If I were to identify a single theme this novel is about, I’d say it is about the uneven burden of suffering. We are all aware that life is structuredIf I were to identify a single theme this novel is about, I’d say it is about the uneven burden of suffering. We are all aware that life is structured such that some people have tremendous wealth while others survive in desperate poverty. We don't think as often about the unequal burdens of physical and psychological suffering. (Sometimes related to the inequities of wealth.) Some people lead a charmed life. Some go through life without too many tremendous burdens and tragedies. Some others suffer all their lives. This story is about a person in the last group.
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This story was written in 1925 but it's set in Hungary in 1899, so we have candles, fear of highwaymen if you travel, duels and dowries. A family of three � mother, father, adult daughter - live in small city in what is now Serbia, although the father reads the Budapest newspaper. We’re told the father is 59 but looks 65.
The father, his wife and daughter form a threesome, really an isolated world unto themselves. We're told the daughter (Skylark) is ‘ugly;� she has large teeth and we’re almost given the impression that her face and perhaps her body are misshapen. She's uncomfortable going out so they are basically housebound. Yet they seem, if not happy, contented. The daughter runs the household doing most of the cooking and cleaning. The threesome forms a dictionary definition of what it means ‘to be in a rut.�
They essentially have no visitors. There may have been one or two young men they entertained at home years ago but nothing came of it. But they still keep money set aside for their daughter’s dowry in the unlikely event�
The story begins when, for the first time, (even though she's probably in her late 20s or so), the daughter is invited to go off by herself. She will take a train to visit distant relatives for a week.
During that one week the life of the stay-at-home parents totally changes. They go out to eat and end up socializing every night with various groups of people. They had forgotten there was life in the world outside their living room. The father gets drawn into a group of men, former acquaintances, who meet nightly to play cards and drink.
One night the husband gets staggeringly drunk. He comes home and says things to his wife that have never been said before. (view spoiler)[ Among the shocking things he says are: she's ugly; even we don't really love her - we pity her; she's going to end up alone and she'd be better off dead. (hide spoiler)] Pretty shocking. But true?
Meanwhile the daughter writes back that she is having a good time visiting the relatives. (view spoiler)[ That’s a lie. She had a lousy time. Some relatives shunned or ignored her; the aunt she spent most time with was basically annoyed by her. She knows she'll never visit again. She tells none of this to her parents. The novel ends with her crying in bed at night, as she does many nights, wondering what will become of her when her elderly parents die. (hide spoiler)]
The author structures the novel so that the first third is on a level keel � dull and flat. The second third is that week of elation. At the top of the roller coaster, the author drops us flat on our faces from a third-floor window.
Here’s a passage about the father’s reading that I found interesting. The father does nobility/genealogy research. People write to him with questions about ancestry. He has an extensive library on these topics. “He didn't consider novels and plays as things to be taken ‘seriously.� He wouldn't even look at a work on which imagination had left its magic mark. In his younger days he had attempted one or two, but had soon wearied of them. Whenever books were discussed in company, he'd always remark that he only read ‘as much as the exigencies of his vocation would allow.� As the ‘exigencies of his vocation� allowed very little, he read nothing at all.�
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The author (1885-1936) wrote about 20 or so novels in Hungarian, although only a few appear to be available in English translation. After Skylark, his best-known work in English is Anna Edes about a peasant maid to a wealthy family. The edition I read is part of the great New York Review Book series of translated classics. (And I think this novel qualifies as a Hungarian classic.)
[Edited 5/19/23]
Top photo of Budapest in the 1890s from pinterest.com The author from Wikipedia...more
Four short stories by this classic Russian author. Three of the stories have all the things the author became known for: satire, realism, and comic deFour short stories by this classic Russian author. Three of the stories have all the things the author became known for: satire, realism, and comic depictions of bureaucracy and petty bureaucrats.
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The first story, Old-Fashioned Farmers, has none of these characteristics. It’s a lush description of a quaint elderly couple living in an idyllic rural setting.
The Nose is a fantasy � a biting satire of Russia's incompetent bureaucrats.
The Overcoat focuses on a poor, low-level bureaucrat � a copyist who enjoys his simple work. But he is bullied and humiliated by his co-workers and superiors. He has to spend half his annual salary to replace his threadbare overcoat and things go downhill from there.
The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich is a humor-laden but ultimately sad story of how two best-of-friend neighboring landowners turned into life-long bitter enemies over a trivial happening.
I enjoyed his biting humor. Gogol is considered the first Russian realist and he influenced Tolstoy, Turgenev and especially Dostoyevsky. Gogol was about 20 years older than the other three.
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I had this book on my TBR shelf (shelves actually lol) and decided to read it after reading Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. In that novel, a baby boy, born to Bengali immigrants in the US, is named Gogol in honor of this author and that name provides a major thread for how the story unfolds.
Top image of St. Petersburg at the time of the author (~ 1830) from russianlife.com The author on a Russian stamp from Wikipedia ...more
Ah, Madame Bovary. Isn't that the one where she has an affair and kills herself by jumping in front of a train? No, that's one by Tol[Revised 3/21/23]
Ah, Madame Bovary. Isn't that the one where she has an affair and kills herself by jumping in front of a train? No, that's one by Tolstoy. But I'm thinking of adding a new ŷ shelf: 'Old classics I thought surely I had read years ago, but hadn't.'
There are thousands of reviews so I'll keep this short.
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Our two main characters are remarkably unlikable. Emma marries a divorced small-town doctor who's a widower. Isn't there a French expression: "How can a woman love a man who adores her?� Charles acts like a country bumpkin. He adores her and he’s such a cuckold that he is an enabler. If he found her in bed with another man, Emma would say “I was just showing Armande how comfortable our mattress is, and we took our clothes off because it was so hot.� And he would believe her.
The introduction tells us that Flaubert wrote in a letter “Women are taught to lie shamelessly. An apprenticeship that lasts all their lives.� So he created Emma to prove his point. Emma’s picture could appear in an illustrated dictionary under ‘self-centeredness.� (We’ll put her husband, Charles� picture, in under ‘cuckold.�)
The biggest red flag for me about Emma is her lack of interest in, dislike of, and even disgust with her baby daughter. She's forever pushing her away and sending her off to her nurse. Her extravagance creates financial problems that she seems not only unconcerned with but unaware of. That extravagance drives the novel to its tragic end.
If you are thinking of reading it, here are a couple of passages that I liked and that illustrate the style of writing. This one is about an old roadside inn: “…a good old house, with worm-eaten balconies that creak in the wind on winter nights, always full of people, noise, and feeding, whose black tables are sticky with coffee and brandy, the thick windows made yellow by the flies, the damp napkins stained with cheap wine, and that always smells of the village, like plowboys dressed in Sunday clothes, has a cafe on the street, and toward the countryside a kitchen-garden.�
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Here's a passage when Madame B and a future lover are beginning to feel attracted to each other: “Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices. Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, thrown over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.�
It's a good story and excellent writing, although my paperback edition by Harper Collins has problems. It doesn't name the translator, so it must be an old translation where the copyright expired. I know that Flaubert was a writer known for finding le mot juste. The translator, I think, tried to match that exactness of word usage in English with some fairly obscure English words: diligence (in the sense of a carriage), colza (rapeseed), bistoury (scalpel), faubourg (suburb). The back of the book gives us a glossary that has none of the obscure words I had to look up, but instead defines for us words like ruffian, trivet, penury and gruel! This is what happens when you turn over the glossary task to your graduate student intern and no one else looks over the finished product.
