tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49727643839634591522024-03-14T03:25:32.110-04:00Bookphilia.comBookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.comBlogger489125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-89953117057296618612012-06-19T17:20:00.000-04:002012-06-19T17:20:05.525-04:00Don't be sad...we haven't left the interwebsWe're just over <a href="http://jamandidleness.com/">here, at Jam and Idleness</a>--come visit!Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-21111501942754275162012-03-26T08:40:00.001-04:002012-03-26T08:40:26.477-04:00Wave goodbye<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you’re still following Bookphilia.com, bless you. This is, I believe, to be my final post here. On the fifth anniversary of this blog, I’m officially moving onwards and upwards to brighter and broader things; I hope you’ll join me over at <a href="http://jamandidleness.com/">Jam and Idleness</a> starting right now!<br />
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I’ll still be talking about books there but I’ll also be discussing cooking and learning to garden and sew (not simultaneously) and riding my bicycle—generally, the growing wealth of things I’ve found to do and think about since I’ve realized, post-grad school, that there is more to life than sitting in a chair for 14 hours every day with my nose in a book. I will also be discussing, perhaps, the horror of overly long sentences; but that’s for another day.<br /><br /><b>My most, most favourite books of the past year:</b><br /><i>Bleak House</i>, Charles Dickens<br /><i>Vanity Fair</i>, W.M. Thackeray<br /><i>Barchester Towers</i>, Anthony Trollope (I’m almost but not quite finished this one…but it’s superlative. I hope Trollope will forgive me, wherever he is, for finding cause to doubt him <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2011/09/why-i-must-never-ever-ever-read.html">when I was reading his <i>Autobiography</i></a>.)<br /><br /><b>Really good too:</b><br /><i>The Mill on the Floss</i>, George Eliot (re-read)<br /><i>The Gone Away World</i>, Nick Harkaway<br /><i>Murder Must Advertise</i>, Dorothy L. Sayers<br /><i>Busman’s Honeymoon</i>, Dorothy L. Sayers<br /><i>Mary Barton</i>, Elizabeth Gaskell<br /><i>Cold Comfort Farm</i>, Stella Gibbons (re-read)<br /><i>Fire in the Blood</i>, Irene Nemirovsky<br /><i>North and South</i>, Elizabeth Gaskell<br />
<i>The Warden</i>, Anthony Trollope<br /><br /><b>Least favourite:</b><br /><i>The Dog of the South</i>, Charles Portis (because parts of it were SO GOOD and the rest of it didn’t come remotely close to living up to its own high standard!!)<br /><i>The Woman Who Walked Into Doors</i>, Roddy Doyle<br /><i>After Dark</i>, Haruki Murakami (Dear Murakami: You believed the hype; haven’t you heard how dangerous that is?)<br /><i>The Kraken Wakes</i>, John Wyndham<br /><i>The Thief and the Dogs</i>, Naguib Mahfouz<br /><i>Birthday</i>, Koji Suzuki<br /><i>The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner</i>, James Hogg (If I were still an academic, I would be salivating all over Hogg’s double narrative…but as a “mere” reader, it just couldn’t hold me. Indeed, this book contains some of the sloggingest 250 pages I’ve ever read.)<br /><br /><b>Especially bad:</b><br /><i>The Hunger Games</i>, Suzanne Collins<br />
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So, friends, take care. And please come see me in the land of sugary spreads and laziness. :) Thanks again for many good interwebby years!<br />
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-ColleenBookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-55642931977260056082012-02-23T18:31:00.002-05:002012-02-23T18:31:21.347-05:00FYI...In about a month's time, I will be launching a new blog, with a broader focus. I'll post a link to it, along with one final Bookphilia post on the past year's best and worst reads. Thanks to all you lovelies for supporting me over the years...I hope you'll come along for the next stage in my bloggish shape-shifting. March 26 is the date!Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-60930968490162047762011-12-25T18:38:00.002-05:002011-12-25T18:41:49.416-05:00I'm making it official: Bookphilia is on hiatusAs it's been a solid month since I last posted, this will surprise no one; indeed, you may be wondering why I'm bothering to make it official at all. Well, I don't like to just disappear without saying anything (as I have) so here it is: I'm putting the blog on hiatus, until I don't know when. I definitely see this as a hiatus and not as a precursor to a deletion, but I have no idea how long this radio silence might last. I <i>do</i> know that I haven't really had time to engage with it in the way I'd like to in months, and I also don't know when things will improve in this regard. Also, and perhaps just as significantly, I think writing <i>only</i> about books has reached a critical enough low on my interest scale that I need to think seriously about making this into a different kind of blog<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>which might necessitate a new name and a new layout<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>more things that take time I don't currently have, in other words.<br />
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Before I head off into an internet-quiet 2012, here's a short reading update. I'm currently 300 pages into Charles Dickens's <i>Bleak House</i> (yes, I plan to keep up with my Victorian lit reading plan, even if I'm not able to write about it) and it's absolutely stellar; it's so good it's challenging <i>David Copperfield</i> for the "Best Dickens Novel" honours in my soul. I think Dickens is a genius; slightly restrained Dickens is u<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"></span>ber-genius. I'm ready it incredibly slowly because I just don't want it to end. And as it's 900+ pages long, it might just <i>not</i> ever end. #win<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AhV-YjFoISo/Tveqp5hITUI/AAAAAAAACJY/DehlxOokAsQ/s1600/have-his-carcase.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AhV-YjFoISo/Tveqp5hITUI/AAAAAAAACJY/DehlxOokAsQ/s200/have-his-carcase.jpg" width="123" /></a>Before getting the best Festivus gift ever (i.e., rolling out of bed very late to eat pancakes and read Dickens!), I finished a few other things, all of them very good, none of them perfect (although <i>Sanshiro</i> was close). First up was Dorothy Sayers's awkwardly titled <i>Have His Carcase</i>. More awkward than the title, however, was the plot which was just too ridiculously complicated; it was almost laughable. That said, I don't actually read Sayers for the plot. I read Sayers because she was an extremely gifted prose stylist and because the interactions between Harriet and Lord Peter are entirely irresistible. I loved this book in spite of its plot.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-czTQvChDl5M/TveuWPE7aoI/AAAAAAAACJw/aRqtDHDjikY/s1600/villette1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-czTQvChDl5M/TveuWPE7aoI/AAAAAAAACJw/aRqtDHDjikY/s200/villette1.jpg" width="128" /></a>Next up was Charlotte Bronte's <i>Villette</i>, the tale of a downtrodden but alternately rebellious, funny, mean, and hysterical woman of mysterious origin (not that Bronte ever did anything with the mystery she invoked around Lucy Snowe, damn her eyes). Lucy's adventures in being a self-supporting single woman result in adventures with ghosts, gaggles of teenaged girls, a Machiavellian boss, and a ferocious but strangely attractive male English teacher and no one knows which of said challenges is scariest. I alternated between being repeatedly surprised at Bronte's excellent writing (I love <i>Jane Eyre</i>, but in the many times I've read it, I don't honestly remember being struck by the writing <i>per se</i>), enjoying the story, and wanting to give Lucy a good hard shake for trying to be so self-effacing. Self-deprecation rendered in extensive and minute detail does not make for good reading, even when done by a gifted author. Overall, I enjoyed <i>Villette</i> quite a bit but I'm fairly certain I will never feel tempted to re-read it.<br />
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Finally, there was Soseki Natsume's <i>Sanshiro</i> (the new Jay Rubin translation!), which I read in two days while Hubby and I traipsed around the perfect and beautiful city of Lisbon, Portugal. Soseki is one of my favourite authors (in spite of my finding <i>Botchan</i> to be just shockingly over-rated) and Sanshiro did not disappoint; it was alternately quietly hilarious and sharply satirical, somewhat silly and deeply saddening<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>rather like the titular boy-hero himself. This book was just lovely; it made me wonder why I haven't stormed through more of the Soseki cache I have stashed in my bookshelves...Probably because my rationing instinct is stronger than my consuming instinct when it comes to books; if only that were true of peanut butter toast!<br />
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Now, we're all caught up. While I try to figure out when and how to return to Bookphilia, I will be reading, hopefully only from the large collection of unread books already in my possession. Yes, I have made a New Year's resolution, which is very unlike me. I've resolved to try and not buy myself books in 2012. I will, of course, continue to accept books as gifts because if I didn't, the lovely people who give me presents would likely go mad with confusion about how to give me things. Selfless of me, isn't it?<br />
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See you soon(?) my friends! (PS-I'll keep my currently reading tab here up-to-date just in case anyone's curious; you can also <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5706000-colleen">find me on Goodreads</a>, which I remember to log into every 1-2 weeks).Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-43742665901601239942011-11-25T22:45:00.001-05:002012-09-16T21:17:53.905-04:00In death they were not divided<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I finished re-reading <i>The Mill on the Floss</i> tonight; I first read it in 1998-1999 when I had the pleasure of being in <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings/">Rohan Maitzen</a>'s graduate seminar on George Eliot. I loved it then; I have a much greater appreciation for it now. Why I love this book is radically different in 2011; it's a sign of how immature a reader I was then that it's only now that I understand how much this novel is <i>not</i> about Maggie and Stephen and how much it <i>is</i> about Maggie and Tom, and the larger web of familial and social relations they stand at the centre of. For those of you who saw this obvious fact ages ago, don't laugh too hard at me.<br />
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I've never believed the fairly commonly held notion by so many readers I've come across that if you don't properly sympathize with a book's central concern and its characters' most basic and irresistible desires and motives, it's because you haven't experienced them personally. I have argued with a number of parents about this with specific regard to Cormac McCarthy's <i>The Road</i>; they insist that I don't like it because I don't understand it, and that I don't understand it because I don't have children. I have dismissed this fuzzy syllogism as balderdash and I still do. I maintain, against a tide of disbelieving moms and dads (mostly dads) who read books, and internet trolls given to uttering death threats, that that book is bad because the writing is bad and because the plot in no way makes up for this deficiency. <br />
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But my failure to understand what I now see <i>The Mill on the Floss</i> is about--the central importance of our first relationships with the people and places who raise us--is sort of related to this claim, and that's surprising. My failure to see what this novel's primary concerns are isn't the result of my not having had that experience, however (although my experience growing up was certainly nothing like Maggie's, and not just because I luckily had electricity, but unluckily no fetish whose head I could hammer nails into). Rather, it was, I think, the result of my being, at that moment in my life, determined to <i>escape</i> all the scenes and claims of my life thus far, to leave and be someone else by being somewhere else (and, indeed, I escaped directly to rural South Korea within the year). It wasn't that I didn't understand what made Maggie what she is; on the contrary, I quite desperately didn't want these things to be this powerful or important, and that clouded my reading judgment.<br />
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To be someone else by being somewhere else--naive? overly simplistic? foolish? weird? Yes. But it's something Maggie feels implicitly and partly why I've always felt both attracted to and irritated by her. For while other characters in the book seem to enjoy the appearance of such bonds, none <i>feel</i> them so excruciatingly deeply as she does; certainly, none are as devoted to them as she is, even in spite of her struggles with her own vanities and selflessnesses. For her, family, birthplace, and her everyday life cannot be separated without serious damage to her soul. I was always desperate for her to show enough chutzpah to tell the stupid, self-righteous, and unbending Tom to shove it; to just leave, one way or another, and try to find some place where she wasn't constantly belittled and misunderstood.<br />
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In other words, I wasn't just an immature reader during my first go-round with this novel, I was also a selfish one--for I wanted things for Maggie that she wouldn't have wanted for herself, things that would have made her even more miserable! I had a touch of Stephen Guest in me then and would have gladly tricked her down the river and out of town, just to give myself the satisfaction of kicking her dumbshit family to the curb.<br />
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No, I was not a generous reader, and I suspect that's not unrelated to the fact that I wasn't a very generous person. I don't know if I'm a generous person now; probably not. But I think I'm a somewhat better reader. I think George Eliot was incredibly generous; indeed, I don't know how anyone who wasn't painfully generous could write books like hers. Her profound intelligence was focused so entirely on the human; even her philosophical musings, which the very silly Anthony Trollope complained about, never stray far from the most central human concerns. She looked deep and doesn't seemed to have judged anything she saw too harshly. <br />
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Now, about the physical act of reading <i>The Mill on the Floss</i>. I started out with a trusty Penguin Classic, sturdy and well footnoted. But my back has been not so great lately and to try to make carrying it around in my bag less of a burden, my husband convinced me to try it on the Kobo eReader he got for his birthday.<br />
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At first, I absolutely loathed the experience. It didn't feel like a book and so I was constantly being reminded of the ridiculous <i>Star Trek: The Next Generation</i> prop I was holding in front of my face. I was distracted by how frequently I had to "turn" the page. No footnotes. And a lot of typos. I didn't think I'd make it. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth.<br />
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But then, it somehow began to grow on me. And it's fine; at some point, it stopped feeling like staring at a gadget and started feeling like reading. I switched back to the Penguin tonight to finish <i>The Mill on the Floss</i> and that was also good, and now all of a sudden I have double the reading options I used to have. I don't know how often I'll use this thing; it is my husband's after all, and as acceptable as the experience turned out to be, I still missed the tactile associations of holding a book-book in my hands. That said, if I ever get around to <i>Clarissa</i>, it might <i>have</i> to be on Kobo...otherwise, I'll end up in hospital.Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-33612489821069116122011-11-09T20:49:00.001-05:002011-11-09T21:31:52.113-05:00I miss those days of jam and idlenessMy reading is all over the place lately; it's taking me a long time to finish things, in part because Autumn hasn't been very cold and I've been cycling like a fiend. I've also been working on the <a href="http://veg.ca/content/view/824/112/">4th Annual Totally Fabulous Vegan Bake-Off</a> because its inventor and fearless leader, <a href="http://www.veganculinarycrusade.com/">Lisa</a>, is off to distant lands to talk to people about raw food. She's a brave and lovely lady. <br />
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But I <i>have</i> been reading. I've been plodding my way (enthusiastically! but it's still plodding) through <i>The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom</i> for months now. There are two things you need to know about children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom: 1) She wrote fantastic letters. (E.g., "Someday very soon I'm going to write you a great letter. But not today.") 2) She discovered the genius that is Maurice Sendak and it's her we have to thank for the timeless, wild rumpus that is <i>Where the Wild Things Are</i>.<br />
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Letters take me a long time<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>I read one and then I feel as though I'm done with that author for at least a few months; short stories are the same. It's absurd. My sleepy snail pace with this collection has been exacerbated by the fact that the first copy I borrowed from the library fell to pieces in my hands, and there are only two circulating copies; I may not be able to immediately renew it when my time is up.<br />
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(This book was recommended to me by <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings/">Rohan Maitzen</a>, who is much better at storming through books than I am, unless those books are by David Mitchell.)<br />
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I'm also slogging through cult favourite <i>The Dog of the South</i>, by Charles Portis. It began like a beautiful, hilarious, silly dream; there was a deer's head mounted on the wall of a seedy bar, and that deer had a smoke in its mouth...but then, I don't know. The book just deflated and while I'm 2/3 of the way through I don't know if I can bring myself to even finish it. I honestly don't know how a book that began by making me laugh, and out loud like a stupid git at that, every 20 lines or so can have become so totally dull and uninspired.<br />
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And I feel wretched that I don't love this book<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span><a href="http://interpolations.wordpress.com/">Kevin</a> recommended it because he loved it so. But you know, we actually often don't love each other's favourites. I thought Soucy's <i>The Immaculate Conception </i>was brilliant; he objected that it didn't always make sense, and not in a charming way. He loves Cormac McCarthy, who I think is very clever only for having made it as a famous writer who generally can't write complete sentences. We tend to agree completely only on <i>Cloud Atlas</i>; but that is more than enough to build a friendship on.<br />
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Rohan, again, directs my reading life: After 13 years, I'm re-reading <i>The Mill on the Floss</i>, which I first read in her George Eliot graduate seminar; she's teaching it again now to some undergraduates. I'd been hoping to read along and write a <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/02/i-find-it-enough-to-live-without.html">series</a> <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/02/silent-bed.html">of</a> <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/02/light-abandonment-of-ties-whether.html">posts</a> worthy of my eddication as I did with <i>Romola</i> last year. However, while I think I love the book much more now than I did in 1998, I just don't have the time; those <i>Romola</i> posts took me hours and hours, and as I worked in a bookstore then, it seemed much easier to find time to spend hours and hours thinking and writing about books.<br />
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I lament not giving this novel the attention it deserves, but I'm happy that it seems to have reignited my enthusiasm for my Victorian Lit project<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>which I am absolutely not going to jeopardize again by trying, again, to read Thackeray's <i>The History of Henry Esmond</i>! I might even skip <i>Villette</i> and go right back to Dickens, just to be safe.<br />
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Then there are all these books I haven't even cracked, the most important being my Lisbon guidebook and my Portuguese phrase book. I really, really should look at these books, as we're heading to Portugal in just over a month...but somehow it just keeps not happening. I keep finding myself busy with something else. God, I'm such an irresponsible pre-traveller!Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-32742301041001776952011-10-28T23:36:00.001-04:002011-10-28T23:36:10.622-04:00Mo money, mo moustachesIt's almost <a href="http://ca.movember.com/">Movember</a>, friends, the month during which those who can grow hair above their upper lips do so to help raise money for men's health. My husband is participating, and there will be photographic evidence every day <a href="http://momoneymomoustache.blogspot.com/">here</a>. Join the very silly fun! Magnum P.I. wants you to.<br />
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<br />Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-34668214914271109892011-10-26T11:07:00.001-04:002011-10-26T11:07:40.503-04:00An unlikely trioAnother round-up, my friends! I'm looking forward to soon finding the time for writing round-ups of one. Today, three books that in no way belong together form the subject of my early morning musings. (Actually, it's not that early; it's almost 9:30 ayem as I begin writing this. I woke up late. Yesterday, I gymmed for an hour and then later had an hour-long swimming lesson. I feel both very strong and very tired today.)<br />
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Last week, I finished reading China Mi<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>ville's fat novel <i>Perdido Street Station</i>. I can't give you a plot summary without telling you the whole story, so I won't even try. Some generalities: it's fantasy completely <i>sans</i> swords but not sorcery (but no funny hats or wands are involved), it's sci-fi, it's an excellent example of literary world-building, it's absolutely full of disturbing and bad shit.<br />
<br />
<i>Perdido Street Station</i> is almost 700 pages of trouble going down. For a long while, I loved the perpetual climax (crisis!) of the plot but 300+ pages of unremitting tension started to wear on me a little by the end. China Mi<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>ville, who is lovely because he looks like a bouncer but has a PhD from the London School of Economics and a vocabulary at least 10 times larger than most people's, is also generally a very good writer. As I noted in my review of <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2011/01/palimpsest-of-evolving-interpretation.html"><i>The City & The City</i></a>, I really admire his ability to write compelling fiction in a semi-academic "voice"; I honestly don't know how he manages to make this work, but he does, and that's my third reason for adoring him.<br />
<br />
But I didn't adore <i>Perdido Street Station</i>, at least not as a whole. And my biggest complaint about the book is something I'm not sure is, in fact, a problem with the book; it might very well be only a reflection of the limitations of my being a Bear of Very Little Brain. This is the problem: I kind of hate descriptions of the physical context of a story. I like some very basic information to set the stage, and then my own brain takes over and aggressively creates its own set of visuals. This compulsion was set repeatedly in conflict with Mieville's extensive, rich, and unending details about the physical aspects of the world he creates; unfortunately, all his information couldn't silence my own notions of how things looked and so I suffered from a mild but persistent headache the whole time I was reading this book. Also, and this is a much smaller issue but it grated on me more and more as I neared the book's conclusion: the word "architecture" was so over-used it started to make me feel crazy. With a vocabulary bigger than god's boots, I know Mieville needn't have relied so heavily on this one word.<br />
