Monthly Archives: October 2007

Happy Halloween everyone! I’m sitting in my living room armchair, a place I rarely sit, so I can hop up and answer the door in case kids are out trick-or-treating. This is the extent of my Halloween celebrations, I’m afraid.

So, I finished Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood last week and have decided to go ahead and read it again right away. My response to the first reading was a mixture of awe and bewilderment. The plot is simple to follow, so it was not the plot that bewildered me, but there is not much plot anyway; rather, it’s the things the characters were saying that I sometimes had trouble following. But their speeches were beautiful and in the moments when meaning broke through, I found myself moved.

I learned pretty quickly I couldn’t read and re-read passages until I understood them perfectly, because that moment didn’t always come; instead, I read slowly and figured out what I could, and kept going even if I didn’t get everything. I did this partly because I knew I’d mostly likely be reading the book again, but also because trying to figure everything out would lead to frustration. I think this is the kind of book where you can read for mood and atmosphere and for the beauty of the language as much as you read for logical meaning.

Here’s a typical passage, a speech from one of the most important characters, the doctor:

Suppose your heart were five feet across in any place, would you break it for a heart no bigger than a mouse’s mute? Would you hurl yourself into any body of water, in the size you now are, for any woman that you had to look for with a magnifying glass, or any boy if he was as high as the Eiffel Tower or did droppings like a fly? No, we all love in sizes, yet we all cry out in tiny voices to the great booming God, the older we get. Growing old is just a matter of throwing life away back; so you finally forgive even those that you have not begun to forget.

I’m not entirely sure what this passage means, but I do like it. The book it not entirely made up of passages like this one; it also has plenty of dialogue and narration that’s easier to follow. The novel tells the story of a group of characters, following them through many years as they wander around, fall in love, marry in some cases, break up, despair, talk it over, despair, talk it over, etc. There’s the doctor, who has most of the eloquent, poetic speeches, who doesn’t seem to do much but talk to the other characters. There’s Baron Felix, who marries Robin Vote, who then leaves him to pursue Nora Flood and then leaves her to pursue Jenny. The conversations that come out of all this loving and leaving are more important than the actions themselves — the book is really about the sense that the characters make of what happens to them.

I do not at all feel as though I have a handle on this book, but perhaps after a second reading, I’ll get more of it. Perhaps I’ll look up some critical work as well.

Last night Hobgoblin took a group of students to see the play version of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw at a local theater, and I went along. I’d read the novella in college and wrote a paper on it even, so I knew the basic story, although I’d forgotten a lot of the details. I was curious to see how they would handle the uncertainty and ambiguity of the action — was the governess crazy or was she not? Were the ghosts real?

The director chose an intriguing method of staging the story. There were only two actors, a man and a woman; the woman played the governess, of course, and the man, Tom Beckett, played the master, the children’s uncle; Miles, one of the two children the governess is charged with; and Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper. He also functioned as a narrator from time to time, filling the audience in some of the background details. Flora, the other child, was played by no one; the other characters simply pretended she was there, and so turned her into a ghostly presence — or absence — on stage. The set was very simple too, only an old armchair, a spiral staircase, and wisps of smoke.

The effect was claustrophobic, in a way that suited the story perfectly. The two actors seemed to be descending into a nightmare, battling each other — even as Beckett switched into different characters — and at war within themselves too. They were stuck in a small space that never changed and where no one new ever appeared. All they could do was retreat into their minds or lash out at one another. It’s the perfect set-up for a ghost story: a creepy atmosphere, some eccentric characters, an isolated location, and no means of escape.

Beckett did a brilliant job switching from one role to another; he would change his accent, posture, and body language and transform himself from a 10-year old boy into a middle-aged housekeeper instantly.

I appreciated all this intellectually, but I must say that at times I found myself bored. I never quite lost myself in the story. I’m not sure if it simply wasn’t the right night for me to see a play — I was tired and distracted — or if there was something else going on. I wonder if The Turn of the Screw isn’t best experienced on the page after all. For me, at least, the play was both too visual and not visual enough. Seeing the governess descend into hysterics, hearing her ranting and raving, I was pushed away from the story instead of drawn into it. Something subtle and delicate from James’s novel was lost. And at the same time, I wanted more to look at. I have enjoyed plays where not much happens but people standing around and talking, but in those cases the dialogue was brilliant, and in last night’s performance, it wasn’t particularly. I suppose what I was missing was the voice of the narrator from James’s novella; it’s her voice that created the mood for me, and without it, the story lost some of its interest.

But, at any rate, even if I did get a bit bored, on some level I enjoy any experience that makes me think, which the performance certainly did. And I was thrilled to see Hobgoblin’s student Hepzibah, who is always so much fun to talk to. It was my first visit to this local theater, too, and I’ll make sure I return again soon.