BTW, when is GR going to get around to letting reviewers use italics without having to insert formatting marks?
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A great novel and good writing. Indeed a classic. The sex, tame by modern standards, pushed the envelope when published in 1856, and the author was charged with obscenity. It’s a fascinating blend of romance and realism. Flaubert (1821-1880) was a pioneer in French literary realism.
Top photo of Emma from a 2014 20th Century Fox movie at befrois.com French inn from messynessychic.com The author on a French stamp from postbeeld.com...more
Ah, Gabriela, scent and color, a beautiful young woman, almost still a girl, who arrived in the city with a rag-tag band of starving, dirty immigrantsAh, Gabriela, scent and color, a beautiful young woman, almost still a girl, who arrived in the city with a rag-tag band of starving, dirty immigrants from the backlands of northeastern Brazil in the 1920s.
(I added a funny TBR story about this book at the end.)
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Although he’s not in the title, much of the story also follows Nacib, a Syrian Brazilian, whom you can call Arab, but don’t ever call him Turk. He needs a cook for his restaurant. It’s the only restaurant in town that isn’t also a brothel. He hires Gabriela and the romance begins. Maybe he’ll even marry her, but one of the themes in this book is “Wildflowers don’t belong in vases.�
The novel overall is an epic James Michener-type story about the real city of Ilheus, the author’s hometown, and how it grew in its time as the major cocoa-growing region of Brazil. (And it still is.) But all the action is in the present; we get the historical background through narrative and discussion among the characters. Many of the important characters are wealthy ‘colonels� who won control of cocoa lands through wild-west gun battles between rival cowboy gangs.
This is Brazil in the 1920s so “The Doctor was not a doctor and the Captain was not a captain. Just as most of the colonels were not colonels: the title was merely a traditional symbol of ownership of a large plantation…they were ‘colonels of the most irregulars,� for many of them had led bands of outlaws for the bloody struggle for control of the land.� The priest is a real priest, but his unmarried housekeeper may be a bit more than that because she miraculously keeps having children.
A young, wealthy man from Rio de Janeiro comes to town. He has big ideas about improving the town. He personally pays to build a public boardwalk on the beach. He helps start a bus company. He wants to dredge the harbor to improve navigation. I guess we can call him a Progressive. (Or a ‘Young Turk,� but that may no longer be politically correct?). The stage is set for a political battle and maybe even violence because the old reactionary colonels don’t want change and they want to maintain their behind-the-scenes control of everything.
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Women’s lib is nowhere to be found in Brazil in the 1920s. Maybe there’s an inkling of it in one young woman who wants to get an education and doesn’t want to be forced to marry someone chosen by her father. (view spoiler)[ Her father beats her with his horsewhip. (hide spoiler)] But the double standard is supreme � and extreme. If you are a wealthy colonel your wife has a comfortable life with her children and her servants back at the plantation. You keep your mistress in a house in town. You don’t have to worry about your wife finding out because she and everyone else in town knows this.
If your mistress is unfaithful, you dump her and throw her stuff out on the street. Let her go off with her new lover � she’s just a mistress. If your wife is unfaithful, you kill her and her lover. Period. No jury will ever convict you. If you get a good lawyer you probably won’t even be charged with anything. What’s the point? Even the women agree: his wife was unfaithful � what else could he do?
Do these rules apply to Wildflowers? There’s a Pygmalion theme to this novel. Can you take a wildflower, a young woman who has never worn shoes and doesn’t know her last name, or even have one, and turn her into a fine lady?
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I enjoyed the book and the writing. Much of this is satire and tongue-in-cheek. I liked this when someone is visiting one of the old colonels: “His hands shook slightly, his shoulders were bowed, his step was unsteady. " 'You look stronger than ever,� said Antonio.�
It’s an old Brazilian classic, but not that far back � published in Brazil in 1958. The author was not only progressive but he was elected to Brazil’s parliamentary body as a Communist. Of course, like almost all other well-known Latin American authors of the time, Amado (1912-2001) had to go into exile when military dictators took over.
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Some of his work was not well-received in Brazil. Wiki tells “His depiction of the sexual customs of his land was scandalous to much of 1950s Brazilian society and for several years Amado could not even enter Ilhéus [his home town], where Gabriela was set, due to threats received for the alleged offense to the morality of the city's women.� Amado is best known in English translation for his novel Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.
Here's a TBR story for you. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Brazilian authors including two others by Amado: Home is the Sailor and Shepherds of the Night. A copy of Gabriela had been staring at me from my TBR shelf for 50 years � since college. It survived book cullings from Massachusetts to Virginia to Ohio to Florida. Just never got to it. Then about a month before I wrote this review my older sister was clearing out stuff and, knowing my interest in translations, she sent me her copy of Gabriela. She had received the book as a prize 60 years ago for being the ‘best Portuguese language student� at our local high school where many students took Portuguese as their foreign language. It has an inscription of congratulations from the Brazilian ambassador at that time � 1963. (It was published in English in 1962, so it was brand new then.) I gave away my old copy and I read and I am keeping her copy!
Top photo of Sonia Braga as Gabriela from the 1975 Brazilian telenovela based on the book. There was also another telenovela series made in 2012. From Wikipedia. Modern-day Ilheus from alamy.com Map showing Ilheus from pinterest.com The author on a Brazilian stamp from ebay.com
It’s been a while since I read anything by good old Fyodor. How’s this for opening lines? “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive It’s been a while since I read anything by good old Fyodor. How’s this for opening lines? “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.�
Our 40-ish crazy guy has received an inheritance so he has retired from his job as a government clerk: “I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least.� He’s the type of guy who enjoys taking offense for nothing and after a while he becomes genuinely offended.
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Then he goes on to say, in effect, 'not really, actually I have good urges but they can’t come out.� At one point he says “I want to tell you how…why I could not become an insect…� and I wondered if this line may have been an inspiration to Kafka for Metamorphosis? Surely Kafka read a lot of Dostoevsky.
The story is heavy on psychology and philosophy and this work is one of the earliest existential novels.
We are treated to a discourse on how people ease their own suffering by inflicting it on others, such as a man with a toothache who moans all night keeping the family awake.
Then we get a discourse on how people act contrary to their best interests. They do perverse things just to exercise their free will. And how do we know what’s in anybody’s ‘best interest� anyway?
Obviously this guy has no friends. In fact he likes the idea that people think of him with loathing because that’s what he feels about himself “I hated my face for instance: I thought it disgusting.� He tells us he goes out at night to indulge in ‘horrible vices.�
These musings make up the first half of the book. The second half is mostly the tale of a long drunken night, so I’ll say SPOILERS FOLLOW, although I don't think this is a book anyone reads for its plot.
The next section revolves around a dinner that he invites himself to. It’s his old schoolmates who have no use for him and the feeling is mutual. Why does he go? At the dinner he gets drunk, insults everyone, and shows himself to be the fool that he is. He talks about challenging people to a duel and lucky for him he’s such a drunken ass that no one takes him seriously.