<br />
These seem like pretty minor problems, yes. Indeed, much of the book was wonderful, fantastic. But there is one major problem with <i>Perdido Street Station</i> that doesn't seem minor to me at all, but which I can't reveal here as it occurs at the very end of the book and to discuss it in any detail would be to blow the whole plot up in the air. But I will say this: Isaac's reasons are damned stupid, because the moral bind Mi<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>ville puts him is a total cop-out. That said, I'm still desperate to read <i>Kraken</i>. <br />
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Next up was a collection of short stories edited by Kenzaburo Oe: <i>The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath</i>. In terms of historical, archaeological reflection this is an excellent collection as it covers writers of different ages, experiences, and gender. As a literary collection, it is wildly uneven and the only reason I see this is a problem is that, given how rich Japan's literary history is, I just can't imagine it was actually necessary to choose historical variety over artistic merit.<br />
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Indeed, stories by Tamiki Hara and especially Hiroko Takenishi's "The Rite" were literarily amazing which, of course, lent much greater poignancy and pathos to the historical moments they addressed. These two recognized, or at least were able to articulate, that the physical calamity of the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II was only the beginning; that the emotional, familial, social, mental calamities would go deeper and last much, much longer. So, this book was also not all it could have been, but I'm incredibly grateful to have been introduced to two excellent Japanese writers I hadn't before known of.<br />
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And to make it three partial disappointments in a row, there's Roddy Doyle's <i>The Woman Who Walked Into Doors</i>, which I finished yesterday. I keep reading Roddy Doyle but the fact is, I think I've actually only really loved one of his novels so far: <i>The Snapper</i>. All his books have great moments, and sometimes those great moments are lengthy. But his writing style is so set, his approach so uniform that even different topics come out looking pretty similar. All his characters speak exactly the same way.<br />
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I've concluded that Roddy Doyle is quite good at what he does, but he only does one thing. Or, he sort of does two things: funny books and not funny books, but the writing style and voice issues remain problems, and so it's really just one thing. And that one thing is lower middle class Dubliners screwing shit up and having tough lives. The question is simply whether or not there will be laughs involved. <br />
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<i>The Woman Who Walked Into Doors</i> is about one Paula Spenser, a woman with an abusive husband and a problem with the bottle. There are some truly powerful moments in this novel; indeed, I found myself tearing up on the subway train yesterday. But I already can't remember why; Doyle's style just isn't strong enough, on the whole, to find any purchase in either my short- or long-term memories. I'll still read the sequel, <i>Paula Spenser</i>, just to find out what happens though; if Doyle's writing isn't memorable, it's easy and sometimes that's what's required.<br />
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Being such a negative Nelly isn't enjoyable for me either, by the way. But it's mid-morning and it's as dark outside as midnight during the apocalypse; sprightly blog writing simply can't occur under such conditions.Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-54164788959957205602011-10-12T21:29:00.001-04:002011-10-13T08:22:20.655-04:00Autumn has well and truly arrivedThis afternoon, I was wearing all black and riding my shiny black bicycle (with flash red panniers) when I felt autumn arrive. As I came around the corner on Annette Street by my favourite coffee shop, I was caught in a rainstorm that didn't exclusively comprise rain; manically swirling yellow leaves were at least as abundant as the cold water running down the back of my hoodie. It was lovely, not to mention slippery. After a month of relatively endless ("relatively" because, after all, the sun <i>is</i> setting before 8pm these days) sunshine and sandals and bare legs, summer has finally moved on. And you know what that means: Bookphilia has come back inside and has some blogging to do.<br />
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I have been reading steadily, of course, as well as physically covering a great deal of ground, both on foot and on wheel. And I've been busy with other "life" things (don't ask me what those scare quotes imply, for I can't quite recall at the moment), but the fact is, a persistent and slow-burning internet disaster has been afflicting Bookphilia Castle. I am writing this post on a laptop that is from the Stone Age of Computing, i.e., it's about 8 years old. It takes 5-10 minutes to load pictures to Blogger (and given that this post contains 3 images, let's just say that I'm in the process of developing a Zen-like state of calm and disconnection (double entendre fully intended)). The real computer, the newish computer, the fast computer can't be reliably used these days because it breaks up with the wireless connection approximately every 45 minutes; it's behaving like a fussy and dramatic 14-year old boyfriend I once had (we were <i>both</i> 14, relax).<br />
<br />
This problem began well over a month ago and my dear husband, Master of Computery Things, has been unable to fix it. So I've been stuck. When I was spending almost every minute of every day outside, this clearly wasn't a big problem; now, however, that we are all quickly becoming dead leaf- and rain-bound, things have reached a crisis point. There may be a duel, but I'm not yet sure who I'll have to challenge.<br />
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But yes, I've been reading. And now I am sitting cozily and happily ready to discuss. Several weeks ago, I finished a mad romp by Nick Harkaway called <i>The Gone Away World</i>. Part sci-fi, part action adventure, part slapstick, part surprisingly touching coming of age story, this novel was simply over-stuffed; Harkaway tried to pack too much into his first novel. But here's the thing: it was still really good and <i>it still worked</i>. My initial concerns that Harkaway didn't have complete control over his own narrative enthusiasm have, for the most part, proven to have been rather too prim and worried of me. Given how the whole thing ties up, he clearly knew from the beginning where he was going.<br />
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And while, yes, he <i>did</i> pack a lot in, which created an appearance of literary chaos, the fact is, there were a whole packet of connecting clues <i>I</i> failed to pick up on. Why? The danger of the good romp is that you're too busy enjoying yourself bouncing around in the apparent chaos to get down to analyzing. That's one possibility. It could also have been residual coffee withdrawal, which I think (after two months) I am now finally free of.<br />
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It may also have been the writing. I don't know how else to describe the <i>energy</i> of Harkaway's writing except to say that I think it entirely possible that every day when he sat down to write, he roared, in the spirit of that living genius Maurice Sendak, "LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!" I don't think it necessary that Harkaway wore a monster onesie in order to channel the Sendak God, but I do imagine he regularly pounded his chest while belting out this ageless, good-time battle cry.<br />
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It doesn't matter why I missed all those damned connections; <i>The Gone Away World</i> is a bloody good, if not perfect, novel; I can't wait to see what Harkaway does next.<br />
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In an attempt to circle stealthily back towards my Victorian Lit project and my unappetizing copy of Thackeray's <i>The History of Henry Esmond</i>, I picked up Honoré de Balzac's <i>Lost Illusions</i>. This seemed like a safe bet, given how completely I loved my first Balzac novel, <i><a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/03/elegant-parricide.html">P</a><a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/03/elegant-parricide.html">è</a></i><i><a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/03/elegant-parricide.html">re Goriot</a></i>; alas, this latest foray into the father of French realism's vast oeuvre was not entirely satisfying. <br />
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I think it should have been, though. Balzac's writing was just as stellar, as penetrating, as incisively cynical and condemnatory, as strangely compassionate of extreme and ridiculous human failing as it was in <i>P</i><i>è</i><i>re Goriot</i>; which may have been the problem, actually—<i>Lost Illusions</i> didn't seem sufficiently distinct from this other novel. Indeed, I'm fairly certain that in a year's time, I won't be able to distinguish the two in my memory except in very broad and fuzzy outline. As with <i>P</i><i>è</i><i>re Goriot, Lost Illusions</i> features a naive provincial man-boy moving to Paris to be corrupted and to ruin those who believe in and adore him. The temptations Eugène and Lucien face are similarly shallow, fleeting, and amorphous, having entirely to do with succeeding in "Society." Because of this, Balzac's moral scalpel-wielding seemed less convincing overall, and that makes me incredibly sad.<br />
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Of course, I will read more of Balzac's work; I still think he was likely a genius of a very high (and well caffeinated order) and so I am more than willing to eat the above expressions of disappointment if further reading shows them to have been premature. Also, I have a lovely little reading copy of <i>Cousin Bette</i> sitting patiently but persistently on my shelf...<br />
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Meanwhile, my frustrated love affair with Haruki Murakami has reached a new low. I recently finished <i>After Dark</i>, the last novel published before this month's (well, this month in English) hysterically anticipated <i>1Q84</i>. Don't get me wrong, <i>After Dark </i>contains some very, very good bits, but of all the Murakami novels I've thus far read, it makes the least overall sense.<br />
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Murakami has with this novel made explicit something that I've always unconsciously believed—his works read best around 3 am, preferably when accompanied by a hard dose of insomnia. The dark and quiet whispered life of reading alone after midnight is his fiction's proper milieu. In the middle of the night (not when I've read most of the Murakami I've read, but when I've enjoyed it most), it doesn't seem problematic that much of his narrative makes no recognizable human sense (the lovely <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/03/human-side-of-haruki-murakami.html"><i>Norwegian Wood</i></a> excluded, of course); indeed, it seems appropriate. As I still have several of his major works left to me, I almost miss the heyday of my grad school insomnia/Murakami renaissance.<br />
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Even knowing that Murakami belongs in the cracks of existence made visible only after the sun goes down, and even knowing that Murakami clearly knows this about himself, <i>After Dark</i> is nonetheless the weakest, most self-indulgent, most inconsistently written novel he has in my experience produced. It should have been hacked at with a sacred editorial machete; it should have been cleansed in ritual re-writing fires. It was not; it simply cannot have been interfered with in the way it needed to be interfered with. It was, I'm guessing, published in the malformed state in which it burst original and entire from its author's forehead.<br />
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But original...yes, Murakami is still absolutely original, at least in comparison with other writers, if not with himself. Nobody else writes the way he writes, and sometimes it's just so irresistible...Yes, I will probably eventually read the 900-page monstrosity <i>1Q84</i>; I suspect there will be gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair though.Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-6125136301068046442011-09-16T23:16:00.002-04:002011-09-16T23:18:20.469-04:00Why I must never, ever, ever read (auto)biography againJust a (hopefully) quick post on what I've been reading, and what I ought not to be reading so that I can read other things I want to read. Anthony Trollope and I are going to have to have a duel, that's all.<br />
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I had been enjoying my Victorian Literature project so much that I decided to read Anthony Trollope's <i>An Autobiography</i> in between fat Victorian novels, instead of something more contemporary.<br />
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I enjoyed the <i>Autobiography</i> very much, at first, for Trollope seemed to be rather endearing in his stiff-necked hilarity; e.g., finding himself wedged between two men at a gentlemen's club, who didn't know who he was but who were loudly complaining that Anthony Trollope over-used the same old characters in different novels, Trollope announced himself and then promised to kill one of his most famous characters dead the next week<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>and did! This made me really very happy.<br />
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But his hilarity died somewhere along the way, and he spent a lot of space coarsely (and dully, so dully) discussing in great detail the precise amounts of money he earned for each novel he published. I don't object to authors making a living via writing; it sounds rather delightful, in fact; it's that he was so specific about it. People who talk a lot about all the money they've made regardless of profession are tiresome.<br />
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What really appalled me, though, was that his commitment to never missing a deadline was so ruthless that he sent things off which he himself believed to be not very good. He was a great reader himself so I find it doubly shocking that he didn't appear to have an inkling of how rude that is to the readers that kept him in business! Trollope, damn your eyes, I thought we were going to be excellent friends. As it is, I'm now rather relieved that it'll be some time before I encounter one of your novels on my Vic Lit list.<br />
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This book has<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>Dear gawd, please, make it <i>briefly</i>!<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>put me off the Victorians altogether. (My reading comfort is rather like a delicate flower, or small and easily frightened woodland animal; any little upset can cause catastrophe.) Worse yet, my next Victorian novel is supposed to be Thackeray's <i>The History of Henry Esmond</i><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">;</span> that this was one of Trollope's favourite books of all time is making the problem harder to overcome.<br />
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It's not that I disliked Trollope entirely; but that doesn't seem to matter; much about the book was enjoyable, particularly his thoughts on his contemporary authors (although I completely disagree re: George Eliot). It seems that knowing almost anything about authors I like is potentially fatal. I thought it was just that <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2008/08/consumed-by-his-own-brilliance.html">Mishima was a whole packet of crazy unpleasantness</a>; but no, the sad fact is that while I think the New Critics were unmitigated idiots, I actually don't want to really believe that authors actually exist(ed). Except for <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/07/bookphilia-meets-david-mitchell-and.html">David Mitchell</a>, of course.<br />
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In my non-Victorian lit-reading meantime, I have, of course, turned to my beloved and entirely reliable Ellis Peters for solace and healing. <i>The Confession of Brother Haluin</i> is the 15th chronicle of Brother Cadfael, and it's one of my favourites so far in the series, right up there with <i>The Virgin in the Ice</i> (book 4). Cadfael et al got to be very tolerant but Peters didn't, for a change, overuse her favourite adjective. There was snow and pain and death and remorse and more pain and lust and murder and redemption. A comforting, satisfying read, in part because it wasn't particularly surprising or suspenseful.<br />
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Reading Ellis Peters is like getting wrapped up in your favourite blanket and being given a bowl of your favourite comfort food. I'll be quite sad when I'm done the series (just four or five more little books to go).<br />
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Much more challenging was Junichiro Tanizaki's uber-famous novel of Japan near the end of the Second World War, <i>The Makioka Sisters</i>. A compatriot of mine in my MA year told me that this novel was like a George Eliot novel. Now, with that I can't agree<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>but that's because no one, as far as I know, has ever come close to replicating Eliot's profound ability to unpack her characters' characters.<br />
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But this by no means should imply that <i>The Makioka Sisters</i> is not an excellent book; it is an <i>excellent</i> book, truly. This story of four sisters trying to maintain old traditions of behaviour and sentiment in a world that's leaving them behind is by turns amusing, appalling, terrifying, and frustrating. And Tanizaki's skill at subtly cranking up the underlying anxiety as the events that lead to Japan's surrender is "set your teeth on edge" effective. Painful, yes; but Tanizaki also somehow maintains the compelling story-telling throughout. Just wonderful.<br />
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Finally, I just re-read a Renaissance slice and dice of the first order, a play I hadn't read in probably twelve years and which I did not remember at all: Thomas Middleton's <i>Women Beware Women</i>.<br />
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My gawd, it is just so damned good. It is stunningly foul in its portrayal of human desire; people are truly a disgusting lot in Middleton's world view. I've never met such a compelling she-villain (Livia) in my explorations of the Renaissance drama (that I can remember; you can be damned sure I will be seeking out all the Middleton going in case I've missed and/or forgotten more amazingness of this lurid order). I am <i>desperate</i> to see this play performed; a double-header of it and John Ford's <i>'Tis Pity She's a Whore</i> might well constitute my idea of heaven on earth.<br />
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Just read it, trust me; and while you're doing so, try to think of who could do justice to a character like Livia. I can only imagine Angelina Jolie in five years or so, in one of those rare instances in which she doesn't simply phone in her performance.<br />
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Also, William C. Carroll's introduction was very compelling; it almost made me miss academia (in part because I met this prof at a conference once and he didn't know me at all but made a point of being really nice to me).<br />
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Right then, I'm all caught up. I'm back to <i>The Gone Away World</i> which I put down for awhile but am now rushing madly through again.Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-40395262077625719942011-08-26T11:07:00.001-04:002011-08-26T11:08:25.868-04:00Matthew "Monk" Lewis turns it up to 11<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Matthew Lewis wrote his classic Gothic novel, <i>The Monk</i> (1796), when he was 19, and you can tell. He also completed the manuscript in a mere ten weeks, and that's obvious too. The book is really quite terrible, but in a good, fun, rollicking, silly, and very enjoyable way. Deep literature it ain't.<br />
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<i>The Monk</i> is a novel that glories in all the most horrendous conventions of the Gothic<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>there is rape, murder, ghosts, incest, torture, kinky sex with a demon, contracts with Lucifer (written in blood no less)<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>but it also makes fun of these common tropes. In addition to hilarious horrors, there are prolonged rants against the hypocrisy of the Catholic church coupled with glaring factual errors with regards to said Church. Lewis aimed to entertain and by no means to instruct, and he succeeded.<br />
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I didn't take notes on this novel while I was reading it. As with several of the books mentioned in my previous post, <i>The Monk</i> was integral to my getting through the first week of Life After Caffeine. I needed a romp that wouldn't ask me to think too much and Lewis delivered; it couldn't have been a more perfect choice. And having carried this book around unread for approximately 10 years, it's also been a remarkable relief to realize that sometimes the right time for a book really is full a decade in the making. (FYI: It's almost 2 weeks since my last coffee; I think I'm almost okay now. Maybe.)<br />
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Gah, what a boring review. I wouldn't post this if I thought I could do better later. The fact is, for the next little while I'm going to be busier than usual and I'm not sure how much time I'll have for blogging; I'm certainly not going to be reading less, if I can help it! I will try to stay on top of things, by at least indicating when I've read a book. But spending a few hours on each post, and doing several posts per Victorian novel...not sure I can engage that deeply for the next little while.<br />
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Next up: a likely very short and unsatisfying review of Anthony Trollope's <i>Autobiography</i>!Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-34561613528743955852011-08-21T15:35:00.000-04:002012-09-16T21:28:50.891-04:00A caffeine withdrawal-related miscellanyI have a complicated relationship with the noble coffee bean. I love coffee just for the taste, and that's normally why I forget the kind of headachey, sleepy, confused, and indecisive withdrawal week I just went through and start eventually drinking it again. When I do start drinking it again after a period of abstinence, I feel amazingly good and am stupidly productive...which eventually ends in complete dependence that provides no such boosts and I'm drinking it just to avoid the headache, etc. Which, understandably, I think, quickly becomes unacceptable, and I quit, again. I haven't had a coffee, or anything else caffeinated, since last Saturday.<br />
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But before I quit the good stuff, I finished reading Anne Fadiman's collection of familiar essays, <i>At Large and At Small</i>. Indeed, in a terrible instance of art thumbing its nose at (my) life, I found myself reading her essay about coffee while drinking what I knew would be my last cup of coffee (this time around).<br />
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"Coffee" was a great essay, but it filled me with fear because of its discussion of all the great people (Balzac being the one I recall most clearly) who would have gotten nothing done and achieved no fame or fortune whatsoever without imbibing copious amounts of the caffeinated beverage of extreme deliciousness. I don't think coffee can make me as gifted and prolific a writer as Balzac was; coffee is no substitute for natural talent. Yet, reading this piece made me antsy about ever getting anything interesting done again. Have I mentioned that coffee also makes me antsy?<br />