I’m writing this the night before the Booker winner will be announced, and I’m curious to see if McEwan will win for On Chesil Beach. I haven’t read any of the other books on the short list, so I can’t compare, but I do think McEwan probably shouldn’t win. (See Eve’s Alexandria for a very good run-down of the possibilities.) It’s a very good book, don’t get me wrong, but it would be a pretty boring choice — McEwan is so popular and well-known.

People have argued that he shouldn’t win because it’s such a short and slight book, and I don’t know how I feel about this argument. A part of me agrees, and another part of me thinks, what’s wrong with short? And do I really agree that it’s slight? I’m not sure books have to have large, grand themes and to say something about politics and history or whatever, to be good books. Why can’t somebody write a really excellent book about a wedding night gone wrong? And who’s to say a book about a wedding night gone wrong couldn’t have something significant to say about history and culture? And even if it doesn’t, does that matter? Does every great work of literature have to deal with “large” or “broad” or “grand”?

I’m reminded of Jonathan Coe’s essay on Virago Modern Classics and women writers where he argues that On Chesil Beach is a book dealing with stereotypically women’s subjects — emotions, love, and sex — but is, of course, written by a man and therefore is an example of how writers are undermining gender stereotypes. Here’s what Coe says:

Most of the new writers who have broken through to critical acclaim and big readerships in recent years have been women: Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Ali Smith, Lionel Shriver, Marina Lewycka, Sarah Waters and Susanna Clarke, among others. And these writers are, for the most part, writing big, historically and politically engaged novels, not voyaging in “an exclusively emotional and sexual sea” – a phrase that might rather be applied (accurately, but non-pejoratively) to a novel like Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. In 2007, it’s Graham Swift who writes a novel focused entirely on the domestic and familial (Tomorrow), while writers such as Rose Tremain and Marina Lewycka examine the plight of low-paid migrant workers in the modern British economy. The old clichés about what distinguishes male writing from female writing no longer stand up to scrutiny.

I wonder, though, what would happen to On Chesil Beach if it were written by a woman. Would it get dismissed by readers, maybe even by more readers than at present, for being minor and slight? Would it be seen as women’s fiction and not of interest to men? Would it get on the Booker prize short list? Or, suppose it were written by someone, male or female, less well-known and popular than McEwan — would it get much attention?

I guess I’d like to think, along with Coe, that our understanding of what constitutes “male” and “female” writing is changing, but I wonder if it’s really true. I rather doubt it.

I haven’t yet written exactly what I thought of the book itself; perhaps I’ll save that for another post.

When Litlove suggested I read Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (the Booker prize winner from 1987), I made sure to mooch a copy right away. And I was right to do so; I finished it the other day and enjoyed every minute of it. I read her novel The Photograph a little while ago and liked it quite a lot, so I knew I would be in good hands. She has a quiet, understated way of writing that can work magic on you and leave you moved and wanting more.

Moon Tiger tells the story of Claudia, a woman on her deathbed dying of cancer. She is now looking back over her life, thinking about the things she has done and the people she has known. She thinks about how her life has intersected with historical events and she contemplates history itself — how its narrative gets created and how individuals fit within that narrative. She claims she is writing a history of the world, although it’s clear that this book will never get written, but this is the way she prefers to face death — with a project in mind and work to be done. Her history of the world will be a magnificent book, she hopes, one that will take in the large sweeps of history and somehow have space for her own story. Her view of history is unabashedly personal (the plural “you” in this passage are the English pilgrims to America):

You are public property — the received past. But you are also private; my view of you is my own, your relevance to me is personal. I like to reflect on the wavering tenuous line that runs from you to me, that leads from your shacks at Plymouth Plantation to me, Claudia, hopping the Atlantic courtesy of PanAm and TWA and BA to visit my brother in Harvard. This, you see, is the point of all this. Egocentric Claudia is once again subordinating history to her own puny existence. Well — don’t we all?

She concludes that the pilgrims weren’t entirely wrong when they claimed to know there’s such a thing as eternal life; heaven may not exist, but those pilgrims continue to live on in her mind, gaining their eternity through the attention we still pay them.

The book has a lot of this sort of philosophical rumination, but it also has a good story to tell. Lively introduces us to members of Claudia’s family: her brother, Gordon, with whom she has an unusually close relationship; her daughter, Lisa, who seems not to understand Claudia very well (and vice versa); and her long-time although often-estranged lover Jasper. No one quite understands why the brilliant, beautiful Claudia has devoted so much time to this man, but Claudia merely shrugs and talks about the mysteries of love and attraction. These family members drift in and out of Claudia’s hospital room, and Lively uses their entrances and exits as opportunities to tell their stories.