Then he goes to a prostitute and starts trying to talk her out of the life she is leading. He tells her of the pleasures of leading a normal life and having a family. Even though she tells him he ‘sounds like a book,� he succeeds in inspiring her to think about giving up her profession. When the poor woman shows up at his door, he changes his tune and goes on a monologue about how love is tyranny.
That’s too bad because the only help for this kind of guy is a good caring woman. But what are the chances of any sane person getting involved with him? Get thee to the couch.
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Unlike many of the author’s other major works, this is a short work only about 135 pages, so really a novella. Worth a read because it helps us a bit in understanding some of the folks we run into on street corners.
Top picture, actor Harry Lloyd in a British theater production of the story from theguardian.com The author (1821-1881) on a Russian stamp from Wiki
A cute idea for a collection of book reviews, but the title is not accurate. The vast majority are not ‘classics� in any sense of that meaning. The suA cute idea for a collection of book reviews, but the title is not accurate. The vast majority are not ‘classics� in any sense of that meaning. The subtitle is better: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission.
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But here’s an even more accurate description: Mostly obscure books by mostly obscure authors that some relatively famous authors think are good reads.
There are 71 books reviewed by 71 authors. The vast majority are fiction with a few non-fiction mixed in. I think a few of the books reviewed might indeed qualify as classics: Lost Horizon by James Hilton, Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford and The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford.
To be honest, I’m not familiar with the names of the vast majority of the ‘famous� authors doing the reviewing. Here are ones I recognized: Michael Ondaatje (one of the editors of the book), John Irving, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, W. S. Merwin, Anchee Min, Colm Toibin and C. K. Williams.
Here are a few passages that struck me for one reason or another, so this gives you a random sample of what you will find in this book:
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In Joanna Scott’s review of Genoa by Paul Metcalf she writes: “To make something new we must accumulate information and consider, if not fully comprehend, the possibilities of association between unrelated subjects, such as…� She then goes on to list eight unrelated readings such as Melville’s Mardi and Grey's Anatomy.
In Andrew Pyper's review of The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford he quotes Iris Murdoch’s response to the question ‘What makes a great novel?� Her answer was “the story provides something for everyone.� Pyper goes on to say “By this Murdoch didn't mean pandering to satisfy a broad audience, but the synthesizing of every rhetorical tool available to the writer to create a new and particular world that somehow also gives us a sense of the universal.�
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Caryl Phillips reviews Put Money in Thy Purse by Micheal Mac Liammoir, a book about the filming of Orson Welle’s Othello, “…one of the truly great transpositions of Shakespeare to film. It is full of shadowy suggestion, unusual camera angles, big close-ups, and dazzling montage; it is Shakespeare as film noir.�
In reviewing the book, Confessions of an Un-common Attorney by Reginald Hine, Douglas Fetherling tells us “Like Thoreau, who said that he had traveled widely in Concord, Hine found the universe in Hitchin. One doesn't need to know or care much about the actual place to understand how perfectly it illustrates how even today the roots of English society go deeply into medieval and postmedieval soil.�
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Robert Boyers reviews Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann: “Malina is a first-person novel told by an ‘unknown woman,� a writer who is more than a little bit mad and more than a little bit brilliant...Malina is not an easy or comforting book. It is rife with anomaly and grievance, with paradox and hysteria. When it is determined to be positive, to renounce perversity and malice, it mistrusts its own tender sentiments and reverts more or less inevitably to its characteristic accent: a compound of the desperate and accusatory. Occasionally fabulist and escapist, the novel is more usually apocalyptic and prophetic.� [Sounds fascinating!]
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If you are interested in the table of contents to see all the recommended books, their authors, and who reviewed them, you can find this book on Amazon.com and then click “see inside� even though there is not a book cover picture posted. I tried to copy and paste the table of contents into this review, but no luck.
I'm glad that this book will help some other books get rescued from oblivion. I found several I’d like to read.
A classic. Certainly THE classic Sicilian novel and some critics say it may be THE classic Italian novel. It’s the story of a wealthy Sicilian prince A classic. Certainly THE classic Sicilian novel and some critics say it may be THE classic Italian novel. It’s the story of a wealthy Sicilian prince set around 1860 when Garibaldi is unifying Italy (the Risorgimento). Garibaldi’s men, the Redshirts, have landed in Sicily with the intention of taking control of the island over from the Bourbons, a dynasty that also controlled France and Spain at times.
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Here’s what life is like for the Prince, Don Fabrizio. His big family, including governesses and live-in tutors and the local priest dine together every evening, so every meal is like a state dinner. The children and their nannies/governess/tutor all stand if he so much as walks by the door of a room they are in. (view spoiler)[ On many evenings he visits prostitutes in town but he makes the priest go with him on the journey to pretend it’s some kind of legitimate visit. Of course everyone knows where he is going and the priest goes to visit other priests or monks in town. (hide spoiler)]
He’s wealthy of course, an 1860s Master of the Universe, but his mansion near the main Sicilian city of Palermo, and his summer home inland, are ancient with a scent of decay to them; perhaps crumbling grandeur or ‘shabby sheik,� long before that term was invented. His homes are not just mansions but feudal fiefdoms with hundreds of acres and hundreds of peasants living on them and paying a good portion of their crop as rent. The King of Naples is godfather to his children.
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The Prince isn’t really worried that he or his family will be killed or that his wealth will be taken away � he’s too wealthy and too politically savvy for that. In today’s terminology, “he’s too big to fail.� (view spoiler)[ (He’s eventually asked to be a senator in the new government.) (hide spoiler)] But he is uncertain and annoyed by the inevitable changes he knows must come. If any single line in the novel summarizes his position it may be this one: “I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.�
To help secure his family’s future he works behind the scenes to have his favorite nephew (whom he sees as having more savor faire and common sense than his own son) marry into an up-and-coming nouveau riche family. The nephew and his fiancée spend a lot of time courting in the empty rooms of the mansion. His nephew has a classic line about change too: "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change."
The Prince’s hobby is astronomy. He loves the precise calculations he can make about planetary orbits, undoubtedly because they are precise and predictable, certainly compared to the societal and political turmoil he experiences around him.
I liked the story, the writing and the detailed geographical descriptions of the country. It has a good rating on GR, 4.1. I'll give it a 5 and I'm adding it to my favorites. Some other lines I liked:
“Yes, Don Fabrizio has certainly had his worries those last two months; they had come from all directions, like ants making for a dead lizard. Some had crawled from crevices of the political situation; some had been flung on him by other people’s passions; and some� had sprung up within himself…�
“…but although she did not love him, she was, then, in love with him, a very different thing…�
“In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing� at all.�
The novel was made into an Italian film in 1963 starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale.
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This is really the only major work by the author (1896-1957). It is based in part on the life of his great-grandfather and the author lived in mansions described in the story.