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As for the rest of Fadiman's collection, it was not as compelling to me as her previous work, <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2009/02/someday-ill-lead-book-revolutionin.html"><i>Ex Libris</i></a>, but I think this has primarily to do with the fact that <i>Ex Libris</i> was entirely about books and <i>At Large and At Small</i> is only partially about books. My favourite pieces in the latter (besides "Coffee") were about Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; her other essays<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>addressing such diverse topics as ice cream, butterfly collecting, and the American flag<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>were incredibly well-written, of course, but their subject matter didn't draw me in at all.<br />
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Reading this book has made it even more embarrassingly clear to me that books are my almost exclusive interest in life. Well, at least in terms of reading; I like cats very much, and travel, and hummus, but I don't care much to read about any of these things. Books that are stories and books about books (sometimes) are all I really care to read. Fadiman's superb writing carried me through the essays addressing topics that I had no interest in, but <i>At Large and At Small</i> didn't grab me the way her bibliophilic romp <i>Ex Libris</i> did.<br />
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The first few days of life after coffee (LAC) were passed away in the post-apocalyptic YA hell that is Suzanne Collins's <i>The Hunger Games</i>. My darling friend <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2008/10/reading-lamp-more-than-simply-passable.html">Vee</a> sent me the whole trilogy a while ago and I was incredibly grateful to have them here when my brain tried to adjust. <i>The Hunger Games</i> is a fast read as well as kind of an addictive one, but I have to say I don't know why the latter is true, for the novel is highly derivative of all such battle royale plots (especially derivative of, say, Koushun Takami's <i>Battle Royale</i>). <br />
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In spite of its being highly derivative, I still think this could have been a really good book, for Collins gestures towards the hideous underbelly of America's obsession with reality TV in conjunction with its love of sensationalist news "reporting". But she just doesn't and this is part of a larger problem: this book was produced by a lazy writer. Collins brings up incredibly fascinating issues and then doesn't bother to tease them out; her characterization is almost non-existent, and the writing is at best merely adequate. I wish either Philip Pullman or Garth Nix had written this book. That said, I will save the other two books in the trilogy for my next bout with the caffeine withdrawal, to help me pass the time.<br />
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In the midst of my caffeine withdrawal, which peaked at day 4 and covered my soul with the most sickening and soul-destroying malaise, I dove (gingerly; I did have a terrible headache, after all) into a graphic novel about the goddamn Batman called <i>Knightfall Part 1: Broken Bat</i>. Very few words and pretty pictures were just what the doctor ordered, and making my way through this collection helped distract me from my acute pain and thankfully short-lived despair.<br />
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I have read very few graphic novels in my day, but I think my husband may have screwed the form's chances of ever becoming a favourite of mine by having me read two of the best examples thereof to begin<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span><a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2009/03/i-am-brother-to-dragons-and-companion.html"><i>Watchmen</i></a> and <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/05/id-been-meaning-to-read-v-for-vendetta.html"><i>V for Vendetta</i></a>. <i>Watchmen</i>, especially. <i>Broken Bat</i>, in comparison, was amateurish in its story-telling, for each chapter simply detailed the Batman having his ass viciously handed to him by increasingly more dangerous super-villains until he's (literally) broken by the large, hairy, angry, and souped up Bane. I wouldn't say I was exactly bored by the time it ended, but I wasn't sorry to see it go either.<br />
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Finally, there was the lovely J. D. Salinger's famous collection, <i>Nine Stories</i>. I actually began reading this small tome about a month ago but let it lay for a long time because the first several stories were just not compelling in the ways I've come to expect of Salinger's work. The first tale, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", wasn't bad<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>but it's about <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2011/01/definition-of-sentimentality.html">Seymour</a>, so it should have been bloody fantastic, and it wasn't. And the story that followed it, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut", I thought was actually kind of terrible. So, I put the book down.<br />
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But then I picked it up again last week, in part out of guilt and in part out of necessity (for it's due back at the library tomorrow) and in part because I thought short stories might help me get through the final days of caffeine detoxification (I'm feeling excellent now, thank you). The rest of the book is a mixed bag of disappointing and brilliant. I hated "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" even more than I hated the wiggily story, but "For Esme<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>with Love and Squalor", "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period", and "Teddy" were so good as to make up for everything else; yes, it was worth reading all nine just for these three.<br />
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And now my reading brain has recovered, I am reading Anthony Trollope's autobiography while I wait for my next Vic Lit project novel to arrive from the library<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—Thackeray's <i>The History of Henry Esmond</i>. I actually already have a copy of this novel, but when I picked it up to begin it, all the pages started falling out; this is no way to read a Great Book, so I will wait for the hopefully less abused library copy.</span>Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-49594410153525206592011-08-17T15:09:00.001-04:002011-08-17T15:09:22.890-04:00Dombey and Son - a novel without a hero?As I was nearing the conclusion of Charles Dickens's <i>Dombey and Son</i>, it occurred to me that unlike <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/search/label/Vanity%20Fair"><i>Vanity Fair</i></a> (which only claimed to be so), this might <i>really</i> be a novel without a hero. Paul Dombey, Sr. never comes close to occupying the role of hero; he is too selfish, prideful, self-absorbed, cruel. Certainly, he changes quite radically in the end but his moment for heroism has long passed by then. Young Paul might have become one but he is, of course, too good to live into adulthood. Other options? Really, only young Walter Gay has any potential in this regard and he spends a great deal too much time floundering about in the ocean trying not to drown to fulfill this role.<br />
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It's not simply absence or youth or personality defect that discounts these three potential heroes from inhabiting such a role; it's that they are either never confronted with the kinds of terrible and impossible choices that true heroes face and manage to respond rightly to, or (in Dombey's case) they respond in ways that can only be described as miserable failures.<br />
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But in the end, someone does show themselves to be capable of foolish bravery and truly selfish action performed on another's behalf: Florence Dombey. Florence Dombey suffers a great deal. During her lonely childhood, her father never once makes an effort to hide his utter disinterest in her; indeed, he sees her as a threat to his relationship with young Paul, then his second wife, and always to his perception of himself.<br />
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In the early years, he worries he will come to hate her, and he does<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>to such a degree that upon Edith's elopement with Carker the Manager, he blindly blames Florence and physically assaults her! (Further, he never inquires into Florence's whereabouts after she flees in fear and pain, assuming she's probably with his odious sister. Bad, bad man!) She runs, finally having seen what has been clear to everyone else her whole life<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>that her father despises her, utterly, and does not deserve the place in her heart she's held for him. It's taken 17 years for her to see him clearly and the knowledge almost breaks her.<br />
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Up to this point, Florence is certainly a portrait of long-suffering devotion, but she is not heroic; her love is timid, mostly passive, and secret. She spends a great deal of time weeping, lamenting, sighing, placing her weary head upon her hand, and feeling like her heart is about to break. When she is forced to escape the Dombey household (which has never been eligible for the moniker "home"), she flees to the home of Sol Gills and his nephew Walter Gay, as they are the only people in her life who've ever truly helped and cared for her. Neither are there; both are lost on the ocean; but she finds Captain Cuttle, Sol's greatest friend, present and willing to hide her and nurse her indefinitely.<br />
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It takes her some time to recover but when she does, Walter has miraculously made it back to London and they soon discover that now they are young adults, their childhood friendship has become something rather more complicated. And here's where Florence begins to become something larger and braver and stronger than I would have imagined possible. Having survived one shipwreck, Walter must shortly away to sea again due to deep financial constraints; Florence responds thus:<br />
<blockquote>
'Are you soon going away again, Walter?'<br /><br />'Very soon.<br /><br />She sat looking at him for a moment; then timidly put her trembling hand in his.<br /><br />'If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world's end without fear. I can give up nothing for you<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>I have nothing to resign, and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be devoted to you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have sense and memory left.'<br /><br />He caught her to his heart, and laid her cheek against his own, and now, no more repulsed, no more forlorn, she wept indeed, upon the breast of her dear lover. (p. 752)</blockquote>
It's not simply that Florence proposes to Walter; it's that, having lost everyone she's ever loved, and had her hopes about her father so horrifically stripped away, she's capable of laying her heart completely on the line <i>again</i>. No other character in <i>Dombey and Son</i> has looked such emotional horrors in the face and remained in one piece, AND been able to continue to take important risks.<br />
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And Florence transcends even this incredible moment when a year after she and Walter sail away for China, she returns to her father who has lost everything and, locked up in his old and now empty house, is on the verge of committing suicide and can think of himself only as a thing: <br />
<blockquote>
Now it was thinking again! What was it thinking?<br /><br />Whether they would tread in the blood when it crept so far, and carry it about the house among those many prints of feet, or even out into the street.<br /><br />It sat down, with its eyes upon the empty fireplace, and as it lost itself in thought there shone into the room a gleam of light; a ray of sun. It was quite unmindful, and sat thinking. Suddenly it rose, with a terrible face, and that guilty hand grasping what was in its breast. Then it was arrested by a cry<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>a wild, loud, piercing, loving, rapturous cry<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>and he only saw his own reflection in the glass, and at his knees, his daughter!<br /><br />Yes. His daughter! Look at her! Look here! Down upon the ground, clinging to him, calling to him, folding her hands, praying to him.<br /><br />'Papa! Dearest Papa! Pardon me, forgive me! I have come back to ask forgiveness on my knees. I never can be happy more, without it!'<br /><br />Unchanged still. Of all the world, unchanged. Raising the same face to his, as on that miserable night. Asking <i>his</i> forgiveness! (pp. 886-89)</blockquote>
But she has changed, for having a baby has made her truly understand what it means to have and lose a child, and what the bond between infant and parent ought to be. She asks his forgiveness but she shortly after <i>informs</i> him (gently, but without fear) that they will never part again. Not only is she still willing to lay her heart bare to him, after a lifetime of neglect and cruelty, but she is no longer a child who hopes and begs; she is an adult who demands what is right, and right for all.<br />
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Now, I personally felt a little put out that she felt the need to ask this sumbitch for forgiveness; my feelings about him have been rather more aligned with Edith's than with Florence's. But this is Florence through and through<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>she is heroic because her courage in being her best self only increases over time, and never breaks under the pain of ill treatment.<br />
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Of course, this is all very fantastical and sentimental. Indeed, my sister-in-law recently suggested that while it seems impossible, <i>Dombey and Son</i> is actually even more sentimental than <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/search/label/The%20Old%20Curiosity%20Shop"><i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i></a><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>and I can only agree. Dickens makes people pay for their stupidity and cruelty and selfishness and never get another chance in <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>; in <i>Dombey and Son</i>, the morally bankrupt are made to suffer, often a great deal, but only a few are not given another chance to make reparations and live differently.<br />
<br />
It was so sentimental, it made me roll my eyes a few times; but I still loved it. Next on my Vic Lit list: a much less well known Thackeray novel. <br />
Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-37345974463989452622011-08-09T15:46:00.002-04:002011-08-10T06:55:54.965-04:00The mysterious Edith GrangerThis, my second quotation-heavy post on Dickens's <i>Dombey and Son</i>, does give some plot details away, so be warned. I simply can't stop writing and thinking about this book—indeed, there's already a third post in rough draft, and as I still have approximately 350 pages left in the novel, I suspect it won't be the last. I should have become a Dickens scholar, if my enthusiasm is any indication; the worth of my posts makes my not becoming one much less of a loss, I'm sure.<br />
<br />
********************<br />
<br />
The loss of his son doesn't either chasten or soften Paul Dombey. After the funeral, he leaves young Florence alone with the servants in their gigantic, dreary house and takes to travelling about England with his charming new acquaintance, Major Bagstock. Major Bagstock is gruff, honest, straightforward, out-going, entirely devoted to Mr. Dombey—and on the make. In particular, he handily sets and springs a trap for the saddened but no less prideful and self-absorbed Dombey, which culminates in the latter's marriage to a beautiful young widow who boasts not a penny to her name. Bagstock and Edith Granger's mother, Mrs. Skewton, gleefully discuss the ease with which their mark has been lassoed: <br />
<blockquote>
'Shall we marry him to Edith Granger, Ma'am?' chuckled the Major, hoarsely.<br />
<br />
'Mysterious creature!' returned Cleopatra, bringing her fan to bear upon the Major's nose. 'How can we marry him?'<br />
<br />
'Shall we marry him to Edith Granger, Ma'am, I say?' chuckled the Major again.<br />
<br />
Mrs Skewton returned no answer in words, but smiled upon the Major with so much archness and vivacity, that that gallant officer considering himself challenged, would have imprinted a kiss on her exceedingly red lips, but for her interposing the fan with a very winning and juvenile dexterity. It might have been in modesty; it might have been in apprehension of some danger to their bloom.<br />
<br />
'Dombey, Ma'am,' said the Major, 'is a great catch.'<br />
<br />
'Oh, mercenary wretch!' cried Cleopatra, with a little shriek, 'I am shocked.'<br />
<br />
'And Dombey, Ma'am,' pursued the Major, thrusting forward his head, and distending his eyes, 'is in earnest. Joseph says it; Bagstock knows it; J. B. keeps him to the mark. Leave Dombey to himself, Ma'am. Dombey is safe, Ma'am. Do as you have done; do no more; and trust to J. B. for the end.'<br />
<br />
'You really think so, my dear Major?' returned Cleopatra, who had eyed him very cautiously, and very searchingly, in spite of her listless bearing.<br />
<br />
'Sure of it, Ma'am,' rejoined the Major. 'Cleopatra the peerless, and her Antony Bagstock, will often speak of this, triumphantly, when sharing the elegance and wealth of Edith Dombey's establishment. Dombey's right-hand man, Ma'am,' said the Major, stopping abruptly in a chuckle, and becoming serious, 'has arrived.' (pp. 392-93)</blockquote>
That these elderly former lovers do not scruple to take advantage of Dombey's weaknesses (which comprise primarily his unbending pride and confidence in his own worth, not to mention a desire to make another attempt at establishing the company under the banner of Dombey <i>and Son</i>) is not something shared by the fair face of their scheme, however. Edith chafes under the compulsion to marry a man whom she scorns, and shows more humanity in spite of her shockingly cold and proud demeanour than either Bagstock or Mrs. Skewton are capable of imagining. The predatory Mr. Carker the Manager comes across Edith in a private moment and observes her thus: <br />
<blockquote>
It was that of a lady, elegantly dressed and very handsome, whose dark proud eyes were fixed upon the ground, and in whom some passion or struggle was raging. For as she sat looking down, she held a corner of her under lip within her mouth, her bosom heaved, her nostril quivered, her head trembled, indignant tears were on her cheek, and her foot was set upon the moss as though she would have crushed it into nothing. And yet almost the self-same glance that showed him this, showed him the self-same lady rising with a scornful air of weariness and lassitude, and turning away with nothing expressed in face or figure but careless beauty and imperious disdain.(p. 403 bottom)</blockquote>
Her self-protective mask of aggressive disinterest in everything going on around her is so strong that it reasserts itself even in moments when she imagines herself to be alone. Yet, Edith bridles painfully under the necessity of her purchase at the hands of a man who is thus far shown himself to be incapable of thinking of human relations in anything other than transactional terms. She will marry Mr. Dombey and all his money but she never claims to relish the prospect; indeed, she never pretends to have even the tiniest interest in it, not even to Dombey. She sees herself as chattel, as does everyone else around her: <br />
<blockquote>
'Look at me,' she said, 'who have never known what it is to have an honest heart, and love. Look at me, taught to scheme and plot when children play; and married in my youth—an old age of design—to one for whom I had no feeling but indifference. Look at me, whom he left a widow, dying before his inheritance descended to him—a judgment on you! well deserved!—and tell me what has been my life for ten years since.'<br />
<br />
'We have been making every effort to endeavour to secure to you a good establishment,' rejoined her mother. 'That has been your life. And now you have got it.'<br />
<br />
'There is no slave in a market: there is no horse in a fair: so shown and offered and examined and paraded, Mother, as I have been, for ten shameful years,' cried Edith, with a burning brow, and the same bitter emphasis on the one word. 'Is it not so? Have I been made the bye-word of all kinds of men? Have fools, have profligates, have boys, have dotards, dangled after me, and one by one rejected me, and fallen off, because you were too plain with all your cunning: yes, and too true, with all those false pretences: until we have almost come to be notorious? The licence of look and touch,' she said, with flashing eyes, 'have I submitted to it, in half the places of resort upon the map of England? Have I been hawked and vended here and there, until the last grain of self-respect is dead within me, and I loathe myself? Has been my late childhood? I had none before. Do not tell me that I had, tonight of all nights in my life!' (pp. 417-18)</blockquote>
Edith is both trapped by circumstances and the means by which Dombey is trapped, though she never actively tries to further Major Bagstock's and Mrs. Skewton's plans. She coldly acquiesces because she is without options, she chafes against the untenable situation in which she finds herself, but never displays human kindness or tenderness; she seems as hardened as the prostitute she aligns herself with above. Yet, her first meeting with Florence Dombey shows that there is more to her than even she reckons herself: <br />
<blockquote>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NLYyBkREcCM/TkGFJdCa47I/AAAAAAAACCM/mAWUDvjm8sg/s1600/dicken1.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320px" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NLYyBkREcCM/TkGFJdCa47I/AAAAAAAACCM/mAWUDvjm8sg/s320/dicken1.gif" width="285px" /></a>'Edith,' said Mr Dombey, 'this is my daughter Florence. Florence, this lady will soon be your Mama.'<br />
<br />
Florence started, and looked up at the beautiful face in a conflict of emotions, among which the tears that name awakened, struggled for a moment with surprise, interest, admiration, and an indefinable sort of fear. Then she cried out, 'Oh, Papa, may you be happy! may you be very, very happy all your life!' and then fell weeping on the lady's bosom.<br />
<br />
There was a short silence. The beautiful lady, who at first had seemed to hesitate whether or no she should advance to Florence, held her to her breast, and pressed the hand with which she clasped her, close about her waist, as if to reassure her and comfort her. Not one word passed the lady's lips. She bent her head down over Florence, and she kissed her on the cheek, but she said no word.<br />
<br />
'Shall we go on through the rooms,' said Mr Dombey, 'and see how our workmen are doing? Pray allow me, my dear madam.'<br />
<br />
He said this in offering his arm to Mrs Skewton, who had been looking at Florence through her glass, as though picturing to herself what she might be made, by the infusion—from her own copious storehouse, no doubt—of a little more Heart and Nature. Florence was still sobbing on the lady's breast, and holding to her, when Mr Dombey was heard to say from the Conservatory:<br />
<br />
'Let us ask Edith. Dear me, where is she?'<br />
<br />
'Edith, my dear!' cried Mrs Skewton, 'where are you? Looking for Mr Dombey somewhere, I know. We are here, my love.'<br />
<br />
The beautiful lady released her hold of Florence, and pressing her lips once more upon her face, withdrew hurriedly, and joined them. Florence remained standing In the same place: happy, sorry, joyful, and in tears, she knew not how, or how long, but all at once: when her new Mama came back, and took her in her arms again.<br />
<br />
'Florence,' said the lady, hurriedly, and looking into her face with great earnestness. 'You will not begin by hating me?'<br />
<br />
'By hating you, Mama?' cried Florence, winding her arm round her neck, and returning the look.<br />
