this is so restrained that you can barely feel it....more
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