[Edited to hide spoilers 5/4/24]
Top photo, the library in the Palazzo the author lived in near Palermo, from townandcountrymag.com Scene from the film from sensesofcinema.com The author from romecentral.com...more
A classic by one of Japan’s most famous authors. It’s largely based on a real-life story. As we are told in the introduction, in 1950 a Buddhist templA classic by one of Japan’s most famous authors. It’s largely based on a real-life story. As we are told in the introduction, in 1950 a Buddhist temple, a national architectural treasure built in 1398, was burned to the ground by a young Buddhist acolyte. The young man intended to commit ritual suicide afterward but he lost his nerve and was imprisoned. The young man had a severe stutter and thought of himself as ugly. An exactly reconstructed temple still stands today.
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So Mishima starts us off with a young man who has a severe stutter and considers himself ugly. This is very much a psychological novel that puts us into the mind of this fictional young man as much as Crime and Punishment puts us into the mind of Raskolnikov.
I imagine there aren’t a lot of novels written about stutterers, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the author’s portrayal of this disability. (Joe Biden overcame a stuttering problem.) A main theme is that the delays in his ability to speak and to respond put a time-delay barrier between the young man and the world. He thinks of the analogy of a rusty key in an old squeaky lock. When he speaks, he sees people look fretfully at him; they are relieved when he stops talking; maybe they understood some of it, but WHAT HE SAYS has little importance in this process. It’s interesting that the narrator tells us that when the man speaks English (to give tours of the temple to American GI’s) he doesn’t stutter.
I’ll use some passages directly from the author to give an idea of the writing style and the feel of the book:
“The matter was entirely self-evident: my feelings suffered from stuttering. They never emerged on time. As a result, I felt as though the fact of Father‘s death and the fact of my being sad were two isolated things, having no connection and not infringing on each other in the slightest.�
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“…the fact of not being understood by others had been my sole source of pride since my early youth, and I have not the slightest impulse to express myself in such a way that I might be understood.�
The boy was raised in another temple � his father was a Buddhist priest and he was a “temple brat.� Apparently “temple brats" were looked down upon by society, so as a child the boy was bullied by the other kids for his stuttering, his looks and his family status. His father dreamed of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion and the son fulfilled his father’s wish by becoming an acolyte at the Golden Pavilion. The Temple and its beauty become an obsession with the young man. Like the delay between him and the world caused by his stuttering, the beauty of the Temple now causes a barrier between him and the world:
“I felt no intimacy with anything in the world except the Golden Temple…�
“Between the girl and myself, between life and myself, there invariably appeared the Golden Temple.�
“When I thought that, whatever happened, the Golden Temple was going to be burned down, unbearable things came quite bearable.�
[image] A major theme is good and evil, structured around two friends who are also temple acolytes while college students. One friend is polite and caring, the other is arrogant, self-centered and abusive toward women. “My small theft [of flowers from the temple garden] had made me feel cheerful. The first things that my contact with [his evil friend] always produced were small acts of immorality, small desecrations, small evils.�
Some other passages I liked:
[On Japanese flower arranging:] “The flowers and leaves, which had formerly existed as they were, had now been transformed into flowers and leaves as they ought to be. �
“Once again I was struck by the fact that mediocrity did not wane in the slightest when people grew old.�
Einstein would like this: “The continuity of our lives is preserved by being surrounded by the solidified substance of time which has lasted for a given period. Take, for example, a small drawer, which the carpenter has made for the convenience of some household. With the passage of time, the actual form of this drawer is surpassed by time itself and, after the decades and centuries have elapsed, it is as though time had become solidified and had assumed that form.�
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Mishima (1925-1970) is one of Japan’s most famous authors. He’s obviously a favorite of mine since I’ve read seven of his books including his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. I highly recommend this book as a classic psychological novel.
Top photo of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion from timeinc.net Buddhist monks in Japan from tokyotimes.com A Japanese flower arrangement from The author from cdn.britannica.com
[Edited for typos 3/12/23] An existential classic from Japan. A lonely young man is an amateur entomologist and schoolteacher. He hopes to find a new s[Edited for typos 3/12/23] An existential classic from Japan. A lonely young man is an amateur entomologist and schoolteacher. He hopes to find a new species of sand beetle, so he goes off on a weekend expedition to a beach town where the houses are buried in pits by the ever-shifting stands. He asks about a place to stay and reaches his night’s lodging with a landlady by descending a rope ladder.
The next day the rope ladder is gone. He discovers he is a prisoner who will be kept there to help the woman, a young widow, with her work. Her work is the daily and endless task of shoveling out buckets of sand that accumulate each night. The sand buckets are pulled up each morning by teams of village men. Food and water come down by rope from the same men. If he stops working, the men hold off food and water.
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It’s considered a modern existential novel, published in Japanese in 1962 and translated into English in 1964. Kafka’s Metamorphosis comes to mind � will he turn into a sand beetle? The woman who lives there seems to have accepted her fate.
Will he try to escape? If so, how? Will his escape be successful?
What kind of relationship will develop between the man and the woman living in such close quarters?
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The author provides many touches of realism with nightmarish details of the sand invading their bodies, their clothes, their food, their water. The roof and walls of the primitive house can’t keep it out.
We also get entomological and geological information. Sand isn’t just a collection of tiny objects that flow and shift: sand involves the flowing and shifting that creates it: form and function; structure and process.
A good story; amazingly, never boring and in some ways a suspense novel. I read it first many years ago and didn't hesitate to read it again. I added it to my favorites.
It occurs to me the book is mistitled because we learn nothing of the inner workings of the mind of the woman. We only see her actions and hear limited conversation from her. An omniscient narrator tells us of the man’s mental anguish and of his philosophical thinking. The book could just as well be titles The Man in the Dunes.
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The author (1924 -1993) was a prolific writer with a dozen novels, almost all translated into English. He wrote a dozen collections of short stories and a dozen plays. Women in the Dunes is by far his most popular work on GR and it was made into a Japanese film in 1964. I have also read his novel Beasts Head for Home and a collection of fantasy/magical realism short stories titled Beyond the Curve. I rated Dunes 5; Curve 4 and Beasts 3.
Top photo, a still from the movie from co.pinterest.com Tottori sand dunes in Japan from japanrailpass.com The author from azquotes.com...more
A ‘classic� classic. Written in 1862, Wikipedia suggests this can be considered the 'first modern Russian novel.' The plot revolves [Edited for typos]
A ‘classic� classic. Written in 1862, Wikipedia suggests this can be considered the 'first modern Russian novel.' The plot revolves around the relationship between two sons and two fathers, meant to show political change in Russia reflecting generational differences. We are told in the introduction that the author deliberately set the time frame of the novel in 1859, shortly before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.
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The fathers are old school, of course, traditional Slavophiles, even though they have both recently adopted some changes that give their serfs some more liberties, such as making some of them wage laborers. But that's not enough for the two sons who are radicals at that time � essentially nihilists. This novel introduced the term nihilism into modern culture.
The two sons are schoolmates at university and they believe in nothing of the established order � family, religion, customs - any established authority. Everything has to prove itself anew. They want to see Russia westernized.
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The older of the two young men is more experienced and world-wise than the younger. The older is really the one espousing radicalism; the younger man idolizes him and agrees with everything he says. Both fathers have the same reactions to their sons: they are shocked but not argumentative. They defer to their sons� level of learning and are awed by them. They expect great things of them, and given the choice to lead, follow, or get out of the way, the fathers choose the last.