<br />
'Hush! Begin by thinking well of me,' said the beautiful lady. 'Begin by believing that I will try to make you happy, and that I am prepared to love you, Florence. Good-bye. We shall meet again soon. Good-bye! Don't stay here, now.' (pp. 428-31)</blockquote>
Florence hasn't been shown such regard and kindness since dear Walter sailed away on the ill-fated Son and Heir, since she last visited Sol Gills at The Wooden Midshipman, since her dear brother Paul died. She is so young, so kind, so gentle that she begins to revive her almost entirely deadened hopes of inspiring her father to love her, and of being happy within and part of a family, the moment Edith embraces her for the first time. And Edith is sincere. She truly empathizes with and cares for the neglected girl, and asks pointed and observant questions about her relationship with her father, questions which no one has ever before had the guts, wherewithal, or interest to put to Florence before.<br />
<br />
Indeed, Edith is so strangely interested in and committed to caring for and protecting Florence that she threatens not to marry Dombey if her scheming and relentless mother doesn't promise to allow Florence to stay home alone while the new Dombeys honeymoon: <br />
<blockquote>
'Listen to me, mother,' .... 'You must remain alone here until I return.'<br />
<br />
'Must remain alone here, Edith, until you return!' repeated her mother.<br />
<br />
'Or in that name upon which I shall call to-morrow to witness what I do, so falsely: and so shamefully, I swear I will refuse the hand of this man in the church. If I do not, may I fall dead upon the pavement!'<br />
<br />
The mother answered with a look of quick alarm, in no degree diminished by the look she met.<br />
<br />
'It is enough,' said Edith, steadily, 'that we are what we are. I will have no youth and truth dragged down to my level. I will have no guileless nature undermined, corrupted, and perverted, to amuse the leisure of a world of mothers. You know my meaning. Florence must go home.'<br />
<br />
'You are an idiot, Edith,' cried her angry mother. 'Do you expect there can ever be peace for you in that house, till she is married, and away?'<br />
<br />
'Ask me, or ask yourself, if I ever expect peace in that house,' said her daughter, 'and you know the answer.<br />
<br />
'And am I to be told to-night, after all my pains and labour, and when you are going, through me, to be rendered independent,' her mother almost shrieked in her passion, while her palsied head shook like a leaf, 'that there is corruption and contagion in me, and that I am not fit company for a girl! What are you, pray? What are you?'<br />
<br />
'I have put the question to myself,' said Edith, ashy pale, and pointing to the window, 'more than once when I have been sitting there, and something in the faded likeness of my sex has wandered past outside; and God knows I have met with my reply. Oh mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I too was a girl—a younger girl than Florence—how different I might have been!' (pp. 458-59)</blockquote>
Edith is hardened and resigned to her fate and doesn't give either her mother or her new husband any quarter, for she sees them as entirely complicit in her degradation; but her devotion to Florence is instantaneous and entire. Edith is, clearly, not as lost a soul as she imagines she is; she cannot see that she is a desperately needed good angel to Florence, who could perhaps serve the same function for her. Both are surrounded by the cruel, the corrupt, and the fatally selfish and somehow forge a bond based on something higher than mere transaction, something both more human and more humane. Which, of course, Dombey finds terribly threatening.<br />
<br />
Early in <i>Dombey and Son</i>, on a page I foolishly failed to make a note of, our narrator asserts that at some point the thunder will strike and Dombey will be cast down. But it hasn't happened yet. And the dark looks he wears while secretly watching the women in his life (during which he correctly notes that Edith cares only for Florence) suggest that others will suffer for his small and hard, but incredibly powerful, selfishness before he does.Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-87039078935546884042011-08-06T10:14:00.003-04:002011-08-06T10:15:09.344-04:00The house of Dombey and Son<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am currently about 240 pages (of 900+) into Charles Dickens's <i>Dombey and Son.</i> This is my third Dickens novel and fifth novel total of my Victorian Literature project. I would like to reiterate that this might be the best idea I've ever had. (Well, second best; <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2011/01/delicious-distractions.html">there was the pie-luck</a>, after all.)<br />
<br />
So, <i>Dombey and Son</i>. Dickens revisits many of the same themes in his novels: the rough ways in which children are educated, their parents' often entirely selfish desires for them, their vulnerability. Nonetheless, Dickens treats them differently enough each time that I'm always surprised. And so far, <i>Dombey and Son </i>is the most surprising (you guessed it—<b>plot spoilers follow</b>).<br />
<br />
The novel begins in Dickens's particularly charming way, with Dombey the father sitting with Dombey the new son: <br />
<blockquote>
Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new. (p. 1)</blockquote>
This sweet and gently funny domesticity is not allowed to set the tone for the novel, however; indeed, it seems to be there only to throw into painful relief what follows—primarily, the elder Dombey's immediate commencement of a lifelong project of imposing his desires onto his boy: <br />
<blockquote>
'The House will once again, Mrs Dombey,' said Mr Dombey, 'be not only in name but in fact Dombey and Son;' and he added, in a tone of luxurious satisfaction, with his eyes half-closed as if he were reading the name in a device of flowers, and inhaling their fragrance at the same time; 'Dom-bey and Son!'<br />
<br />
The words had such a softening influence, that he appended a term of endearment to Mrs Dombey's name (though not without some hesitation, as being a man but little used to that form of address): and said, 'Mrs Dombey, my—my dear.'<br />
<br />
A transient flush of faint surprise overspread the sick lady's face as she raised her eyes towards him.<br />
'He will be christened Paul, my—Mrs Dombey—of course.'<br />
<br />
She feebly echoed, 'Of course,' or rather expressed it by the motion of her lips, and closed her eyes again.<br />
<br />
'His father's name, Mrs Dombey, and his grandfather's! I wish his grandfather were alive this day! There is some inconvenience in the necessity of writing Junior,' said Mr Dombey, making a fictitious autograph on his knee; 'but it is merely of a private and personal complexion. It doesn't enter into the correspondence of the House. Its signature remains the same.' And again he said 'Dombey and Son, in exactly the same tone as before.<br />
<br />
Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them. A. D. had no concern with Anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei—and Son. (pp. 1-2)</blockquote>
Love, tenderness, care—such ideals have nothing to do with Dombey family unity. As his wife lies dying in the same room with him, the elder Dombey can think only of how having a son will finally allow him to realize certain long-cherished monetary and social ambitions. His love for his son is entirely tied up in what the child will be and what that becoming will do for the reputation and prosperity of the family. Gender and what it stands for here is everything; young Paul's potential for personality, desire, or actions unrelated to this aren't part of the equation.<br />
<br />
Dombey is as proud as any new father with misdirected and confused priorities might be, except that he's not a new father. No, he already has a daughter named Florence but, well, she's a girl: <br />
<blockquote>
They had been married ten years, and until this present day on which Mr Dombey sat jingling and jingling his heavy gold watch-chain in the great arm-chair by the side of the bed, had had no issue.—To speak of; none worth mentioning. There had been a girl some six years before, and the child, who had stolen into the chamber unobserved, was now crouching timidly, in a corner whence she could see her mother's face. But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House's name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn't be invested—a bad Boy—nothing more.<br />
<br />
Mr Dombey's cup of satisfaction was so full at this moment, however, that he felt he could afford a drop or two of its contents, even to sprinkle on the dust in the by-path of his little daughter.<br />
<br />
So he said, 'Florence, you may go and look at your pretty brother, if you like, I daresay. Don't touch him!' (p. 3)</blockquote>
Dombey is in the grips of a lifelong fantasy. At this point, all the birth of a son has done is confirm the worth and primacy of that fantasy; indeed, it has confirmed Dombey's very identity. The birth of Paul is central to the plan that has defined every aspect of his life. That this fantasy conforms to many of society's approved values of a man's worth in life doesn't, however, change the fact that it is an obssession—it keeps him from seeing clearly that when humans are involved, there are sometimes variables that cannot easily be overcome.<br />
<br />
Children, it turns out, can have plans of their own; and sometimes God (or nature; in any case, something larger and stronger than mere individuals) has plans for them that blindly disregard all of one's best laid plans. But Dombey certainly tries to control the course of young Paul's life, beginning by reminding the wet nurse brought in to care for Paul once his fragile mother dies, that as essential as such a relationship might be, it's still only transactional:<br />
<blockquote>
'You have children of your own,' said Mr Dombey. 'It is not at all in this bargain that you need become attached to my child, or that my child need become attached to you. I don't expect or desire anything of the kind. Quite the reverse. When you go away from here, you will have concluded what is a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting: and will stay away. The child will cease to remember you; and you will cease, if you please, to remember the child.'<br />
<br />
Mrs Toodle, with a little more colour in her cheeks than she had had before, said 'she hoped she knew her place.' (p. 18)</blockquote>
In spite of his confident assertion of power here, things don't work out quite as planned. First, of course, Mrs. Toodle (who Dombey <i>et al</i> insist upon referring to as Mrs. Richards) becomes attached to the infant Paul, who quite naturally reciprocates and thrives under her care. Second, the very existence of young Florence, as much as Dombey tries to ignore her and not figure her into his calculations for his son at all, quietly but insistently intimates to him that there are limits to both his power and his understanding: <br />
<blockquote>
The last time he had seen his slighted child, there had been that in the sad embrace between her and her dying mother, which was at once a revelation and a reproach to him. Let him be absorbed as he would in the Son on whom he built such high hopes, he could not forget that closing scene. He could not forget that he had had no part in it. That, at the bottom of its clear depths of tenderness and truth, lay those two figures clasped in each other's arms, while he stood on the bank above them, looking down a mere spectator—not a sharer with them--quite shut out.<br />
<br />
Unable to exclude these things from his remembrance, or to keep his mind free from such imperfect shapes of the meaning with which they were fraught, as were able to make themselves visible to him through the mist of his pride, his previous feeling of indifference towards little Florence changed into an uneasiness of an extraordinary kind. Young as she was, and possessing in any eyes but his (and perhaps in his too) even more than the usual amount of childish simplicity and confidence, he almost felt as if she watched and distrusted him. As if she held the clue to something secret in his breast, of the nature of which he was hardly informed himself. As if she had an innate knowledge of one jarring and discordant string within him, and her very breath could sound it. (p. 31)</blockquote>
More than Florence, however, young Paul himself defies the elder Dombey's expectations by becoming a gentle, sensitive, kind, and very thoughtful boy. He is naturally generous and good to others and loves none so much as the piece of base coin that is his adoring elder sister. He is naturally generous in spite of his father's influence, and insists upon his father (who humours him because he is, after all, Son, of the house of Dombey and Son) helping young Walter Gay and his grandfather to get out from beneath some ruinous debt: <br />
<blockquote>
'If you had money now,' said Mr Dombey; 'as much money as young Gay has talked about; what would you do?'<br />
<br />
'Give it to his old Uncle,' returned Paul.<br />
<br />
'Lend it to his old Uncle, eh?' retorted Mr Dombey. 'Well! When you are old enough, you know, you will share my money, and we shall use it together.'<br />
<br />
'Dombey and Son,' interrupted Paul, who had been tutored early in the phrase.<br />
<br />
'Dombey and Son,' repeated his father. 'Would you like to begin to be Dombey and Son, now, and lend this money to young Gay's Uncle?'<br />
<br />
'Oh! if you please, Papa!' said Paul: 'and so would Florence.'<br />
<br />
'Girls,' said Mr Dombey, 'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son. Would you like it?'<br />
<br />
'Yes, Papa, yes!'<br />
<br />
'Then you shall do it,' returned his father. 'And you see, Paul,' he added, dropping his voice, 'how powerful money is, and how anxious people are to get it. Young Gay comes all this way to beg for money, and you, who are so grand and great, having got it, are going to let him have it, as a great favour and obligation.' (p. 141-42).</blockquote>
Paul is firmly entrenched in the concerns of the human, rather than the pecuniary, world. He cares about others and wants them to care for him. Dombey Sr. deals in coin; Dombey the younger recognizes no meaningful currency except community:<br />
<blockquote>
[H]e felt a gradually increasing impulse of affection, towards almost everything and everybody in the place. He could not bear to think that they would be quite indifferent to him when he was gone. He wanted them to remember him kindly; and he had made it his business even to conciliate a great hoarse shaggy dog, chained up at the back of the house, who had previously been the terror of his life: that even he might miss him when he was no longer there.<br />
<br />
Little thinking that in this, he only showed again the difference between himself and his compeers, poor tiny Paul set it forth to Miss Blimber as well as he could, and begged her, in despite of the official analysis, to have the goodness to try and like him. To Mrs Blimber, who had joined them, he preferred the same petition: and when that lady could not forbear, even in his presence, from giving utterance to her often-repeated opinion, that he was an odd child, Paul told her that he was sure she was quite right; that he thought it must be his bones, but he didn't know; and that he hoped she would overlook it, for he was fond of them all.<br />
<br />
'Not so fond,' said Paul, with a mixture of timidity and perfect frankness, which was one of the most peculiar and most engaging qualities of the child, 'not so fond as I am of Florence, of course; that could never be. You couldn't expect that, could you, Ma'am?'<br />
<br />
'Oh! the old-fashioned little soul!' cried Mrs Blimber, in a whisper.<br />
<br />
'But I like everybody here very much,' pursued Paul, 'and I should grieve to go away, and think that anyone was glad that I was gone, or didn't care.' (pp. 197-98)</blockquote>
But it's precisely because he's swiftly leaving the world, and knows it at some level, that he can't help but pay such close attention to those around him. Yes, poor little Paul, initially a physical specimen to be reckoned with (under Mrs. Richards's care), pretty early begins to show that he is simply too good to live long. His connection to people is transcended only by his connection to the distant shore towards which we're all inexorably travelling:<br />
<blockquote>
Sister and brother wound their arms around each other, and the golden light came streaming in, and fell upon them, locked together.<br />
<br />
'How fast the river runs, between its green banks and the rushes, 'Floy! But it's very near the sea. I hear the waves! They always said so!'<br />
<br />
Presently he told her the motion of the boat upon the stream was lulling him to rest. How green the banks were now, how bright the flowers growing on them, and how tall the rushes! Now the boat was out at sea, but gliding smoothly on. And now there was a shore before him. Who stood on the bank—!<br />
<br />
He put his hands together, as he had been used to do at his prayers. He did not remove his arms to do it; but they saw him fold them so, behind her neck.<br />
<br />
'Mama is like you, Floy. I know her by the face! But tell them that the print [of Jesus] upon the stairs at school is not divine enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go!' (pp. 240-41)</blockquote>
And so, on page 241 (of 925) of a novel called <i>Dombey and Son</i>, Son passes away. And Dombey Sr., who may be the subject of this story but who is certainly not its hero, is left with nothing of the dream which has defined his life. It's probably fair to guess that the rest of the tale will be concerned with Dombey's reckoning with his life's work and meaning in the face of such a gaping hole in his plans; but how Dickens will construct that struggle is beyond me, for young Paul's death was not at all what I was expecting. But I should have been less surprised, at least, given how frequently childhood mortality figures in Dickens's fiction—and how frequently such early and excruciatingly unfair deaths (I'm thinking particularly of Little Nell as a counterpart to young Paul here) are tied to their parents' absurd and selfish desires and actions. <br />
<br />
Dombey Sr. couldn't, in most ways, be more dissimilar to Nell's grandfather—but in terms of executing their burden of care with regards to their dependents, they are fatally similar in exhibiting a shocking inability to notice that their children aren't thriving, until it's far, far too late. Dombey, of course, has an opportunity to make some restitution both to the institution of fatherhood and to an individual in particular, but whether or not he'll do so seems to me highly unlikely. But then, Dickens does continually surprise...Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-7403361372346571672011-08-01T15:26:00.001-04:002011-08-01T15:26:40.182-04:00Slavish adoration
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uGANnQp5ZFU/Tjb9zXVJrqI/AAAAAAAACCE/z1xgSqWmV9g/s1600/thackeray.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uGANnQp5ZFU/Tjb9zXVJrqI/AAAAAAAACCE/z1xgSqWmV9g/s320/thackeray.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So, I had been planning to write my
third and final post on <i>Vanity Fair</i> addressing, both ingeniously and in-depth, the way Thackeray constantly either draws attention to the bookish-ness of
this book or addresses the reader directly. It's very distracting, as
well as compelling. Here's an example from very early in the novel, in which
our narrator breaks off describing Amelia's departure from school and
all the dramatic, girly farewells, packing, etc going on, to consider how
his reading public is doing—and it's only page 6:</div>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
All which details, I have no doubt,
JONES, who reads this book at his Club, will pronounce to be
excessively foolish, trivial, twaddling, and ultra-sentimental. Yes;
I can see Jones at this minute (rather flushed with his joint of
mutton and half pint of wine), taking out his pencil and scoring
under the words "foolish, twaddling," &c., and adding
to them his own remark of "QUITE TRUE." Well, he is a lofty
man of genius, and admires the great and heroic in life and novels;
and so had better take warning and go elsewhere. (p. 6)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This sort of indirect address is only
outnumbered by direct addresses to “the reader”, who includes
men, women, the old, the young, the rich, the indigent, and all
classes in between; the moral, the immoral, the disinterested, the confident, and
the fearful. Thackeray addresses <i>everyone</i>. He seems to have been hell-bent on
constantly reminding readers that they are reading, and my favourite
example of this—can you credit it?—was excised from the revised second edition (and
presumably from all ensuing editions, as it is not included in the
online Gutenburg Project file of the novel; it is, however,
included in Peter L. Shillingsburg's Norton, bless his soul).
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Just so you have a sense of where the
following craziness is situated in the narrative: Early in the novel,
George and Amelia accompany Becky and Jos (as well as fifth wheel,
Dobbin) to Vauxhall for an evening's entertainment. Thackeray begins
this chapter with a bland direct address that simply doesn't prepare
one for what follows. Please to note that what is in bold is what was
excised:</div>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I know that the tune I am piping is a
very mild one,—(although there are some terrific chapters coming presently)—and must beg the
good-natured reader to remember, that we are only discoursing at
present, about a stock-broker's family in Russell Square, who are
taking walks or luncheon or dinner, or talking and making love as
people do in common life, and without a single passionate and
wonderful incident to mark the progress of their loves. The argument
stands thus—Osborne in love with Amelia has asked an old friend to
dinner and to Vauxhall—Jos Sedley is in love with Rebecca. Will he
marry her? That is the great subject now in hand.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We might have treated this subject in
the genteel or in the romantic or in the facetious manner. Suppose we
had laid the scene in Grosvenor Square with the very same
adventures—would not some people have listened? Suppose we had
shown how Lord Joseph Sedley fell in love, and the Marquis of Osborne became attached to Lady Amelia
with the full consent of the Duke her noble father; or instead of the
supremely genteel suppose we had resorted to the entirely low and
described what was going on in Mr. Sedley's kitchen—how black Sambo
was in love with the Cook, (as indeed he was), and how he fought a
battle with the coachman in her behalf; how the knife boy was caught
stealing a cold shoulder of mutton, and Miss Sedley's new <i>femme de
chambre</i> refused to go to bed without a wax candle; such incidents
might be made to provoke much delightful laughter, and be supposed to
represent scenes of "life." Or if on the contrary we had
taken a fancy for the terrible and made the lover of the new <i>femme
de chambre</i> a professional burglar, who bursts into the house with
his band, slaughters black Sambo at the feet of his master and
carries off Amelia in her night-dress not to be let loose again till
the third volume—we should easily have constructed a tale of
thrilling interest through the fiery chapters of which the reader
should hurry, panting. <b>Fancy this chapter having been headed
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>THE NIGHT ATTACK.</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>The night was dark and wild—the
clouds black—black—ink-black. The wild wind tore the chimney-pots
from the roofs of the old houses, and sent the tiles whirling and
crashing through the desolate streets. No soul braved that
tempest—the watchmen shrank into their boxes whither the searching
rain followed them—where the crashing thunderbolt fell and
destroyed them—one had so been slain opposite the Foundling—a
scorched gaberdine a shivered lantern a staff rent in twain by the
flash were all that remained of stout Will Steadfast. A hackney
coachman had been blown off his coach box in Southampton Row—and
whither? But the whirlwind tells no tidings of its victim save his
parting scream as he is borne onwards! Horrible night! it was dark
pitch dark—no moon, No, no, no moon—Not a star: Not a little
feeble twinkling solitary star. There had been one at early evening
but he showed his face shuddering for a moment in the black heaven,
and then retreated back.