[Some spoilers here, but I’m not giving away anything that’s not on the back cover.] Lurking behind all these relationships is a secret Claudia has kept for many years; during World War II, while she was working as a war correspondent in Egypt, she met and fell in love with Tom, a young and dashing soldier. They had an intense love affair that ended abruptly and tragically. Claudia has never really recovered, and the psychic damage caused by this failure to recover accounts for some of what appears mysterious to her family and friends. It helps explain her attachment to Jasper, the man who will in no way threaten Tom’s place in her memories. But there are other secrets, too, deeper and darker ones, and Claudia eventually is revealed to the reader as a much more complex being than anyone in her life can recognize, perhaps even herself.

Lively uses a shifting point of view; the narrative is told at times in the first person with Claudia speaking and at times in the third person, focused on Claudia mostly, but also getting into the consciousness of some of the other characters, especially Lisa. This constant shifting could come to seem awkward if Lively weren’t so expert at using the shifts to capture the different ways people perceive the same event. She’ll sometimes tell the same scene from different characters’ perspectives, or from an interior and then exterior perspective, and the scene will be slightly different, a phrase or two added or taken away, an emphasis altered and the meaning changed. She’s getting at the idea that how we choose to tell our story shapes the story itself. There are no meaningful facts outside a story told by a particular person in a particular way. This holds true for the narrative of history as well; to study history is to study the manifold ways people have told the story of humanity over time.

I can see why this novel won the Booker, and I hope to read even more work by Lively — has anyone read anything of hers besides the two I mention here?

I have begun reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, and I can already tell I’m going to need to read it again. I’m considering reading it again immediately after I finish the first time around, although I’ll wait to see how I feel when I get there. It’s a short book, 150 pages with large font, and I’ve already read about 45.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of it or even how to describe my difficulty knowing what to make of it. Perhaps quoting the opening line is the best thing to do:

Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin in which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms — gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken.

Yes, that gives you a taste of what it’s like to read this book. The prose is exquisitely well-crafted; I love how this sentence slowly winds its way around to its point, taking in along the way all kinds of information about Hedvig, who turns out not to be a character in the book at all, but is important, perhaps, for the way she sets the tone and gives us information about what kind of person that son will be — who is a character in the book.

The pace of the book is both fast and slow; after two chapters a lot of events have occurred — that son has grown up and now has a child of his own — but the narrator also lingers over conversations at length, allowing the character called “the doctor,” although I don’t think he really is one, to go on and on. I’m not always sure exactly what he’s saying. The characters seem a little like Hedvig, larger than life, not quite real, and fascinating.

You see why I’m going to have to read this book again? It’s not coming together for me in the way books usually do by the time I’m nearly 1/3 of the way through. But this book strikes me as good enough to spend some time with, trying to figure it out.

I finished! I’m sorry Walter Scott, I really tried. I wanted to like this book; I was patient and gave it time to get better after a slow start. I kept hoping and hoping that the action would pick up, the characters become more meaningful — and more comprehensible — the romances would get more interesting, but it never happened for me. Well, Walter Scott, you obviously have done quite well enough without my approval; you’ve got so many books in print after nearly 200 years, and you have lots of readers, including, as a matter of fact, my father, who reads every book of yours he can find. You don’t really need me.

I wish, though, that you had toned down those accents a bit. Baron Bradwardine was so nearly impossible to follow. His high-flown diction and his Latin phrases mixed in everywhere drove me crazy. The problem is, I stopped trying to figure him out after a while. I could follow the action without understanding every word he said, and so it turned out not to be worth my while to decipher his language. Couldn’t he have talked just a bit more normally?

I found myself having a hard time caring about any of the characters too. They were all types, not real people. Edward was foolish, though not irremediably so; clearly he was going to have to learn a lesson, but, also clearly, he would prove himself capable of doing so. Rose was the perfect young heroine, beautiful, modest, capable but not overly smart. It was crystal clear to me after I encountered her what her fate would be. And the same for Flora and Fergus, the Scottish siblings — there wasn’t much doubt what would happen to them. Both of them fascinate Edward, tempt him, lure him into questionable things, but both of them would ultimately prove themselves too dangerous. There was no suspense! Nothing to keep my interest for very long. And I’m generally very bad at predicting the endings of books. When I can figure it out, you’re in trouble.

And here’s another thing I don’t get: you’re Scottish, right? Why portray Scotland and the Scottish people as unstable and dangerous, and the English as the bastions of safety and normality and order? Why exoticize the Scottish? They lure Edward into all kinds of danger and you portray his attraction to them as understandable but flawed and a weakness he needs to outgrow. Well, okay, let me revise this — you’re really portraying the Highlanders as exotic and dangerous. The Lowlanders are merely odd. So am I supposed to see the Lowlanders as roughly aligned with the English in their “normalcy” and the Highlanders as the dangerous other? I’m not sure I like this.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t read other books of yours. I’m curious about why you were so popular, and I don’t feel I understand it yet. What was it about Waverley that fascinated people so much? Those Highlanders are kind of romantic and thrilling, but, still, even there I thought you could do a better job describing them and their lives. Anyway, maybe I’ll try Ivanhoe next. I’m willing to give you one more shot.