The older of the two young men, named Bazarov, is portrayed as egotistical and arrogant. Although Turgenev had relatively liberal views, this book was attacked by both sides in the politics of the time. Reactionaries felt he favored these radical nihilist views by daring to argue them through Bazarov’s mouth. Liberals felt he was making fun of their views by having them expressed by a jerk.
There’s romance. On a visit to a neighboring estate, both men start to fall in love with a young widow. The younger man turns his attention to her younger sister while the older man falls hard for the widow. One of the fathers is embarrassed by having a young female serf as his mistress, although the son has no problem with that relationship.
The plot is as much a love story(ies) as it is a political novel and at times becomes a bit like a soap opera. But we recognize that literary styles have changed since 1860! We are also given a 3-page 'Where are they now' wrap-up that you would not find in a modern novel.
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I enjoyed the book. Not stellar, but a worthwhile read.
Top painting of Russia serfs from beastrabban.files.wordpress.com Russian women pulling a barge from johnknifton.files.wordpress.com The author from lareviewofbooks.org
I don’t usually cite book cover comments from critics in my reviews, but I’ll make an exception for this book by the 1955 Nobel Prize-w[Edited 1/4/21]
I don’t usually cite book cover comments from critics in my reviews, but I’ll make an exception for this book by the 1955 Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author (1902-1998). In the introduction, Brad Leithauser, a poet, novelist and English professor called it (at the time he wrote the introduction) “my favorite book by a living novelist.� Annie Proulx said it was “one of my top ten� and Jane Smiley called it “one of the best books of the twentieth century.�
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The story is about Bjartur, a hard-nosed sheep farmer in Iceland in the early 1900’s. He loves hard work, dawn to dusk. He’s a skinflint and he drives his family as hard as himself � 16 hour days in the summer. He’s obsessed with expanding his herd of sheep and doesn’t believe in debt. So the family survives on porridge and saltfish - and coffee.
They live in a cave-like croft, built partly underground, above the stench of their animals. Bjartur dreams of sheep, but his wives and children dream of food � especially of meat. (It occurs to me that dreaming of food is a stellar mark of poverty. I’m reminded of a story of a young boy who was a Portuguese American immigrant from the Azores � in Home Is an Island by Alfred Lewis - who dreams almost every night of coffee, sugar and white bread.)
Over time he contributes to the deaths of his two wives (in the introduction they are described as “tortuously unhappy�) and drives off his children when they are old enough to leave.
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Perhaps Bjartur has a couple of humanistic qualities but I don’t agree with the writer of the introduction who tells us we develop a kind of grudging admiration for Bjartur’s persistence. (Like we do for the crotchety old man in A Man Called Ove.) I don’t feel that way � I see Bjartur as a thug. It’s true that while he works he recites and formulates poetry. Poetry is part of the Icelandic tradition that has led it to be considered the most literate country in the world. Iceland is where people read the most books per person and publish the most books per capita. How many countries with 350,000 people have a Nobel laureate?
If Bjartur loves anyone, it is his eldest daughter. A childhood incident destroys their mutual affection and he chases her away too. The daughter has a terribly tough life. One year, when she is 15 years old, her father goes away for months to work as a day laborer. (view spoiler)[ She is left in their semi-isolated house in charge of her little brother and the entire farm and animals. (hide spoiler)]
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They live in semi-isolation. We hear of other characters when visitors stop by or when Bjartur goes into town, a day’s journey away. We read of the bailiff’s wife, the wealthiest woman in the area who expresses her admiration for the “independent people� who commune with nature and live such simple and rewarding lives. (There are times when they starve.) We pity her as she struggles with the complexity of her wealthy existence. (‘White people’s problems� in Iceland in the 1900s! lol) There’s a lot of political discussion between Bjartur and the men in town.
I’ll add this to my shelf of ‘environmental novels� � those where the weather and climate (usually harsh) play such a role that it’s almost like another main character.
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Independent People is an intriguing story that kept my attention all the way through. It’s a novel that very successfully inserts us into another time and place. It’s about survival in overwhelmingly harsh physical and mental conditions. Squalor with poetry, humor and irony. And yes, a classic.
To photo: a contemporary farmstead in Iceland from thetravelimages.com Rural farmstead in Iceland around 1900 from digital.library.cornell.edu Modern-day Reykjavik from seabourn.com Icelandic postage stamp honoring the author from hipstamp.com...more
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines [Revised, spoilers hidden 9/12/23]
I think this book deserves to be considered a classic of American literatuA Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines [Revised, spoilers hidden 9/12/23]
I think this book deserves to be considered a classic of American literature about Black-white relations in the American South. Two other books I think of in this category (there are several others) are To Kill a Mockingbird and The Help. None are “great literature� in a literary sense � great writing - but they are popular books and they tell stories that need to be told. For those skeptical about The Help as a classic, consider that it has more than 2 million ratings on GR and 85,000 reviews and that it is assigned reading in high school and college courses. So, despite its lack of literary brilliance, I think it’s inevitable that it will come to be thought of as a classic. Of the three, Gaines� book is the most “genuine,� if I may use that word, because it was written by an African American man who grew up as a son of sharecroppers, picking cotton when he was six years old.
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The story is set among the French Creole population in Louisiana, probably about the time the author was growing up, the Jim Crow era. Some French influence remains in the language from Cajun culture in things like calling their aunt ‘Tante� or their godfather ‘Parain.�
The story starts with Jefferson, a young Black man brought up by his godmother. He’s slow and almost uneducated. One fateful day he takes a ride with two other young Black men who end up in a shootout with a white store clerk. The two Black men and the store clerk all die. Jefferson had nothing to do with it. At his trial, Jefferson’s lawyer points out his ignorance, the ‘lack of slope in his forehead,� and tells the all-white jury “Why, I would as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.� (And Jefferson’s relations understand what the lawyer is trying to do � it’s their only hope.)
Of course, to the all-white jury, the facts in the case are ‘straightforward�: a white man was killed; a Black man was there; he’s sentenced to die in the electric chair. We know all this a few pages into the book. The trial is not the focus of the book � it’s not a John Grisham novel.
The focus of the story now turns to Grant, a young Black man who is the teacher in a run-down school for Black children. He’s one of the few educated Black men in town; folks call him ‘professor.� We learn about the school. It’s a public school even though it’s housed in an old church. Grant is the only teacher for six grades. They use worn-out books with missing pages discarded by white students. Kids bring in wood to heat the building in winter. The students kneel in front of the pews to use the seats as desks.
Grant’s parents live in California so he lives with his aunt, the best friend of Jefferson’s godmother. Jefferson’s godmother has one wish before her godson’s execution: that Grant do whatever he can to can to get Jefferson to die like a man and not 'like a hog.'
Grant is reluctant and has no idea how to approach this task during the few months of life Jefferson has left. Grant is educated but agnostic, so the godmother also asks her elderly minister to intervene with Jefferson. It becomes almost a competition between the men: when Jefferson goes to his execution, ‘will he kneel or will he stand�?