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>One, two, three! It is the signal that
Black Vizard had agreed on.
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>"Mofy! is that your snum?"
said a voice from the area. "I'll gully the dag and bimbole the
clicky in a snuffkin."</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>“Nuffle your clod and beladle your
glumbanions," said Vizard with a dreadful oath. "This way,
men—if they screak, out with your snickers and slick! Look to the
pewter room, Blowser—You, Mark, to the old gaff's mopus box—and
I," added he in a lower but more horrible voice, "I will
look to Amelia!"</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>There was a dead silence. "Ha!"
said Vizard—"was that the click of a pistol?"
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>******</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Or suppose we adopted the genteel
rose-water style—The Marquis of Osborne has just dispatched his
<i>petit tigre</i> with a <i>billet doux</i> to the Ladye Amelia.
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>The dear creature has received it from
the hands of her <i>femme de chambre,</i> Mademoiselle Anastasie.</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Dear Marquis! What amiable politeness!
His lordship's note contains the wished for invitation to D— House!</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>"Who is that monstrous fine girl,"
said the <i>Semillant</i> Prince G—rge of C—mbr—dge at a
mansion in Piccadilly the same evening (having just arrived from the
omnibus at the opera.) "My dear Sedley, in the name of all the
Cupids introduce me to her!”
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>"Her name, <i>Monseigneur</i>,”
said Lord Joseph bowing gravely, "is Sedley."
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>"<i>Vous avez alors un bien beau
nom</i>,” said the young Prince turning on his heel rather
disappointed and treading on the foot of an old gentleman who stood
behind in deep admiration of the beautiful Lady Amelia.
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>"<i>Trent mille tonnerres</i>!"
shouted the victim writhing under the <i>agonie du moment</i>.</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>"I beg a thousand pardons of your
Grace," said the young <i>étourdi</i> blushing and bending low
his fair curls. He had trodden on the toe of the great Captain of the
age!</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>"Oh D—!" cried the young
Prince to a tall and good-natured nobleman, whose features proclaimed
him of the blood of the Cavendishes. "A word with you!—Have
you still a mind to part with your diamond necklace?"
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>“I have sold it for two hundred and
fifty thousand pounds to Prince Eaterhazy here."
</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<b>"<i>Und das war gar nicht theuer,
potztausend!</i>” exclaimed the princely Hungarian &c. &c.
&c. </b></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>******</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Thus you see, ladies, how this story
<i>might</i> have been written, if the author had but a mind—for to
tell the truth he is just as familiar with Newgate as with the
palaces of our revered aristocracy and has seen the outside of both.
But as I don't understand the language or manners of the Rookery, nor
that polyglot conversation which according to the fashionable
novelists is spoken by the leaders of <i>ton—</i>we must if you
please preserve our middle course modestly amidst those scenes and
personages with which we are most us familiar. In a word this chapter
about Vauxhall would have been so exceeding short but for the above
little disquisition, that it scarcely would have deserved</b> to be
called a chapter at all. And yet it is a chapter, and a very
important one too. Are not there little chapters in every body's
life, that seem to be nothing and yet affect all the rest of the
history? (pp. 49-52)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
(Thackeray doesn't leave a sentence
fragment, of course. This is what replaced everything above that is
bolded: “But my readers must hope for no such romance, only a
homely story, and must be content with a chapter about Vauxhall,
which is so short that it scarce deserves”. Also, to my infinite
dismay, there are drawings included in the excised bits that I can't
find anywhere online. <i>*Weeps quietly*</i>)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Ignoring all questions of authorial
intention versus editorial intrusion when it comes to addressing either <i>the</i>
or <i>a</i> “true” version of <i>Vanity Fair</i>; my question is, why did
anyone ever think this little tangent didn't belong simply for its own glorious sake? Hilarious, distracted, satirical of contemporary reading tastes, this scene also exemplifies much of what is unique and
irresistible about this novel. How many people have spent their
reading lives not realizing what they were missing? It's a crime, I tell you, a crime!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Really, literary outrage is all I have
to offer here. If you want something more thoughtful, coherent, or
awake, I suggest you read <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-morality-of-vanity-fair-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-you/">Rohan Maitzen's piece on <i>Vanity Fair</i> at <i>Open Letters Monthly</i></a>, from last summer. You see, while I've had
some thoughts on what heroism means in this story, my
predominant response to this book has been slavish adoration. While
lovingly turning the pages of this, to me, perfect literary creation,
<a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2009/09/reading-lamp-he-contains-multitudes.html">I was very often tempted to kiss the pages to show my deepest respect and commitment to them</a>; I dream already of having
sufficient time and distance to re-read it as though it were new to
me.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Next up: a trip to cooler climes,
Dickens's <i>Dombey and Son</i>, and becoming accustomed to being a 36-year-old.</div>
Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-17937013266682773222011-07-31T02:51:00.002-04:002011-07-31T09:16:09.800-04:00Three by SayersThere are three things you need to know:<br />
<br />
1) I currently have insomnia. I brought this upon myself by being unable to wake up before 11 am today (well, yesterday now. Sigh.) and insisting upon napping around 6 pm; this is important to note because it will explain if the following is barely literate. <br />
<br />
2) I am sitting at my dining room table mostly in the dark. The mood for midnight blogging is set by my fat cat Jeoffy sleeping directly next to the laptop and the houseplants all around me showing a fair bit more energy and purpose than they do during the daylight hours; they are positively standing at attention, in direct contradistinction to their usual diurnal droopiness and generally poor morale.<br />
<br />
3) In the last month or so, I've read three Dorothy Sayers novels. My normal practice, upon discovering excellent authors who happened to have been much less prolific than either Anthony Trollope or P. G. Wodehouse, is to space out their works, to <i>ration</i> them. Really good books to me are like delicious morsels discovered on the eve of winter - they must be stored for the lean times which must inevitably come. I did not read this trio of Sayers in order to make any commentary upon the evolution of her style, or anything like that; I did it merely to see what reading life is like for the friends of mine who tend to tear through one author at a time. Because Sayers was so ridiculously talented, I doubt this experience is representative of this practice as a whole; nonetheless, I will pass judgement: it's incredibly enjoyable and I now understand focusing on present bookish feasting rather than fearful squirreling away of promising novels in fear of future famines. Indeed, as I am in possession of three other Sayers novels as yet unread, I may do this again in the Fall.<br />
<br />
(It just occurred to me that peanut butter toast may be required to get me through this post, and this night.)<br />
<br />
Pre-toast rantlet: Dorothy Sayers was a gifted writer; that she chose to bestow her gifts upon the murder mystery (thus helping to usher in what became known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction) is, to me, a most excellent example of non-pretension and one I wish "serious" contemporary writers would think about more. Being a great writer shouldn't have to mean writing "literary fiction" designed to set fire to the hearts of Earnest 20-somethings and Booker prize judges. Plot and the pure pleasure of reading should not be underestimated!<br />
<br />
These are the three novels I read: <i>Strong Poison</i> (1930), <i>Murder Must Advertise</i> (1933), and <i>Busman's Honeymoon</i> (1937). I note the dates here because two of the three novels bear important story connections to <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/12/sickbed-reading-round-up.html"><i>Gaudy Night</i></a> (1935), which I read back in December and which began my belated love affair with Sayers.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c4Y1lbAtvN4/TjTu4R2ZcQI/AAAAAAAACB4/kgdfJ8fKkzg/s1600/strong+poison.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c4Y1lbAtvN4/TjTu4R2ZcQI/AAAAAAAACB4/kgdfJ8fKkzg/s200/strong+poison.jpg" width="124" /></a></div>
<i>Strong Poison</i> is the novel in which Sayers first introduces the lovely Harriet Vane, the star of <i>Gaudy Night</i> and Lord Peter Wimsey's best beloved. A successful author of detective fiction, Ms. Vane finds herself on trial for the murder of a former lover with no hope of being proven innocent...until, that is, the dashing amateur crime sleuth, Lord Peter, arrives and determines based on a hunch that she's innocent! Yes, the premise is this silly (which I mean in the nicest possible way); but the writing is fantastic, and the scenes between the resigned Harriet and the alternately avuncular and smitten Peter are particularly so.<br />
<br />
I don't know if I've ever mentioned, but the Lord Peter Wimsey of <i>Gaudy Night</i> is one of my literary boyfriends. He is not nearly so well drawn in this early novel, but he has potential...<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W-am-7DGxaA/TjTyu5gC0sI/AAAAAAAACB8/ARIFdau9n2g/s1600/murder+must+advertise.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W-am-7DGxaA/TjTyu5gC0sI/AAAAAAAACB8/ARIFdau9n2g/s200/murder+must+advertise.jpg" width="124" /></a></div>
...A potential Sayers displays in strange and contradictory ways in <i>Murder Must Advertise</i>. In this novel, Lord Peter infiltrates an advertising agency that's been the site of a mysterious death. On the one hand, Lord Peter turns out to be a natural at writing absurd yet effective advertising copy; on the other, he also reveals himself to be quite skilled at extracting important information from a shallow, drug-addled socialite by dressing up as a harlequin and haunting her.<br />
<br />
He seems so benign and almost ridiculous that Sayers gleefully mocks him by directly aligning him and his butler, Bunter, with Wodehouse's famous characters Wooster and Jeeves (who always endeavours to give satisfaction, sir). Yet, he also knowingly sends at least one person to their violent death in the tying up of this murder's loose ends. He is sprightly and devil-may-care, and at the same time haunted by the lengths he's felt compelled to go to to get at the truth. He's becoming human.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qVxfNjJ4vRk/TjT1px3kg6I/AAAAAAAACCA/4E7jrlyiqNY/s1600/busman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qVxfNjJ4vRk/TjT1px3kg6I/AAAAAAAACCA/4E7jrlyiqNY/s200/busman.jpg" width="124" /></a></div>
And Lord Peter is most thoroughly human in <i>Busman's Honeymoon</i>, which takes place after <i>Gaudy Night</i>; it is all about his and Harriet's post-nuptial adventures. They are married, it is lovely in general, and they go to the country for their honeymoon, staying in an old country house that Harriet's always coveted and which they've purchased for the occasion.<br />
<br />
Of course, it's not long before a body is discovered in the cellar and it is entirely apparent that it is a case of murder most foul...<br />
<br />
Their honeymoon is spent in solving the crime and feeling one another out in the new and frightening context of holy matrimony. This novel is surprisingly sentimental; but what is more surprising is how its sentimentality in no way gets in the way of Sayers creating a conversation that I think does justice to the excellent mystery that is marriage in its early days. This, alongside Sayers's revelations about Lord Peter's complicated past with regards to World War I, makes for an emotionally draining book. Which makes perfect sense to me, as it is also, of the four Sayers novels I've now read, the most complicated in terms of plot. Figuring out the murder is prolonged and difficult and the explanation, when it is finally understood, drawn out and really understandable only by those who have a firm grasp of physics. I loved it. Perhaps not as much as I loved <i>Gaudy Night</i>, but I think <i>Busman's Honeymoon</i> is probably a close second.<br />
<br />
Late night blogging status update: The plants are still looking well. Fat Jeoffy has left the table, but Mz. Bustopher Jones has colonized my lap. The toast was delicious. I am still tired but still in that way that doesn't actually lead to sleep. I have less than 24 hours left of being 35. I wish that for my birthday I could ask for more time to read instead of just for more books. I may begin working on a final <i>Vanity Fair</i> post right now, just because I can.Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-82510953919832872982011-07-28T22:47:00.001-04:002011-07-28T22:47:49.754-04:00One of the best gentlemen Becky ever saw: more on Dobbin as Vanity Fair's unlikely hero<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>All spoilers, my friends</b> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In my previous post on <i>Vanity Fair</i>, I
discussed how in spite of Thackeray's claim that his novel boasted
no hero, there was a clear candidate indeed: William Dobbin. Near the
novel's conclusion, Thackeray finally comes out with it, and claims
the humble Dobbin as our hero:
</div>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Which of us can point out many such in
his circle—men whose aims are generous, whose truth is constant, and not only constant in its
kind but elevated in its degree; whose want of meanness makes them
simple; who can look the world honestly in the face with an equal
manly sympathy for the great and the small? We all know a hundred
whose coats are very well made, and a score who have excellent
manners, and one or two happy beings who are what they call in the
inner circles, and have shot into the very centre and bull's-eye of
the fashion; but of gentlemen how many? Let us take a little scrap of
paper and each make out his list.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My friend the Major I write, without
any doubt, in mine. He had very long legs, a yellow face, and a
slight lisp, which at first was rather ridiculous. But his thoughts
were just, his brains were fairly good, his life was honest and pure, and his
heart warm and humble. He certainly had very large hands and feet,
which the two George Osbornes used to caricature and laugh at; and
their jeers and laughter perhaps led poor little Emmy astray as to
his worth. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(pp.
621-22)</span></span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In a world in which almost everyone is
at best half an inch deep (Amelia, say) and at worst actively
dangerous (Becky!, Good lord, woman!), Dobbin is ridiculous not
because he is physically awkward, or less pleasing to the eye than
one could hope, or because he doesn't care for the social niceties
when they aren't anchored in something more solid than appearances;
it's not even that he is good <i>per se</i>, although that's certainly
important. Rather, Dobbin is the hero because he is focused, stolid,
unashamed of who he is and what he wants. He is strong and
devoted—yet, he is also foolishly smitten:
</div>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This woman had a way of tyrannizing
over Major Dobbin (for the weakest of all people will domineer over
somebody), and she ordered him about, and patted him, and made him
fetch and carry just as if he was a great Newfoundland dog. He liked,
so to speak, to jump into the water if she said "High, Dobbin!"
and to trot behind her with her reticule in his mouth. This history
has been written to very little purpose if the reader has not
perceived that the Major was a spooney. (p. 663)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But being a “spooney”—that is,
“foolish or silly, especially in love”—as Dobbins clearly is
with regards to the selfish Amelia, is actually part and parcel of
his heroism. He doesn't put on airs of any sort; he feels no
particular shame in being her spaniel, for what others might think of
his apparent lack of self respect or dignity has nothing to do with
his love for her. Dobbin's love for this stupid woman entirely
transcends the concerns of the other puppets in Vanity Fair.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Yet, much to my surprise, after so many years of hopeless devotion, William ends things. He finally
sees how shallow and stupid Amelia is when she uses his entirely just
insistence that the fallen Becky not stay with them as an excuse to
send him packing:
</div>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"...you insulted [George's] memory. You
did yesterday. You know you did. And I will never forgive you.
Never!" said Amelia. She shot out each little sentence in a
tremor of anger and emotion.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"You don't mean that, Amelia?"
William said sadly. "You don't mean that these words, uttered in
a hurried moment, are to weigh against a whole life's devotion? I
think that George's memory has not been injured by the way in which I
have dealt with it, and if we are come to bandying reproaches, I at
least merit none from his widow and the mother of his son. Reflect,
afterwards when—when you are at leisure, and your conscience will
withdraw this accusation. It does even now." Amelia held down
her head.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"It is not that speech of
yesterday," he continued, "which moves you. That is but the
pretext, Amelia, or I have loved you and watched you for fifteen
years in vain. Have I not learned in that time to read all your
feelings and look into your thoughts? I know what your heart is
capable of: it can cling faithfully to a recollection and cherish a
fancy, but it can't feel such an attachment as mine deserves to mate
with, and such as I would have won from a woman more generous than
you. No, you are not worthy of the love which I have devoted to you.
I knew all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth
the winning; that I was a fool, with fond
fancies, too, bartering away my all of truth and ardour against your
little feeble remnant of love. I will bargain no more: I withdraw.
I find no fault with you. You are very good-natured, and have done
your best, but you couldn't—you couldn't reach up to the height of
the attachment which I bore you, and which a loftier soul than yours
might have been proud to share. Good-bye, Amelia! I have watched your
struggle. Let it end. We are both weary of it."</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Amelia stood scared and silent as
William thus suddenly broke the chain by which she held him and
declared his independence and superiority. (pp. 669-70)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We have known all along, of course,
that while Amelia is not bad and, in fact, generally tends
towards kindness, she is weak and self-absorbed and such character
defects can—and in her relations with William has—make her cruel. That it
takes the unflattering juxtaposition of a petulant Amelia with a
drunken, corrupt, and still scheming Becky to make Dobbin see the
truth, might lead one to blame him for being rather weak and blind
himself.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And this wouldn't be wrong, except the true manliness with which he gives up the
fight and takes full responsibility for his error in judgement makes
it seem somehow noble. He believed the best of her, but doesn't blame
Amelia for not living up to her own potential. He rightly sees that
she has struggled with her devotion to a man long dead who did not
appreciate her versus her burgeoning feelings for the living Dobbin
and doesn't diminish the significance of that struggle. In a word, he
maintains the utmost respect for her while insisting upon a healthy
dose for himself—and ends things.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Amelia, of course, sees the justice in
this but is too frightened and wilting to admit it to herself.
Becky, however—fallen, malicious, Becky—not only sees the justice
in Dobbin's parting words, but also immediately understands the strength and depth of character his decision arises out of:
</div>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Whilst they had been talking, the door
into Mrs. Osborne's room had opened ever so little; indeed, Becky had
kept a hold of the handle and had turned it on the instant when
Dobbin quitted it, and she heard every word of the conversation that
had passed between these two. "What a noble heart that man has,"
she thought, "and how shamefully that woman plays with it!"
She admired Dobbin; she bore him no rancour for the part he had taken
against her. It was an open move in the game, and played fairly.
"Ah!" she thought, "if I could have had such a husband
as that—a man with a heart and brains too! I would not have minded
his large feet"; and running into her room, she absolutely
bethought herself of something, and wrote him a note, beseeching him
to stop for a few days—not to think of going—and that she could
serve him with A. (p. 670)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
How is it that Becky of all people can
see Dobbin's worth so clearly when no one else can? Because she, the
little adventuress who has never scrupled to play on others'
weaknesses to gain her own ends, who has lied, cheated, and perhaps
murdered (!) in order to ensure her own survival is the only
character in this book who is Dobbin's equal!
Indeed, they have more in common than Dobbin would ever want to
admit. With Amelia being Dobbin's only blind spot (and it has never
been entirely blind), only these two characters have seen others
clearly for what they are—the difference has, of course, been what
they do with such information.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
While Becky uses all her deep insights
into what makes others tick to her personal and ruthless advantage,
Dobbin has tried to prod those around him to be better than they are
(except for Becky—for he's known her to be irredeemable from the
start*). Both have been true to their aims in life, while others have
floundered about either revelling in their complete lack of
self-understanding or have waited for others to determine
their courses in life. Becky, of course, has been happy to exploit
both these sorts of character defect; Dobbin has generously (and in
Amelia's case, to his own detriment) tried to help his friends to
figure out their own shit (a vulgar turn of phrase, yes, but I really
can't think of anything more apt).
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Dobbin is our hero, but Becky has many
of the same traits that make him a hero—and indeed, Thackeray allows her
almost to inhabit the role of the novel's hero when she disabuses Amelia of her misplaced faith in her long-dead
husband so that she may marry Dobbin without guilt:
</div>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"Listen to me, Amelia," said
Becky, marching up and down the room before the other and surveying
her with a sort of contemptuous kindness. "I want to talk to
you. You must go away from here and from the impertinences of these men. I won't
have you harassed by them: and they will insult you if you stay. I
tell you they are rascals: men fit to send to the hulks. Never mind
how I know them. I know everybody. Jos can't protect you; he is too
weak and wants a protector himself. You are no more fit to live in
the world than a baby in arms. You must marry, or you and your
precious boy will go to ruin. You must have a husband, you fool; and
one of the best gentlemen I ever saw has offered you a hundred times,
and you have rejected him, you silly, heartless, ungrateful little
creature!"</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"I tried—I tried my best, indeed
I did, Rebecca," said Amelia deprecatingly, "but I couldn't
forget—"; and she finished the sentence by looking up at the
portrait.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"Couldn't forget HIM!" cried
out Becky, "that selfish humbug, that low-bred cockney dandy,
that padded booby, who had neither wit, nor manners, nor heart, and
was no more to be compared to your friend with the bamboo cane than
you are to Queen Elizabeth. Why, the man was weary of you, and would
have jilted you, but that Dobbin forced him to keep his word. He
owned it to me. He never cared for you. He used to sneer about you to
me, time after time, and made love to me the week after he married
you."</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"It's false! It's false!
Rebecca," cried out Amelia, starting up.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"Look there, you fool," Becky
said, still with provoking good humour, and taking a little paper out
of her belt, she opened it and flung it into Emmy's lap. "You
know his handwriting. He wrote that to me—wanted me to run away with
him—gave it me under your nose, the day before he was shot—and
served him right!" Becky repeated. (p. 680)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lezai04ovso/TjIaRgKisVI/AAAAAAAACBw/at723BIEf2I/s1600/letter+before+waterloo.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lezai04ovso/TjIaRgKisVI/AAAAAAAACBw/at723BIEf2I/s400/letter+before+waterloo.gif" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Is the fact that shortly after this
painful revelation, Amelia admits that she's already written Dobbin
asking him to return (p. 682) what prevents Becky from even briefly
inhabiting the role of the novel's hero? No, I don't think so;
indeed, Becky's lack of information on this front makes her
surprising decision to enable a marriage good for her biggest enemy
more striking in its generosity. Her motives are not clear, but I
think we can justifiably see them as mixed, for she
truly admires and understands what Dobbin is worth and she concedes
the game to him by handing him what he most wants in the world.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
On the other hand, this takes Amelia
off her hands, which leaves her free to work on the weak and
susceptible Jos Sedley—whose money she is able to get her hands on
shortly after his premature death far from the loving home of his
sister and new brother-in-law. That said, I don't believe getting rid
of Amelia is necessary at all to this latter scheme, for the Sedleys
are a pliable bunch and even if Amelia had understood what Becky had
in store for her brother (unlikely), she would have been powerless to
prevent it. No, I think Becky, throughout the novel, has shown
herself to be generous to those whom she deems worthy of it—it's
just that so few are worthy of it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'm hoping to write one more post on <i>Vanity Fair</i>, as well as a post on three Dorothy Sayers novels before I head down east for a little holiday next week. Keep your fingers crossed that our newly repaired home internet connection will allow me to do so!</div>
Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-39550909711364487902011-07-23T16:43:00.001-04:002011-07-23T16:43:37.889-04:00Wounded animals in their final death throes
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0SitSiNwJaE/TisvRVlCkwI/AAAAAAAACBs/HahluJGLERE/s1600/david+golder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0SitSiNwJaE/TisvRVlCkwI/AAAAAAAACBs/HahluJGLERE/s200/david+golder.jpg" width="131" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>David Golder</i>, Irene Nemirovsky's first
novel, begins with a confusing conversation about past and present endeavours,
between two business partners: the titular David and Simon Marcus.
Partners for 25 years, the two older men are having an
argument; Marcus is trying to cheat his partner out of some
lucrative stocks and a future business deal, but Golder has had
enough and impatiently reveals that he knows everything and won't be
giving Marcus one cent:
</div>
<blockquote>
“...you bastard, you crook!" </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“Well, what did you expect? Think
about it...Last year there was that oil deal in Mexico, and three
years ago the high octane deal. How many millions went from my pocket
into yours? And what did I say about it? Nothing. And then...”
Golder seemed to be looking for more proof [of Marcus's duplicity],
attempting to bring everything together in his mind, but then he
brushed it all aside with a shrug of his shoulders. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“Business,” was all he murmured,
as if he were naming some terrifying god... </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Marcus fell silent. He took a pack of
cigarettes from the table, opened it and carefully struck a match.
“Why do you smoke these disgusting Gauloises, Golder, when you're
as rich as you are?” </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Golder watched Marcus's shaking hands
as if he were contemplating the final death throes of a wounded
animal. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“I needed the money David,” Marcus
suddenly said in a different tone of voice, the corner of his mouth
contorting into a grimace. “I...I'm really desperate for money,
David. Couldn't you...let me make just a little? Don't you think
that...” </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“No!” </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Golder shook his fist in the air. He
saw the pale hands clasp each other, the clenched fingers digging
their nails into the flesh. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“You're ruining me,” Marcus said
finally, in an odd, hollow voice. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Golder said nothing, refusing to look
up. Marcus hesitated, then quietly pushed back his chair. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Goodbye, David,” he said. (pp.
4-5)</div>
</blockquote>
The next day, Golder receives word that
Marcus has committed suicide. He feels something akin to but not exactly remorse...it's more closely related to an increasingly fearful
awareness of his own mortality. Indeed, the rest of the novel
tells the story of Golder's last days as he tries to re-establish
himself as one of France's foremost businessmen, a final attempt
intimately linked to his increasingly clear and terrible understanding of how
empty his relationships and life are, of how meaningless it's all
been.
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Irene Nemirovsky was an incredibly
gifted writer; even though <i>David Golder</i> was her first novel (and
penned when she was a mere 26 years old!), it has all the elements,
even if they were not completely developed at this early stage, that make her later
works brilliant and unique: stunning writing and a shockingly mature
ability to imagine and comment upon human psychology.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When <i>David Golder</i> was reviewed
in the <i>New York Times</i> in 1930, the writer asserted that Nemirovsky's first novel was “The work of a woman who has the strength
of one of the masters like Balzac or Dostoevsky.” Having read one
Balzac (mea culpa) and many Dostoevskys, I can only agree; she was
writing in twentieth-century France but her soul belonged in the
Europe of the nineteenth. She was bitter, sardonic,
compassionate, devastating and unrelenting all at once, as was
Dostoevsky was in his best works, but with much more rhetorical
control. Simply put, she was a genius.</div>
Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-11070144761625700352011-07-20T22:48:00.000-04:002011-07-20T22:48:56.294-04:00Beautiful, disturbing, exhausting: the fiction of Yoko Ogawa<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OyRXrgHkBWA/TieRZocWlVI/AAAAAAAACBo/Z9thQ1-2C7I/s1600/TheDivingPool5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OyRXrgHkBWA/TieRZocWlVI/AAAAAAAACBo/Z9thQ1-2C7I/s200/TheDivingPool5.jpg" width="135" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Yoko Ogawa's <i>The Diving Pool</i> comprises a
trio of novellas entitled “The Diving Pool,” “Pregnancy Diary,” and “Dormitory.”
As in <i>Hotel Iris</i>, the writing and translating are stellar, and Ogawa's
observations on human pain and desire are excruciatingly astute. The following
interaction between the narrator and Reiko, a resident of the narrator's
parents’ orphanage, occurs in “The Diving Pool”; reading it the first time was
like being kicked in the gut. Reiko ends up in the Light House as a teen
because her parents go insane in quick succession, leaving her with no one to
care for her:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
wish they would miss me,” she said. Closing the magazine, she sat up on the bed
and took off her glasses. “I'd be glad if they did.” With her glasses off, her
eyes were so small it was hard to tell where she was looking.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“And
that's what makes you so sad?” I asked.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She
blinked nervously but said nothing. Her vacant stare confounded my efforts to
understand what she was feeling. Her lips were pursed in what might have been a
faint smile, but it might also have been a wounded frown. There were several
seconds of icy silence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“The
hooks have all come undone,” she said at last, as if talking to herself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Hooks?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“That's
right. The ones that kept my mother and father and me together. They've come
undone and there's no way to get them fastened again.” Sometimes she spoke like
a young lady from a good family.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
wondered what sort of sound was made when the hooks holding together a family
came apart. (pp. 22-23)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<b>
</b>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><b>Many plot details after this point!</b> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Just crushing. But it is Ogawa's characters'
twisted obsessions with bodies that is (still) most striking to me. In “The Diving
Pool” she shows that this focus on the flesh need not be as lurid or <i>obviously</i>
disturbing <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/bluebeard-in-japan/">as that described in <i>Hotel Iris</i></a>. The narrator of this tale is the
only child in the Light House who is not an orphan; this difference makes her
feel as unhooked from others as not having parents makes others feel, and her
generalized sense of loss and yearning becomes exclusively focused on Jun, an
orphan who's been there since they were young children. She, of course, never tells him of her longing for him;
she simply spends every day after school at the pool, secretly watching him
practise his diving, focusing on absorbing every detail of his beautiful
body.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Her frustration at being able to do nothing
but watch him begins to come out sideways and twisted in her increasingly dangerous
abuse of an 18-month-old baby in her parents' care, abuse which includes
placing the child in a giant urn she is too small to get out of by herself and
watching her cry for help, and feeding her a mouldering pastry just to see what
will happen. The narrator knows there's a connection between her desire for Jun
and this outrageous behaviour, but doesn't understand what it might be; she also
tries to diminish its significance, even though the baby almost dies:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
returned to the pool as soon as I could. It seemed all the more precious after
I'd tasted deeply of my own cruelty. The ripples reflecting on the glass roof,
the smell of the water, and above all the purity of Jun's glistening body—these
things had the power to wash me clean. I wanted to be as pure as Jun, even if
only for a moment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the end, Rie had gone on to the hospital. They said she vomited until there was
nothing left and then slept for two days, as still and cold as a mummy. My
mother went to the hospital to take care of her and came home with long
reports. I wondered whether they'd found any trace of the cream puff.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I'm
not sure how I would have felt if Rie had died, how I would have made sense of
what I'd done. Because I had no idea where the cruelty came from, I could look
at Jun's arms and chest and back without feeling the slightest remorse for
having hurt Rie. (pp. 42-43)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Her pure enjoyment of Jun's body is not
allowed to continue, however, for he confronts her about her actions:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA">I pictured the
scene in her hospital room from the one visit I’d paid her: the walls decorated
with crayon drawings, the stuffed Mickey Mouse on her bed, and Rie herself
stretched out lethargically on the wrinkled sheets.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA">“It was you,
wasn’t it?” His tone was so matter-of-fact, so unchanged, that I didn’t
understand immediately. “You did that to Rie, didn’t you?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA">The voice was the
same, but this time the words began to sink in, as if they’ve been replayed at
a slower speed. There was no hint of blame or reproach in his voice, yet I felt
a chill come over me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA">“You knew?” My
voice was hoarse.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA">“Yes.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA">“How?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA">“I was always
watching you.” This could have been a breathless declaration of love or a final
farewell. (pp. 51-52)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">What strikes me about this interchange is that Jun admits to seeing the
narrator abuse Rie but has never intervened—and I've been racking my brain
about why. It seems to me that what’s important about this scene is the
revelation that her watchful obsession with him has been shown to be less committed, less complete than his watchful obsession with her. For
not only has he known all along that she's been his devoted and daily companion at the
pool, he's been there when she wasn't thinking of him. And in this
total, single-minded, disturbing vision of early adolescent desire, she should
<i>always</i> have been thinking of him; that she hasn’t somehow diminishes the purity
she feels in her desire for him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">I'm not going to discuss the other two
stories in this collection because I think you should probably just go read
this book. I will say that I find Ogawa's lurid, sensual, heavy emphasis on
bodies—their weaknesses and disfigurements, but also the power they have over
others and how grotesquely present they are, even when they're beautiful, to be
almost overwhelming. When I was reading both <i>Hotel Iris</i> and <i>The Diving Pool</i>, I
found myself taking notes on every single page; Ogawa’s work is dense and
unrelenting in its thick sensuality and while literarily satisfying, it is also
utterly exhausting. I am looking forward to <i>The Housekeeper and the Professor</i>
but I think it'll be a good while before I have the energy for it.</span></div>
Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-42906175467705551842011-07-18T17:34:00.001-04:002012-04-04T21:36:53.636-04:00Quite lonely and almost happy<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fc63fVQ2DCg/TiSXCEoC3HI/AAAAAAAACBc/NdWGzm5N0z4/s1600/vanity+fair+cover.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fc63fVQ2DCg/TiSXCEoC3HI/AAAAAAAACBc/NdWGzm5N0z4/s200/vanity+fair+cover.JPG" width="122" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA"></span><span lang="EN-CA">I need to say first off that although I am
only a little more than halfway through William Makepeace Thackeray's
<i>Vanity Fair</i>, I am certain that it is one of the finest novels I have ever read.
The writing is superb, the observations of society and social interaction
matched in wit, incisiveness, and subtle compassion only, in my opinion, by
George Eliot's observations of the individual. I am certain I will re-read it many times if I manage to live to a ripe old age.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">I both lament and celebrate the
fact that I am just now coming to Thackeray's brilliance; I lament it for obvious
reasons and celebrate it because there is much to look forward to. For while he
was not so prolific as Anthony Trollope, Thackeray was not idle either; indeed, the
problem will be in finding his less known works in print. Having being
commanded by a fellow book-obsessed “tweep” to find, stat, <i>The Luck of Barry
Lyndon</i>, I was disappointed to discover that not only is it not
available in my public library, but it's also not available online in
Canada at all! I can, of course, get an affordable copy sent from the UK but I
maintain a perverse desire to buy locally and in person. I will keep
an eagle eye out for it in my local bookshops until I either find it or give in out of desperation and buy it on teh interwebs. Of course, if one of my gentle
readers has an extra copy, I'd be willing to pay postage to have you send it to
me....</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">But about <i>Vanity Fair</i>! Thackeray famously
subtitled this great book “A Novel Without a Hero”; and rather than introducing us to a protagonist to start, he instead begins revealing a world
in which there is much gaiety, but little real happiness. This is a melancholy place in spite of the flash and chintz that blinds the eye and merry, tinkling sounds that draw the ear.
Vanity Fair lacks a hero, as well as either
morals or a moral:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">As the manager of the Performance sits
before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound
melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great
quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the
contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling; there are bullies
pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the
look-out, quacks (OTHER quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths,
and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers,
while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes,
this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very
noisy. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from
their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits
down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas.
The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels,
and crying, "How are you?"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">A man with a reflective turn of mind,
walking through an exhibition of this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it,
by his own or other people's hilarity. An episode of humour or kindness touches
and amuses him here and there—a pretty child looking at a gingerbread stall; a
pretty girl blushing whilst her lover talks to her and chooses her fairing;
poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the waggon, mumbling his bone with the honest
family which lives by his tumbling; but the general impression is one more
melancholy than mirthful. When you come home you sit down in a sober,
contemplative, not uncharitable frame of mind, and apply yourself to your books
or your business.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">I have no other moral than this to tag to
the present story of "Vanity Fair." (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Before the Curtain</i>)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">The novel proper initially bears out the entire lack of heroism claim in the preface. Until page 40 or so, we're introduced only to the cunning and
selfish (although entirely compelling) Becky Sharp; the sweet but weak,
naive, and self-absorbed Amelia Sedley; the ladies and girls adorned with an amazing variety of character defects at Miss
Pinkerton's academy for girls; and the mostly obnoxious little twerps and jerks at Dr. Swishtail's
famous school for boys. Yet, at Swishtail's there is also an unexpected and unusual young fellow named William Dobbin. Young Dobbin is awkward, unhandsome, no great scholar, and socially a failure;
he is a grocer's son at a school housing little hellions generally more privileged than he is; he is
distinguished only for not fitting in and failing to prove that his exclusion
and abuse are inappropriate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Indeed, William is a sad, solitary,
and thoughtful kind of boy, exactly the kind of boy that does not belong in
the sad, loud, energetic glory of Vanity Fair. The constant target of Mr Cuff (school bully and acknowledged king of the boys), Dobbin tries not to cause trouble and to
find a measure of contentment in a way that would most
surely be recognized by poor <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2011/05/there-is-much-higher-justice-than.html">Tom Pinch</a>, that is, he keeps to himself and reads a great deal. William is "quite lonely and almost happy":</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Well, William Dobbin had for once forgotten
the world, and was away with Sindbad the Sailor in the Valley of Diamonds, or
with Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peribanou in that delightful cavern where the
Prince found her, and whither we should all like to make a tour; when shrill
cries, as of a little fellow weeping, woke up his pleasant reverie; and looking
up, he saw Cuff before him, belabouring a little boy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">…….</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Down came the stump with a great heavy
thump on the child's hand. A moan followed. Dobbin looked up. The Fairy
Peribanou had fled into the inmost cavern with Prince Ahmed: the Roc had
whisked away Sindbad the Sailor out of the Valley of Diamonds out of sight, far
into the clouds: and there was everyday life before honest William; and a big
boy beating a little one without cause.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">"Hold out your other hand, sir,"
roars Cuff to his little schoolfellow, whose face was distorted with pain.