Grant and the minister have their work cut out for them: Jefferson is in a stupor, refusing to talk, even to greet visitors nor eat the food his godmother lovingly prepares for him. He says he’s a hog and will die like one. The story line is helped along with a love interest � Grant and a female teacher in a neighboring town.
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A lot of the story is a catalog of how whites of that era treated Blacks. (view spoiler)[ Grant and his aunt need to see a rich white man that his aunt used to work for. They have to ask the rich man for help to get the sheriff to allow Grant and the minister to visit the cell. They enter through the back door and wait for an hour in the kitchen, talking to the cook and maid. When they get into the white man’s office, even the elderly aunt is not offered a chair. The same happens when they talk to the sheriff. Grant buys a radio for Jefferson from a white clerk; he has to argue with her to get a radio that comes in a box rather than the display model. She makes him wait a half hour while she chats with other white people. (hide spoiler)]
Grant talks with a group of white men: “I tried to decide just how I should respond to them. Whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be.� Language is the key. He takes the high road in talking of his aunt and says “…she doesn’t feel that …� The white man says: “She doesn’t, huh?”…He emphasized ‘doesn’t.� I was supposed to have said ‘don’t.� I was being too smart.�
Are all white people like that? No, one is not. Just one: a young white deputy at the jail who is friendly toward Grant and Jefferson and who tries to help them out with the various obstacles the sheriff puts in their way and with the indignities of searches when they arrive at the jail.
Nor are Blacks immune from racism. (view spoiler)[ Grant tells us of mulatto men, half Black, half white, who look down on the ‘niggers� who do field work, like sugar cane cutting. They will only work in bricklaying or carpentry. Grant visits an elderly Black teacher who was a mentor to him and notes that his wife judges the quality of her husband’s visitors by the darkness of their skin � Grant's skin color is suspect. The teacher is a cynic and thinks Grant is wasting his life by staying in this hellhole instead of leaving. He says to Grant: “I am superior to any man blacker than me.� And, if Grant stays, “[they’ll] make you the nigger you were born to be.� (hide spoiler)]
Jefferson keeps a diary in his primitive writing. Those eight pages of misspelled words written without capitalization or punctuation near the end of the book have to be included in any anthology of the saddest things ever written. It’s a real tear-jerker.
As I wrote earlier. I consider this book a classic. I’m giving it a �5� and adding it to my favorites. I wish I had read it sooner.
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As a child, the author (1933-2019) lived the impoverished life he wrote about, literally growing up in old slave quarters on a plantation. In his novels he used his background to create the fictional world of Bayonne in St. Raphael Parish, Louisiana. While A Lesson Before Dying is his most-read work, the general public may know him better for the TV movie made from one of his other works, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, modeled on his aunt who raised him. A Lesson Before Dying was also made into an HBO movie.
Top photo: French Creole people from frenchcreoles.com Photo of a shack that was a home, still standing on the plantation where the author grew up. From myneworleans.com The author from diverseeducation.com...more
A semi-autobiographical story of an ambulance driver in Italy, France and Spain in World War I. (Other pOne Man’s Initiation: 1917 by John Dos Passos
A semi-autobiographical story of an ambulance driver in Italy, France and Spain in World War I. (Other pacifist ambulance drivers in WW I included Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, and W. Somerset Maugham.) The author was a pacifist and he wrote up the carnage in an under-stated, matter of fact style. “Through the trees from which they lay they could see the close-packed wooden crosses of the cemetery from which came the sound of spaded earth, and where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeled carts piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up and unloaded and dragged away again.�
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There is constant butchery, constant gunfire and shelling and gas attacks. Those who don’t get to their masks in time choke to death after five days of agony. This is the trench warfare of WW I. He sees men in masks who have lost faces and jaws, wounded with stomachs missing. A wounded man with PTSD tries to stab those who are helping him. The wounded in the ambulance groan in unison when the vehicle hits a pothole.
The carnage alternates with bouts of idleness when the men drink, play cards and talk about women. They spend time in a bombed-out monastery where they pore over shreds and shards of beautifully illustrated books.
Some passages I liked:
“…Curious how many shells can explode around one’s very head without doing any damage…� “…the Liberals cover their heads with their robes of integrity and wail, wail, wail � God I’m tied of waiting. I want to assassinate.�
“God, it’s so stupid. Why can’t we go over and talk to them? Nobody’s fighting about anything…God, it’s so hideously stupid.�
This book was Dos Passos’s first work. The edition I read (Cornell University Press, 1969) is the complete and corrected version approved by the author in later years. We are told in a publisher’s note that earlier editions were censored without the author’s knowledge or permission and typesetting errors were made.
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It’s time for a John Dos Passos revival! Initially he was more read and more famous than his buddy, Ernest Hemingway. They hung out with other authors in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Dos Passos was most famous first for the staccato-like style of Manhattan Transfer and later for his U.S.A trilogy: The 42nd Parallel (1930); 1919 (1931), and The Big Money 1936.
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How famous was he? Jean Paul Sartre referred to Dos Passos as "the greatest writer of our time.� Norman Mailer called the trilogy perhaps the Great American Novel. However Dos Passos fell out of favor with liberals when he changed his politics from radical left to right. He went from serving on a committee to defend Trotsky to supporting Nixon and Goldwater. This shift in politics (and Dos Passos� fame) were largely why his friendship with Hemingway ended. Anyway I read most of the Trilogy years ago and intend to read more of Dos Passos� work.
His father immigrated from Madeira so the author is Portuguese American. At that time about half of Provincetown was Portuguese. I recall reading in Virginia Carr’s biography of Dos Passos that he and Hemingway hired an old Portuguese man as a handyman who also procured booze for them during Prohibition. They called him their “boy.�
Top photo: ambulances in WW I from alamy.com Dos Passos (r) and Hemingway from publicradiotulsa.org Dos Passos' house at 571 Commercial St. in Provincetown from buildingprovincetown.files.wordpress.com...more
This is a classic Russian science-fiction dystopian novel published in 1924 that influenced many subsequent books such as 1984 and Br[Edited 12/18/22]
This is a classic Russian science-fiction dystopian novel published in 1924 that influenced many subsequent books such as 1984 and Brave New World, and authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and Ayn Rand. According to Wiki “We is generally considered to be the grandfather of the satirical futuristic dystopia genre.�
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The book had to be published outside of the USSR because under Stalin the author ended up first imprisoned, and later exiled to France. In an Introduction, Foreword and Preface we are told that the book emphasizes the “insidious pressures for conformity� in the new Russia.
People of the United State are called ‘Numbers,� which they all wear on the chests of their 'unifs' as they walk around four abreast. They all wake up at the same time and leave work at the same time. They have a ‘personal hour� and sexual days. They live in high-rise glass cubicles, with curtains.
They attend compulsory meetings in auditoriums where they sing hymns to the state and hear from the ‘Well-Dooer� on a big screen. They have to vote for him each year on the Day of Unanimity.
Everyone eats petroleum-based food. Rare resisters are punished by the offender being placed in a machine that dissolves him into water. A ‘Green Wall� separates the urban area from the remaining wild world outside.
The main character is an engineer involved in building a spaceship to conquer other planets. He finds a lover who is involved with a small group of potential rebels. But ‘lover� is a bad word because the system does not allow love or permanent pairings � just hookups.
A corrupt doctor gives the man and his alcohol and nicotine and they find a secret way of getting to the outside world beyond the wall. The main character starts thinking about his soul and about having a child. The rebellion may be spreading but at the same time, the state is introducing a new required lobotomy-type operation to nip this in the bud.
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Why a rating of 3? This book has been in my TBR for years but I’ll be honest and say I’m not a fan of sci-fi or dystopian novels. The author uses math terms in symbolic ways that don’t help the story along. The dialog seemed herky-jerky to me at times and some of the plot I thought was confusing. Still I’m glad I read it!
Top image: Le Corbusier’s 1924 plan for Paris envisaged razing the city from Montmartre to the Seine to build 18 giant skyscrapers. From thetimes.co.uk Sketch of the author from Wikipedia...more
Wiki calls the book the most widely read book in modern African literature.
Written in 1958, this is the classic African novel about ho[Edited 4/1/22]
Wiki calls the book the most widely read book in modern African literature.
Written in 1958, this is the classic African novel about how colonialism impacted and undermined traditional African culture. It’s set among the Igbo people of Nigeria (aka Ibos). A key phrase is found late in the book: “He [the white man] has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.�
The main character is a strong man, the village wrestling champion. He has three wives and many children, although the wealthiest man in the village has nine wives, thirty children and three barns. The main character is not above beating his wives when the spirit moves him. He seems ruled by anger and fear.
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There’s not a lot of plot. We watch as the main character struggles at first to become established. There are some bad crop years but all in all, things go reasonably well. Then he accidentally kills a fellow tribesman and suffers the punishment imposed by the village elders of being banished from the village for seven years. He loses his land and his accumulated wealth and has to go back to his mother’s village, dreaming of his return. When he does return, white rule has extended its influence into his village and everything has changed.
The British have brought greater prosperity, a school and a clinic but at a tremendous cost, mainly by imposing their laws and legal system above the traditional rule by village elders. A Christian church has been built and many villagers are leaving the old gods and converting to the new religion, including one of the main character’s sons.
There is no return to the old ways. Retaliation by the whites is swift. In a nearby village men killed a white man driving a car (they had never seen a car before). In retaliation, soldiers came and machine-gunned the marketplace � men, women, children; basically annihilating the village.
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Much of the book is anthropological. We learn about the village councils, a priestess, crop cultivation, food preparation, and all the elaborate rituals around bride price negotiations, weddings, funerals and the traditional gods.
I liked many of the idioms and proverbs scattered throughout the text:
“There must be a reason for it. A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.�
“An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.�
“Eneke the bird says that since men have learned how to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.�
“As a man danced, so the drums were beaten for him.�
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The author (1930-2013) was raised as a Christian, went to college in Nigeria, became a journalist, and started writing. With his fame he eventually moved to the US as a professor at Brown University. He turned the book into a trilogy, adding No Longer at Ease in 1960 and then Arrow of God in 1964. The author is also known for a famous academic paper attacking Joseph Conrad as “a thoroughgoing racist."
A good read and classic.
Top: old photo of the (also Igbos) from diaryofanegress.com Modern-day family Igbo family from hometown.ng Photo of the author in 2008 from Wikipedia....more
Proust! Memories! Almost 5,000 reviews so I thought I would simply give examples of his writing if you have not read him before. Beauti[Edited 4/2/23]
Proust! Memories! Almost 5,000 reviews so I thought I would simply give examples of his writing if you have not read him before. Beautiful writing, lyrical, complex, maybe even occasionally convoluted.
First the famous passage about madeleines:
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“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of a little piece of the madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seems such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks� windows, that their image had disassociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.�
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An example of detailed description � Swann’s woman friend:
“It must be remarked that Odette’s face appeared thinner and sharper than it actually was, because the forehead and the upper part of the cheeks, that smooth and almost plane surface, were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period drawn forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray locks over the ears; while as for her figure � and she was admirably built � it was impossible to make out its continuity (on account of the fashion then prevailing, and in spite of her being one of the best-dressed women in Paris) so much did the corsage, jutting out as though over an imaginary stomach and ending in a sharp point, beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, give a woman the appearance of being composed of different sections badly fitted together; to such an extent that the frills, the flounces, the inner bodice follow quite independently, according to the whim of their designer or the consistency of their material, the line which led them to the bows, the festoons of lace, the fringes of dangling jet beads, or carried them along the busk, but nowhere attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the architecture of these fripperies drew them towards or away from her own, found herself either straight-laced to suffocation or else completely buried.�
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A passage I liked: “But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so when she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defense, unconfident of success, she felt like weeping from sheer exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. Moreover she knew that her lie was usually wounding to the man to whom she was telling it, and that she might find herself at his mercy if she told badly. Therefore she felt at once humble and guilty in his presence. And when she had to tell an in significant social lie its hazardous associations, and the memories which it recalled, would leave her weak with a sense of exhaustion and penitent with a consciousness of wrongdoing.�
An example of what I think of as his occasional complex writing:
[As a small boy when the main character’s love and another girl are talking near him about meeting again that evening]: “The name Gilberte passed close by me, invoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labeled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the proximity of its target; - carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called it out, everything that, as she uttered the words, she recalled, or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let it brush past me without my being able to penetrate it, who flung in on the air with a light-hearted cry; - wafting through the air the exquisite emanation which it had distilled…�
Enjoy!
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Note: Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, was originally published in seven volumes. There are more than a hundred editions and volumes have alternate names in English, such as The Prisoner vs. The Captive. Wikipedia gives a good summary of all the pieces and the sequence of volumes under “In Search of Lost Time.�
Photos: Proust's imagined village in Normandy, strongly inspired by the village of his childhood, Illiers, which has now been renamed Illiers-Combray (shown in photo). From Wikipedia
Second photo: madeleines from finedininglovers.com
Painting of the woman who partially inspired Odette from Wikipedia
If you read this, you need to know what you are signing up for, so, below, I’ll let Pessoa speak for himself. It’s a series of vignettes, random thougIf you read this, you need to know what you are signing up for, so, below, I’ll let Pessoa speak for himself. It’s a series of vignettes, random thoughts and meditations all written between 1913 and 1935.
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It’s a work of genius, of course. Pessoa, the famous Portuguese writer and poet was known for his multiple writing personalities (heteronyms). Disquiet was supposedly written by Bernardo Soares, an excruciatingly lonely and socially dysfunctional man. He’s a shipping clerk at a textile wholesaling firm and spends his entire life a few blocks from his tiny apartment with one window on a balcony. He goes to the same restaurant, same tobacconist and same barber for thirty years. All of them die one by one in their 70s, which he only discovers by going into their shop and finding out they died the day before. The first two passages below show some of his severe social issues.