Dobbin quivered, and gathered himself up in his narrow old clothes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">"Take that, you little devil!"
cried Mr. Cuff, and down came the wicket again on the child's hand.—Don't be
horrified, ladies, every boy at a public school has done it. Your children will
so do and be done by, in all probability. Down came the wicket again; and
Dobbin started up.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">I can't tell what his motive was. Torture
in a public school is as much licensed as the knout in Russia. It would be ungentlemanlike
(in a manner) to resist it. Perhaps Dobbin's foolish soul revolted against that
exercise of tyranny; or perhaps he had a hankering feeling of revenge in his
mind, and longed to measure himself against that splendid bully and tyrant, who
had all the glory, pride, pomp, circumstance, banners flying, drums beating,
guards saluting, in the place. Whatever may have been his incentive, however,
up he sprang, and screamed out, "Hold off, Cuff; don't bully that child
any more; or I'll—"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">"Or you'll what?" Cuff asked in
amazement at this interruption. "Hold out your hand, you little
beast."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">"I'll give you the worst thrashing you
ever had in your life," Dobbin said, in reply to the first part of Cuff's
sentence; and little Osborne, gasping and in tears, looked up with wonder and
incredulity at seeing this amazing champion put up suddenly to defend him:
while Cuff's astonishment was scarcely less. (pp. 40-41)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Not only does William give Cuff the
worst thrashing of his life, but his social status at Swishtail's also changes
radically as a result. His defense of young George Osborne
results in improved academic performance, a lifelong friendship with George Osborne, and the real and prolonged respect of
everyone at school because Cuff himself is beaten into respecting him! Dobbin becomes, in short, the schoolyard hero
that every bullied young boy could either wish for or hope to become.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Dobbin remains a quiet,
thoughtful, generous, and devoted defender of the underdog well into adulthood.
Years later, his friendship with George Osborne flourishes, even though the
latter isn't half the man he could and should be, and is given to a selfishness
that takes good old souls like William entirely for granted. The primary object of William's quiet
and permanent devotion and care changes later in life when he finds his heart enslaved by Amelia Sedley—destined, of course, because that's the kind
of luck William has, to marry George.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">In William Dobbin, Thackeray gives himself
the lie about <i>Vanity Fair</i> boasting no hero, for this character represents the highest level of heroism imaginable
in a place where everyone is basically out only for themselves. He distinguishes himself on the battlefield when Napoleon is routed, and not only for carrying wounded off the field even though he is wounded himself. He steadfastly does his duty by those around him, regardless of circumstances.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">More importantly in the context of this
novel, I think, is William's domestic heroism. He knows his love for Amelia is
hopeless, but this in no way diminishes his adoration and commitment to her
care, which begins in earnest when her husband dies on the battlefield. Her family being in straightened financial circumstances, and
George's family having disowned him for marrying Amelia, Dobbin quietly takes
care of George's burial expenses, brings Amelia and her newborn back to England, and behaves as her greatest friend with no hope of a
return of any sort:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Our friend Dobbin…brought her back to
England and to her mother's house; when Mrs. O'Dowd, receiving a peremptory
summons from her Colonel, had been forced to quit her patient. To see Dobbin
holding the infant, and to hear Amelia's laugh of triumph as she watched him,
would have done any man good who had a sense of humour. William was the
godfather of the child, and exerted his ingenuity in the purchase of cups,
spoons, pap-boats, and corals for this little Christian.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">How his mother nursed him, and dressed him,
and lived upon him; how she drove away all nurses, and would scarce allow any
hand but her own to touch him; how she considered that the greatest favour she
could confer upon his godfather, Major Dobbin, was to allow the Major
occasionally to dandle him, need not be told here. This child was her being.
Her existence was a maternal caress. She enveloped the feeble and unconscious
creature with love and worship. It was her life which the baby drank in from
her bosom. Of nights, and when alone, she had stealthy and intense raptures of
motherly love, such as God's marvellous care has awarded to the female
instinct—joys how far higher and lower than reason—blind beautiful devotions
which only women's hearts know. It was William Dobbin's task to muse upon these
movements of Amelia's, and to watch her heart; and if his love made him divine
almost all the feelings which agitated it, alas! he could see with a fatal
perspicuity that there was no place there for him. And so, gently, he bore his
fate, knowing it, and content to bear it. (pp. 358-60).</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FtuzyrWtsdw/TiSYGZXQdaI/AAAAAAAACBg/HCweoNoDQB8/s1600/dobbins+and+fam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FtuzyrWtsdw/TiSYGZXQdaI/AAAAAAAACBg/HCweoNoDQB8/s400/dobbins+and+fam.jpg" width="293" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Major Sugarplums performs his duty to the letter</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA">Only when accused by Amelia's father of
harbouring roguish intentions of some sort does Dobbin reveal that the young widow's well-being has been <i>entirely</i> dependent upon him: </span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">Dobbin at this lost all patience, and if
his accuser had not been so old and so broken, a quarrel might have ensued
between them at the Slaughters' Coffee-house, in a box of which place of
entertainment the gentlemen had their colloquy. "Come upstairs, sir,"
lisped out the Major. "I insist on your coming up the stairs, and I will
show which is the injured party, poor George or I"; and, dragging the old
gentleman up to his bedroom, he produced from his desk Osborne's accounts, and
a bundle of IOU's which the latter had given, who, to do him justice, was
always ready to give an IOU. "He paid his bills in England," Dobbin
added, "but he had not a hundred pounds in the world when he fell. I and
one or two of his brother officers made up the little sum, which was all that
we could spare, and you dare tell us that we are trying to cheat the widow and
the orphan." Sedley was very contrite and humbled, though the fact is that
William Dobbin had told a great falsehood to the old gentleman; having himself
given every shilling of the money, having buried his friend, and paid all the
fees and charges incident upon the calamity and removal of poor Amelia.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">About these expenses old Osborne had never
given himself any trouble to think, nor any other relative of Amelia, nor
Amelia herself, indeed. She trusted to Major Dobbin as an accountant, took his
somewhat confused calculations for granted, and never once suspected how much
she was in his debt. (pp. 393-94)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">The fact is, he does all of this out of
pure, unselfish love; of course, William would marry Amelia if he could but he neither hopes for it
nor expects it; he also never tries to disabuse the sweet but blind, and in her
blindness rather selfish, Amelia of the true state of either her husband's
financial status before his death or how entirely reliant she is on William
afterwards.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">William is a complete anomaly in the cast
of characters peopling <i>Vanity Fair</i>, for he is the only one engaged in active
goodness on a significant scale. There are some, like Amelia and Lady Jane, who are not malicious, mean-spirited, or consciously selfish; but
Amelia's passivity and self-absorption, at least, sometimes cause pain as the result of her obliviousness and
inaction. (An exception who still nonetheless doesn't truly compare to William is Mrs. O'Dowd who "in adversity...was the best of comforters [and] in good fortune the most troublesome of friends" (p. 341).)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA">William's domestic heroism boasts all the
loneliness of a knight's quest without any of the external glory; it also represents and worships the
Victorian idol of home and hearth but without allowing him to partake of any of their joys.
It seems as though he is destined to remain quite lonely and at best almost
happy forever; but perhaps Thackeray will relent and allow his Amelia puppet to see her
own foolishness and the ultimate happiness upon his poor, constant
William puppet in the second half of the novel.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-CA">A timely tweet</span></b></div>
J<span lang="EN-CA">ust a few minutes ago, I saw a tweet about Thackeray</span><span lang="EN-CA">—it turns out that today is his 200th birthday! Check out the Oxford DNB for more info <a href="http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/lotw/1.html">here</a>.</span>Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-56075470025140599622011-07-16T22:14:00.001-04:002011-07-16T22:14:16.892-04:00The wild romances of their livesGentle Readers,<br />
<br />
I've really struggled with this post. I think I'm on to something but I also think I've done a poor job of explaining what the hell I mean. If you've read <i>Mary Barton</i>, please put your two cents in and help make this mediocre post better!<br />
<br />
********************<br />
<br />
In <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2011/07/brothers-in-deep-suffering-of-heart.html">my previous post</a> on <i>Mary Barton</i>, I was trying to get at the narrator’s complicated (and to me, still mostly obtuse) technique for using fiction to get at actual, everyday issues for real, living people. I couldn’t figure out what Barton’s was doing, and I still haven’t. I came across the following passage when reviewing the novel again, however, and have come up with the tentative beginning of a theory. Context: John Barton and his friend Wilson are trying to care for an ailing family; John is wandering about the city trying to find medicine:<br />
<blockquote>
It is a pretty sight to walk through a street with lighted shops; the gas is so brilliant, the display of goods so much more vividly shown than by day, and of all shops a druggist's looks the most like the tales of our childhood, from Aladdin's garden of enchanted fruits to the charming Rosamond with her purple jar. No such associations had Barton; yet he felt the contrast between the well-filled, well-lighted shops and the dim gloomy cellar, and it made him moody that such contrasts should exist. They are the mysterious problem of life to more than him. He wondered if any in all the hurrying crowd had come from such a house of mourning. He thought they all looked joyous, and he was angry with them. But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by in the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under? You may be elbowed one instant by the girl desperate in her abandonment, laughing in mad merriment with her outward gesture, while her soul is longing for the rest of the dead, and bringing itself to think of the cold flowing river as the only mercy of God remaining to her here. You may pass the criminal, meditating crimes at which you will to-morrow shudder with horror as you read them. You may push against one, humble and unnoticed, the last upon earth, who in heaven will for ever be in the immediate light of God's countenance. (p. 70)</blockquote>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ta5B-Nsb8WI/TiI0sb5A8bI/AAAAAAAACBY/UbUS6I9nlyg/s1600/Elizabeth_Gaskell_1832.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ta5B-Nsb8WI/TiI0sb5A8bI/AAAAAAAACBY/UbUS6I9nlyg/s200/Elizabeth_Gaskell_1832.jpg" width="158" /></a>My theory is that Gaskell is being deliberately cagey about which, if any side to take, in the master versus man struggle described in <i>Mary Barton</i>; and further, that she is doing so precisely to show that, in spite of people’s (even her own!) claims to understand the other side, they do not and they <i>cannot</i>. How is this useful in terms of reconciling differences, or setting the stage for the kind of social change enabled by, for example, the mutual suffering of grieving fathers?<br />
<br />
I think that Gaskell, by being/creating so unreliable a narrator here, is reminding readers—who mostly, no doubt, began this book chock full of settled options—that they do not know enough to have the right to such opinions. Neither side truly understands the needs, desires, thoughts, actions, feelings, motivations, choices of those with whom they struggle and whom they judge every day. Alluding to that unknowability by aligning all "other" people with the characters of “wild romance”, of fiction, does not simply strengthen Gaskell’s use of story to help readers feel right so that they will act right; it also, one would hope, reminds readers to approach their fellow humans with a measure of chastening humility, to perhaps remember that only God knows how hard they've tried. It’s a literary call to quotidian mercy.<br /><br /><b>Plot spoilers galore</b><br />That we cannot really know what others’ lives are like is reiterated in the unlikely love story of Mary Barton and Jem Wilson. They have been brought up together since childhood, their fathers being best friends and their families close neighbours. It has been assumed by everyone that they will eventually marry—until, that is, Mary’s head is turned by the predatory young Mr. Henry Carson. Having commenced a dangerous flirtation with Henry, Mary begins to nurse fantasies of a different and better life than the one promised to her by her class and familial birthright; she allows herself to be unscrupulously led to dream of becoming a rich man’s wife:<br />
<blockquote>
"O dear," said she to herself, "I wish he would not mistake me so; I never dare to speak a common word o' kindness, but his eye brightens and his cheek flushes. It's very hard on me; for father and George Wilson are old friends; and Jem and I ha' known each other since we were quite children. I cannot think what possesses me, that I must always be wanting to comfort him when he's downcast, and that I must go meddling wi' him to-night, when sure enough it was his aunt's place to speak to him. I don't care for him, and yet, unless I'm always watching myself, I'm speaking to him in a loving voice. I think I cannot go right, for I either check myself till I'm downright cross to him, or else I speak just natural, and that's too kind and tender by half. And I'm as good as engaged to be married to another; and another far handsomer than Jem; only I think I like Jem's face best for all that; liking's liking, and there's no help for it. Well, when I'm Mrs. Harry Carson, may happen I can put some good fortune in Jem's way. But will he thank me for it? He's rather savage at times, that I can see, and perhaps kindness from me, when I'm another's, will only go against the grain. I'll not plague myself wi' thinking any more about him, that I won't."</blockquote>
<blockquote>
So she turned on her pillow, and fell asleep, and dreamt of what was often in her waking thoughts; of the day when she should ride from church in her carriage, with wedding-bells ringing, and take up her astonished father, and drive away from the old dim work-a-day court for ever, to live in a grand house, where her father should have newspapers, and pamphlets, and pipes, and meat dinners every day--and all day long if he liked.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Such thoughts mingled in her predilection for the handsome young Mr. Carson, who, unfettered by work-hours, let scarcely a day pass without contriving a meeting with the beautiful little milliner he had first seen while lounging in a shop where his sisters were making some purchases, and afterwards never rested till he had freely, though respectfully, made her acquaintance in her daily walks. He was, to use his own expression to himself, quite infatuated by her, and was restless each day till the time came when he had a chance, and, of late, more than a chance of meeting her. There was something of keen practical shrewdness about her, which contrasted very bewitchingly with the simple, foolish, unworldly ideas she had picked up from the romances which Miss Simmonds' young ladies were in the habit of recommending to each other.<br />Yes! Mary was ambitious, and did not favour Mr. Carson the less because he was rich and a gentleman. (pp. 90-91)</blockquote>
Like Gaskell’s readers, Mary is unable to read others very well; in particular, she is very slow to realize what base desires motivate Henry Carson’s attentions to her. She is likely of a lower class than Gaskell’s readers would have been, but Mary is smart and good and possessed of valid concerns about how marriage will affect her life; these characteristics should make her sufficiently recognizable to Gaskell's audience to inspire in them enough sympathy and identification to, ironically but crucially, highlight how difficult it is to know even one’s <i>self</i>, never mind another person!<br />
<br />And Gaskell doesn’t stop here; the unlikely love story (and it <i>is</i> a wild romance of true, deep, and abiding love) of Mary and Jem is almost unrealized because of the terrible consequences of carrying on as though there is nothing left to know about either self or others. Jem is accused of murdering Henry Carson and barely saved from conviction and execution by Mary’s desperate efforts to secure the one witness who can speak to his true whereabouts on the fatal evening. In the process, Mary sees clearly what she’s been hiding from herself all along—and what the consequences have been for Jem who, thinking she does not love him, warns Henry to be good to her and careful of her honour, and then walks out of her life. At the trial, Mary is forced publicly to reveal everything that she has come to understand about herself:<br />
<blockquote>
"[The prosecutor] asks me which of them two I liked best. Perhaps I liked Mr. Harry Carson once—I don't know—I've forgotten; but I loved James Wilson, that's now on trial, above what tongue can tell—above all else on earth put together; and I love him now better than ever, though he has never known a word of it till this minute. For you see, sir, mother died before I was thirteen, before I could know right from wrong about some things; and I was giddy and vain, and ready to listen to any praise of my good looks; and this poor young Mr. Carson fell in with me, and told me he loved me; and I was foolish enough to think he meant me marriage: a mother is a pitiful loss to a girl, sir: and so I used to fancy I could like to be a lady, and rich, and never know want any more. I never found out how dearly I loved another till one day, when James Wilson asked me to marry him, and I was very hard and sharp in my answer (for indeed, sir, I'd a deal to bear just then), and he took me at my word and left me; and from that day to this I've never spoken a word to him, or set eyes on him; though I'd fain have done so, to try and show him we had both been too hasty; for he'd not been gone out of my sight above a minute before I knew I loved—far above my life," said she, dropping her voice as she came to this second confession of the strength of her attachment. "But, if the gentleman asks me which I loved the best, I make answer, I was flattered by Mr. Carson, and pleased with his flattery; but James Wilson, I—" (pp. 382-83)</blockquote>
This confession does not, in itself help Jem’s chances at survival. It <i>does</i> provide a disturbing vision of what it means to live life without closely examining one’s own motives, and the need to humbly attempt to determine both one's own and others’ wants and needs <i>before</i> acting.<br />
<br />Jem is acquitted and he and Mary must and will wed, but they cannot do so at home in Manchester. Even though he is proven not guilty, Jem’s reputation is shattered as the result of the murder charge, and so they emigrate to Canada to begin again. This is where I think Gaskell makes her final, complicated commentary on the relationship between reality, fiction, and readers’ responses thereto. Jem and Mary get their incredibly improbable happy ending; they get to begin clean in a "new" and relatively empty (of any traces of their past and people who knew them) world. This too is part of the wild romance—for, of course, if <i>Mary Barton</i> were either a realist or realistic novel this wouldn’t happen. Jem would be hung, Mary ruined and she certainly wouldn’t have secured Jem's saving witness via a crazy and prolonged boat chase (!!). This is not, I think, intended to be a feel-good happy ending; rather, it is a happy ending whose fictionality is so extreme as to force home, one final time, the more likely fatal consequences of in reality assuming one can read and judge and decide for others while labouring under the delusion of understanding them entirely.Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-89474050891549970752011-07-13T22:41:00.003-04:002011-07-13T22:44:35.737-04:00Brothers in the deep suffering of the heart<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a-JS8s09uQU/Th5W-BeAoII/AAAAAAAACAw/7E8vLoFPU3U/s1600/mary+barton.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a-JS8s09uQU/Th5W-BeAoII/AAAAAAAACAw/7E8vLoFPU3U/s200/mary+barton.JPG" width="129" /></a></div>
<i>Mary Barton</i> marks my first real foray into the world of Elizabeth Gaskell. I have read her biography of Charlotte Bronte and back in the dark ages, when I was still teaching the undergraduates, I led a very resistant (to everything, not only Gaskell) set of first-years through “The Old Nurse's Tale”. Based on these two examples of her fiction (for I cannot recall anything at all about what Gaskell had to say about Crazy Charlotte), I think I can say I like Elizabeth Gaskell very much, and I'm really glad I decided to include a couple more of her novels on my Vic Lit project list.<br />
<br />
The basics: <i>Mary Barton</i> is a novel about Manchester, about the bitter and sometimes deadly tension between workers (and their trade unions) and the bosses/owners of the factories in which they work. This general subject is explored through young Mary's relationship with three men: John Barton, her essentially good but broken and bitter father (broken by privation, loss, and constantly having to face the terrible indifference of the men determining the course of almost every aspect of his life); Henry Carson, the pampered young son of one of Manchester's most successful merchant princes; and Jem Wilson, a young man of her own class, who is entirely devoted to her and whom she resists with all her might in the hopes that Mr Carson will marry and thus rescue her from a life of poverty. While Gaskell's novel does engage in a great deal of polemical and philosophical meditation on the issues of class difference, the value of labour, and personal responsibilities, <i>Mary Barton</i> is also an entirely irresistible page-turner, just an incredibly excellent read. (Unfortunately, there are plot spoilers in this post, below, but you'll be warned!) <br />
<br />
Of course, this excellent read is complicated by the narrator's (Gaskell's? I'm not certain. I think I need to read more of her work before I attempt to unpack this relationship) flip-flopping when it comes to describing the aims and needs of the violently opposed interest groups (masters and men) she portrays. The narrator’s preface is notable for its proclamation that she will <i>not</i> take sides; and the narrator's initial distancing herself from the controversy is apparently the result of a careful acknowledgment of having limited information:<br />
<blockquote>
I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want; tossed to and fro by circumstances, apparently in even a greater degree than other men. A little manifestation of this sympathy and a little attention to the expression of feelings on the part of some of the work-people with whom I was acquainted, had laid open to me the hearts of one or two of the more thoughtful among them; I saw that they were sore and irritable against the rich, the even tenor of whose seemingly happy lives appeared to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of their own. Whether the bitter complaints made by them, of the neglect which they experienced from the prosperous—especially from the masters whose fortunes they had helped to build up—were well-founded or no, it is not for me to judge. (xxxv)</blockquote>
Of course, the abundant footnotes to the edition of <i>Mary Barton</i> I read (provided by Edgar Wright) put the lie to this claim—Gaskell was sufficiently aware of the utter rottenness of the impoverished classes to know, for example, that said classes were often forced to live in basement apartments whose walls were literally dripping with human excrement lovingly provided by upstairs neighbours emptying their chamber pots out their windows—and being unable to afford anything better, and there being absolutely no safeguards in place to protect the vulnerable forced by their financial circumstances to accept such terms from unscrupulous landlords. This is just one example; <i>Mary Barton</i> abounds with terrible facts about the everyday realities of Manchester's poor working class.<br />
<br />
It seems, in other words, that our narrator's refusal to take sides is no refusal at all, but rather a shockingly politician-esque rhetorical sidestepping designed to invite the audience to implicitly doubt the working class's claims. This undermining of their claims becomes more explicit when she actually goes so far as to claim that the lower classes’ perceptions are wrong:<br />
<blockquote>
Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food—of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?</blockquote>
<blockquote>
I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters; but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks. True, that with child-like improvidence, good times will often dissipate his grumbling, and make him forget all prudence and foresight.<br />
<br />
But there are earnest men among these people, men who have endured wrongs without complaining, but without ever forgetting or forgiving those whom (they believe) have caused all this woe.<br />
<br />
Among these was John Barton. His parents had suffered; his mother had died from absolute want of the necessaries of life. He himself was a good, steady workman, and, as such, pretty certain of steady employment. But he spent all he got with the confidence (you may also call it improvidence) of one who was willing, and believed himself able, to supply all his wants by his own exertions. And when his master suddenly failed, and all hands in the mill were turned back, one Tuesday morning, with the news that Mr. Hunter had stopped, Barton had only a few shillings to rely on; but he had good heart of being employed at some other mill, and accordingly, before returning home, he spent some hours in going from factory to factory, asking for work. But at every mill was some sign of depression of trade; some were working short hours, some were turning off hands, and for weeks Barton was out of work, living on credit. It was during this time that his little son, the apple of his eye, the cynosure of all his strong power of love, fell ill of the scarlet fever. They dragged him through the crisis, but his life hung on a gossamer thread. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Everything, the doctor said, depended on good nourishment, on generous living, to keep up the little fellow's strength, in the prostration in which the fever had left him. Mocking words! when the commonest food in the house would not furnish one little meal. Barton tried credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with the bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly—all appetising sights to the common passer-by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter! She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove away; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart to see his only boy a corpse! (pp. 24-25)</blockquote>
The poor are set up here as irrational, emotionally immature, and inconsistent; their feelings and fleeting impressions are set up against the facts the narrator is in possession of—or, more precisely, what she claims to be in possession of, for she notably doesn't explain either how or why she knows this to be true. Tricksy, aren't you, Mrs. Gaskell! I think what's going on here is twofold: first, she is worming her way into her likely comfortably middle class readers' bosoms so that she may strike a blow at their feelings and force them to empathize with the suffering around them, a tactic perhaps arising out of the notion that <i>feeling</i> correctly will lead to <i>behaving</i> correct. (Harriet Beecher Stowe famously tried this with <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>, published just four years after <i>Mary Barton</i>.)<br />
<br />
<b>Plot spoilers begin now</b><br />
The specific mechanism of this imagined sympathy and resultant social reconciliation is a gruesome and heart-breaking one: the death of children. John Barton loses his son to the poverty he can't escape; much later, he deprives the elder Mr. Carson of his son, and it is through this sickening parallel that Gaskell's idealized social healing begins. John Barton, literally dying of remorse for murdering Henry Carson, repents enough to see Mr. Carson, the boss, as a person for the first time:<br />
<blockquote>
"Have I had no inward suffering to blanch these hairs? Have not I toiled and struggled even to these years with hopes in my heart that all centred in my boy? I did not speak of them, but were they not there? I seemed hard and cold; and so I might be to others, but not to him!--who shall ever imagine the love I bore to him? Even he never dreamed how my heart leapt up at the sound of his footstep, and how precious he was to his poor old father. And he is gone—killed—out of the hearing of all loving words—out of my sight for ever. He was my sunshine, and now it is night! Oh, my God! comfort me, comfort me!" cried the old man aloud.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The eyes of John Barton grew dim with tears. Rich and poor, masters and men, were then brothers in the deep suffering of the heart; for was not this the very anguish he had felt for little Tom, in years so long gone by, that they seemed like another life!<br />
<br />
The mourner before him was no longer the employer; a being of another race, eternally placed in antagonistic attitude; going through the world glittering like gold, with a stony heart within, which knew no sorrow but through the accidents of Trade; no longer the enemy, the oppressor, but a very poor and desolate old man. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The sympathy for suffering, formerly so prevalent a feeling with him, again filled John Barton's heart, and almost impelled him to speak (as best he could) some earnest, tender words to the stern man, shaking in his agony. (p. 431)</blockquote>
Both men go through the fire and this, rather than hardening their hearts further and re-inscribing the harsh boundaries separating them, begins to affect larger social change in Gaskell's Manchester. For not only does the man begin to see the master as human, but the master's perception of John specifically and workers generally undergoes a paradigm shift. The expansion of each man's soul under the pressure of crushing grief leads to real social improvements:<br />
<blockquote>
It took time before the stern nature of Mr. Carson was compelled to the recognition of this secret of comfort, and that same sternness prevented his reaping any benefit in public estimation from the actions he performed; for the character is more easily changed than the habits and manners originally formed by that character, and to his dying day Mr. Carson was considered hard and cold by those who only casually saw him or superficially knew him. But those who were admitted into his confidence were aware, that the wish that lay nearest to his heart was that none might suffer from the cause from which he had suffered; that a perfect understanding, and complete confidence and love, might exist between masters and men; that the truth might be recognized that the interests of one were the interests of all, and, as such, required the consideration and deliberation of all; that hence it was most desirable to have educated workers, capable of judging, not mere machines of ignorant men: and to have them bound to their employers by the ties of respect and affection, not by mere money bargains alone; in short, to acknowledge the Spirit of Christ as the regulating law between both parties.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Many of the improvements now in practice in the system of employment in Manchester, owe their origin to short, earnest sentences spoken by Mr. Carson. Many and many yet to be carried into execution, take their birth from that stern, thoughtful mind, which submitted to be taught by suffering. (pp. 457-58)</blockquote>
Feeling right leads to right action in <i>Mary Barton</i>; cultivating a Christ-like brotherhood amongst all makes everyone more content and more comfortable. But seeing the lower classes as people, with whom Carson's class must develop and nurture a symbiotic rather than despotic relationship, neatly sidesteps the issue of class difference and the power imbalance inherent therein. Indeed, while Gaskell aims at destroying the notion of factions here, she seems to want to do so without questioning the ingrained social hierarchy that gave birth to them. In Gaskell's social labour market, class isn't the problem—the problem is that chaos ensues when the classes don't keep to their allotted responsibilities. This position was not, of course, an unusual one; what is unusual in <i>Mary Barton</i> is, I think, the effort Gaskell puts into trying to be fair about the clashing perspectives she describes. From the perspective of early 21st-century forward-thinking uber-enlightenment (ha!), her apparently implicit belief in the correctness of class distinctions is unattractive and unfair; but no doubt it seemed rather revolutionary at the time.<br />
<br />
I'll be interested to see if Gaskell addresses these issues again in later works. While she was 37-ish when <i>Mary Barton</i> was published, it seems like a young novel to me, by which I mean her authorial skill in unpacking the implications of her own narrative choices don't seem entirely developed here. The fact that John Barton must die, in spite of his profound spiritual unfolding at the end of his life, and the fact that Mary's aunt Esther must also die in spite of her desire to change and live (especially given Jem and Mary's sincere wish to take her to Toronto (!!) with them to start over), reminded me of <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2009/08/not-that-i-could-have-written-this-in.html">Dickens's clumsy killing off of Smike in <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i></a>. These characters, in the hands of new novelists, seem too difficult to reconcile to their otherwise neat conclusions, and so they mun go. Dickens, in my experience so far, became increasingly adept at handling the utmost of human characters' complications and so I am hopeful that Gaskell did the same—but only time shall tell!Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-38978592250626876402011-07-11T23:15:00.001-04:002011-07-11T23:16:24.192-04:00The silence of God<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QotsZCbORec/Thu545lSmEI/AAAAAAAACAk/eB99mGZOBDg/s1600/endo-silence.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QotsZCbORec/Thu545lSmEI/AAAAAAAACAk/eB99mGZOBDg/s200/endo-silence.jpg" width="132" /></a></div>
Shusako Endo's first novel, <i>Silence</i>, is also his most famous and probably deservedly. I say “probably” because while I enjoyed it very much, I was not nearly as affected by it, either aesthetically or emotionally, as I was by his later work <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2011/01/what-i-can-believe-in-now-is-sight-of.html"><i>Deep River</i></a>. <i>Deep River</i> accomplishes something crucial to Endo's lifelong topic (what it means to be Christian in Japan) that <i>Silence</i> does not—that is, it comes at the same issue repeatedly but without ever becoming repetitive.<br />
<br />
<i>Silence</i> is perhaps more ambitious than <i>Deep River</i>, for not only does it deal with Japanese Christians struggling to maintain faith in a homeland that is ostracizing them for it, but <i>Silence</i> is also an historical novel, told from the perspective of a non-Japanese. The historical moment centres on the last days of Portugal's Christian mission in Japan during the seventeenth century, focused through the lens of Father Rodrigues's attempt first to minister to Japanese Christians, and then to negotiate the terrible options of either apostasy or sending his sheep to suffer terrible tortures for his refusal to do so.<br />
<br />
Brought up against Rodrigues's initial naivety and commitment to spread the Church's teaching at any cost is God's persistent and terrible silence in the face of the atrocities being perpetuated against His sheep. Complicating Rodrigues's understanding of his proper role in Japan is that Kichijiro, his own personal Judas, wrestles with the same question the devoted priest wrestles with:<br />
<blockquote>
I do not believe that God has given us this trial to no purpose. I know that the day will come when we will clearly understand why this persecution with all its sufferings has been bestowed upon us—for everything that Our Lord does is for our good. And yet, even as I write these words I feel the oppressive weight in my heart of the last stammering words of Kichijiro on the morning of his departure: “Why has Deus Sama imposed this suffering upon us?” And then the resentment in those eyes that he turned upon me. “Father,” he said, “what evil have we done?”<br />
<br />
I suppose I should simply cast from my mind these meaningless words of the coward; yet why does his plaintive voice pierce my breast with all the pain of a sharp needle? Why has Our Lord imposed this torture and this persecution on poor Japanese peasants? No, Kichijiro was trying to express something different, something even more sickening. The silence of God. Already twenty years have passed since the persecution broke out; the black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of the churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to Him, God has remained silent. (pp. 54-55)</blockquote>
God's silence cannot be reconciled with anything Rodrigues thinks he knows. And indeed, as time interminably passes with the priest imprisoned and more and more Japanese Christians dying because he refuses to renounce his faith, Rodrigues realizes that he really knows nothing. Or, at least, what he knows in the end is neither safe, neat, nor immediately helpful to either himself or his afflicted flock. <br />
<br />
Now, when I said earlier that I didn't think <i>Silence</i> was as good as <i>Deep River</i>, what I mean is, I don't think it is as successful as <i>a novel</i>. In <i>Deep River</i>, Endo seamlessly made real human spiritual suffering and searching into a compelling story; <i>Silence</i>, on the other hand, reads more like a personal confession dressed not entirely comfortably in the trappings of story. It is, nonetheless, a very fine book, if not a perfect one.<br />
<br />
<b>Because David Mitchell is my literary compass</b><br />
And, to allow myself a little tangent, I cannot believe that David Mitchell wasn't influenced by this novel when he was conceiving of and writing <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2010/11/author-for-whom-we-dance.html"><i>The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet</i></a>. <i>Silence</i> concludes in Nagasaki in the mid-seventeenth century; <i>Autumn</i> begins in the extremely nearby Dejima at the end of that century, focusing on Dutch traders and their uneasy relationship with their Japanese hosts. Besides the Bible that Jacob smuggles into Japan at his mortal peril, the penultimate section of <i>Silence</i> comprises the log-book of a secretly Christian Dutch trader at Dejima—a log-book very like those Jacob is assigned to audit for discrepancies. Also, I like to think that the ruthless Inoue's comparison of Christianity trying to set down roots in Japan to the unwanted love of an ugly woman is ironically but very tenderly reversed in Mitchell's novel to become Jacob's love for an apparently ugly (because of burn scars on her face) but brilliant and lovely Japanese woman entirely out of his reach. But of course, the really important similarity lies in the heart-breaking silence of the beloved when one word would change everything.Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-52729876622418254602011-07-06T14:27:00.000-04:002011-07-06T14:27:46.063-04:00Epic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qrZCxKUYdeM/ThSmbv68chI/AAAAAAAACAY/xNSaTOj_jeg/s1600/cold_comfort_farm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qrZCxKUYdeM/ThSmbv68chI/AAAAAAAACAY/xNSaTOj_jeg/s200/cold_comfort_farm.jpg" width="122" /></a></div>I am woefully behind in my posting, I know. There are several books gathering dust on my desk and I have been, almost aggressively, doing nothing about them. I think I finished <i>Mary Barton</i> in the jolly month of May, for chrissake. What can I say? I think summer makes me allergic to sitting in front of computers; it also seems to make me allergic to reading books straight through without often interrupting them with other, more cottage-y, beach-ish books.<br />
<br />
To wit, I have been approximately 300 pages into <i>Vanity Fair</i> for weeks now; I have been almost done <i>Silence</i> for almost as long. I had to abandon both <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2009/06/daisies-opening-in-sly-lust.html">to re-read <i>Cold Comfort Farm</i></a>, which made me wish everything were as British and silly as that book. Nothing could be more British or silly than that, not even Wodehouse, so I have finished it and am back to <i>Silence</i> which I have promised both myself and the unforgiving interwebs that I will finish TODAY (i.e., Tuesday).*<br />
<br />
I received a concerned email from a friend about my radio silence recently, which has forced me to sluggishly and damply force myself to sit before the newly adopted and christened Hamish Tinycomputer (my new tinylaptop, purchased for the sole purpose of taking my word processing activities outside, and perhaps solving my disgust with sitting indoors during the June/July/August trifecta of seasonal awesomeness, the awesomeness being just how very late it is before the sun goes down, for the most part) and write something in the Toronto's summer signature hellish hot heat. So, here I am, making excuses but really seguing awkwardly into an entirely insufficient review of John Barth's <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GzSvJGi6ctQ/ThSmoAnjExI/AAAAAAAACAc/xWUuH1_v9eg/s1600/barth.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GzSvJGi6ctQ/ThSmoAnjExI/AAAAAAAACAc/xWUuH1_v9eg/s200/barth.jpg" width="124" /></a>This book was gifted to me about a year ago by <a href="http://www.bookphilia.com/2008/09/reading-lamp-reading-on-hidden-path.html">Cyberspatial Tom</a>, during my last summer reading/writing famine. It took me a year to get to it, which sounds bad, but is actually pretty good for me. Also, this was the novel most asked after in my bookstore by 20-something young men possessing large vocabularies, intense respect for the Importance of Reading and Thinking About Important Things, and partially completed philosophy degrees. I never had the book, of course. But this is the thing: now that I've read <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i>, I think I know why these Thoughtful Young Men wanted the book, and I like them better for it.<br />
<br />
First of all, it is a remarkable work of art insofar as it is ridiculously well-written and Barth clearly knows A Lot about A Hell of A Lot of Things, particularly things which occurred in the 17th century. At least, his ability to set context via historical signposts and surprisingly convincing Olde Timey language is the most laudable I've seen. His vision – of young and shockingly naive young poet Eben |Cooke striking out from England for the New World to make his fortune and reputation, as well as the insane laundry list of adventures and disasters he experiences – is as vast as the night sky, as broad and deep as Eben's capacity for self-deception and Hudibrastic rhyming, and as varied as Burlingame's taste for perversion. It is, in other words, epic in both the formal and colloquial senses of the word. <br />
<br />
Thoughtful, epic, learned, brilliant – all these adjectives can describe <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i>. But so can hilarious, ridiculous, and juvenile. You see, Barth's favourite Olde Timey word may very well be “beshit”, as in “But say, thou'rt all beshit”, which Burlingame observes of Eben after the latter fouls himself in response to dire threats received at the hands of some real, live pirates (yaaarrrrrr) (p. 171). That's right, <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i> is perfect for the highly intelligent but immature 12-year old boy stuck in the mature casing of a third-year Humanities student. It's also, apparently, perfect for intelligent but immature 12-year-old boys stuck in the mature casing of a third-year Humanities student stuck in the middle-aged body of an English PhD and former book-seller, for I think that, having read this novel, I may want John Barth to marry me - or, at the very least, to watch 30 Rock with me.<br />
<br />
Now, if I haven't made it clear, this book is terribly funny. It is an insane festival of unrelenting hilarity, of the mostly low-brow sort. If you are squeamish or very mature, you might skip this. If unrelenting hilarity wears you down, you might also not read it; and I get it, for reading this book can cause the mental equivalent of a face made agonizingly sore from too much laughing. <br />
<br />
On the other hand, if you like the rude and loud literary bon temps to roulez in 700-page stretches, <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i> is for you. I think that this book is more compelling for its silliness than its obvious intelligence (although I enjoy that as well). But where, you may be wondering, resides this intelligence I am claiming but not providing evidence for? It’s satirical, of course; at least, the NYTBR claims on the back of my copy that <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i> is a satire on humanity as a whole. Nay, friend, thou’rt lazy and short-sighted! Penning a satire on humanity as a whole is too easy; ’tis less work than shooting fish in a small barrel with a cannon!<br />
<br />
If, indeed, Barth is engaging in some delightfully mean satire here it is, I think, aimed at the following (and with a weapon rather more subtle than a cannon): Poets, Earnestness, and Readers who think they understand what an author ever meant in the first place – which yes, means that I am as much a subject of his finger-pointing and japing as those who read Literature for what is Real and True are. Which is fine, as I no doubt deserve it. I do, after all, bestow ridiculous monikers like "Hamish Tinycomputer" on inanimate electronic devices.<br />
<br />
<i>*Mission accomplished. Please, restrain your applause.</i>Bookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.com3