“Moreover, I am bothered by the idea of being forced into contact with someone. A simple invitation to dine with a friend provokes in me an anguish it would be hard to define. The idea of any social obligation � going to a funeral, discussing an office matter face-to-face with someone, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know - the mere idea disturbs a whole day’s thoughts. Sometimes I am concerned all through the night and sleep badly. And the real thing, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant, justifying nothing; and the thing repeats itself and I don’t ever learn to learn.�
“Sometimes saying hello to someone intimidates me. My voice dries up, as if there were a strange audacity in having to say that word out loud.�
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“There are metaphors that are more real than the people walking down the street. There are images in the secret corners of books that live more clearly than many men and women. There are literary phrases that possess an absolutely human individuality. There are passages in paragraphs of mine that chill me with fear, so clearly do I feel them to be people, standing alone so freely from the walls of my room, at night, in shadows…�
“Yes, dreaming that I am, for example, simultaneously, separately, unconfusedly, a man and a woman taking a walk along a riverbank, To see myself, at the same time, with equal clarity, in the same way, with no mixing, being the two things, integrated equally in both, a conscious boat in a southern sea and a printed page in an ancient book. How absurd this seems! But everything is absurd, and this dream is the least of the absurdities.�
“There is nothing that reveals poverty of mind more quickly than not knowing how to be witty except at the expense of others.�
“I go forward slowly, dead, and my vision is no longer mine, it’s nothing: it’s only the vision of the human animal who, without wanting, inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christin morality, and all the other illusions that constitute the civilization in which I feel.�
“In the dark depth of my soul, invisible, unknown forces were locked in a battle in which my being was the battleground, and all of me trembled because of the unknown struggle. A physical nausea at all of life was born when I awakened. A horror at having to live rose up with me from the bed. Everything seemed empty, and I had the cold impression that there is no solution for any problem.�
“Ennui is not the illness of the boredom of not having anything to do, but the more serious illness of feeling that it’s not worthwhile doing anything. And being that way, the more there is to do, the more ennui there is to feel.�
“How many times, how many, as now, has it pained me to feel what I am feeling � to feel something like anguish only because that’s what feeling is, the disquiet of being here, the nostalgia for something else, something unknown, the sunset of all emotions, the yellowing of myself fading into ashy sadness in my external awareness of myself.�
“During certain very clear moments of meditation, like these in which, at the beginning of the afternoon, I wander observingly through the streets, every person brings me a message, every house shows me something new, every sign has an announcement for me.�
“Sometimes, with a sad delight, I think that if some day, in a future to which I may not belong, these words I’m writing will endure and receive praise, I will finally have people who ‘understand� me, my people, the true family to be born into and to be loved by. But far from being born into it, I will have already died a long time before. I will be understood only in effigy, when affection no longer compensates the dead person for the disaffection he experienced when alive.�
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“I consider life an inn where I have to stop over until the coach from the abyss arrives. I don’t know where it will take me because I don’t know anything. I could consider this inn a prison because I’m force to stay inside it; I could consider it a place for socializing because I meet others here…I slowly sing, only to myself, songs that I compose as I wait.�
“Everything is emptier than the void�.If I think this and look around to see if reality is killing me with thirst, I see inexpressive houses, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stone, bodies, ideas � everything’s dead. All movements are stopping points, all of them the same stopping point. Nothing says anything to me. Nothing is familiar to me, not because I find it strange but because I don’t know what it is. The world is lost. And in the depth of my soul � the only reality at this moment � there is an intense, invisible anguish, a sadness, like the sound of someone weeping in a dark room.�
Not an easy or a pleasant read, but genius.
Top painting from Sculpture of Pessoa in Lisbon from alamy.com Photo of Lisbon in 1940 from atlaslisboa.com
A short review because I can’t add much to the thousands of reviews that are out there.
The story takes [Edited for typos and pictures added 12/11/21]
A short review because I can’t add much to the thousands of reviews that are out there.
The story takes place at an elite all-boys New England prep school. (A thinly disguised Phillips Exter Academy in New Hampshire that the author attended.) The two main characters are opposites in many ways: an introverted, intellectual Southern boy and a Northerner who is outgoing, athletic, a risk-taker. The latter is a natural leader among the boys but he struggles with his studies. They become fast friends (view spoiler)[but impulsive horse-play leads to the death of one of the boys. (hide spoiler)]
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So it’s a male-bonding, loss of innocence, coming of age story set just before World War II, when the threat of the draft hangs over all the boys. One of the secondary characters is drafted and comes back psychologically wrecked.
I did not have to read this in high school as many folks did. It has a relatively low rating on GR: a 3.6 based on more than 150,000 GR ratings. That’s pretty low for a “classic.� In perusing reviews by others I am struck by how often someone leads off with “I hated this book� or “I loathed this book.� Maybe because it was required reading? LOL. Why out of thousands of books out there do we make millions of kids read this one?
Coincidentally, at about the same time that I was reading A Separate Peace, I also happened to be reading Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, and I was struck by the similarities between the two: male bonding, coming of age (but at an elite college instead of a prep school); a war and the draft hanging over them (WW I for Fitzgerald; WW II for the prep school boys).
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Good, but not great: I gave it a �3.�
Top photo of Phillips Exeter from businessinsider.com The author (1926-2001) from fairmontstate.edu...more
Virginia Woolf set out to write an unconventional novel and succeeded, although since she wrote, we have read so many u[Revised, pictures add 4/24/22]
Virginia Woolf set out to write an unconventional novel and succeeded, although since she wrote, we have read so many unconventional novels that it seems tame. In her introduction to the edition I read, Maureen Howard writes: “If ever there was a work conceived in response to the state of the novel, a consciously modern novel, it is Mrs. Dalloway.�
Woolf may have been influenced by Ulysses because all the action occurs in one day. Church bells mark significant events. In turn this marking of the day influenced The Hours, a book based on Woolf’s life, by Michael Cunningham.
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But unlike in Joyce’s work, this is not an ordinary day. True, it centers on what we would now call a cocktail party � Mrs. Dalloway lived for those and hosted them frequently � but it’s also the day when a former flame of hers (the fire on his part, not hers) returns from five years in India. And it’s also a day when one of the characters we follow commits suicide. His doctor arrives at the party and announces this to everyone as soon as he’s inside the door � now there’s a downer!
Through her reflections and that of several other characters we learn the details of Mrs. Dalloway’s life. She’s 52, pale, a bit sickly, attractive enough but not beautiful. We learn of her husband, a nice man, a government bureaucrat whose career has peaked � he will never be a Minister.
Mrs. Dalloway worries about her husband having lunch today with another woman friend of hers - Mrs. Dalloway was not invited; that’s unusual. Of her daughter, she worries that she is being “unduly influenced� by the religion of her female tutor (Catholicism we assume?). And of course she worries about meeting the old flame. He still loves her after 30 years, a marriage and various affairs. True love or arrested development?
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The book, published in 1925, is also a time capsule of daily life in London in the early post-WW I years. It’s a time when horses are still being replaced by cars. As we follow her around town in her preparations we see the hustle and bustle of the city, the grocers, the shop girls, the crazies in the park.
A good book. It makes you think about life and death. You can’t ask for more than that. Her language is also fun. When is the last time you were “whelmed?� Not overwhelmed � just plain old whelmed? What’s a Holland bag? In the discussion below we finally figured out that it is a cloth bag to cover a chandelier to prevent it from getting dusty.
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Top photo of 1930s cocktail party from pompandwhiskey.com Hyde Park in the 1920s from pinterest.com.au The author (1882-1941) from lithub.com ...more
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