Monthly Archives: May 2008

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford is a delightful novel, although calling it a “novel” doesn’t seem quite right, as it’s really more a series of sketches which only eventually settle into a conventional plot. It tells the story of a place, the small, isolated town of Cranford, more than it tells the stories of people’s lives, although it does plenty of that too. Cranford is old-fashioned, peaceful, beyond the reach of fads and fashions, and seemingly unchanging, although, of course, new people do arrive now and then, and people grow up, get married (or more often don’t), and grow old, as people must. Hardly anyone does any traveling, and London is portrayed as a far-away exotic place, different in all respects from Cranford, and by no means an object of anyone’s desire. People in Cranford like their lives and don’t see any need to try to make them any better.

As the very first sentence points out, the town is dominated by women:

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women.

To call these women “amazons” hardly seems right, as they are by no means warrior-like or fierce. But they do keep their town going, establishing their own customs and habits — their clothes are forever out of date and their social rules different from other places — and they take care of each other, at least when they aren’t involved in petty feuds about such things as whether Samuel Johnson is a more worthy author than Charles Dickens.

The book is not all about the town on a general level, though; it starts that way, and then moves into the lives of particular characters. There is the narrator, first of all, who doesn’t live permanently in Cranford, but visits friends there frequently. We never discover much about her life, except that she has never traveled beyond the bounds of Cranford and her hometown. She makes a good narrator for the novel, as the inhabitants of Cranford ask her to visit whenever anything exciting happens, after which she heads home again, a circumstance which allows Gaskell to skip around in time at will, just giving us the good bits without having to fill in the rest or make awkward transitions from one time period to another. The novel is told in the first person, and the narrator’s voice is quiet and contemplative, as it should be to portray a place such as Cranford properly, but it is also sensitive to the humorous aspects of Cranford, and now and then gently ironic, showing the reader how odd and charming the place can be, but never criticizing or complaining about it. There were moments when I laughed out loud at some of the narrator’s observations.

There is also Miss Matty, who becomes more and more important as the book goes on; she is a sweet, timid woman, getting on in years but still dominated by the memory of her now-deceased sister whose strong opinions ruled her life for many years. Miss Matty comes to seem like Cranford itself — she has her quirks and oddities and is extremely old-fashioned and set in her ways, but she proves to have sources of strength in the face of trials she must face, trials that form what there is of the book’s plot.

In some ways one might call this a conservative novel; it celebrates tradition, stability, and permanence, and it explicitly contrasts the quiet, virtuous lives led in Cranford with the uncertain, dangerous, ever-changing world around it. It values self-sufficient community, where people live peacefully with what money they have rather than seeking riches and self-aggrandizement. The characters are also extremely class-conscious, carefully maintaining boundaries between middle-class merchants and the genteel leisured class.

On the other hand, there is something subversive about this town made up mostly of women. Yes, at the novel’s end money comes in the form of a long-lost male relative returning from the east, but throughout the novel, the women take care of themselves and each other, deciding on their own when they want to invite in some male help. Many of them are suspicious of men, and they clearly value their female-centered community and don’t want it disrupted. They are “amazons” in the sense that they rule their own little world, finding their fulfillment in each other. Men seem to be largely beside the point.

This is the third Gaskell novel I’ve read; at this point I’m looking forward to reading and rereading more.

It seems about right to be writing about Rosy Thornton’s campus novel Hearts and Minds on a day my students have given me a headache.  Yes, the end of the semester is terrible, as usual.  It’s too bad I’ve already finished this novel, because reading it would provide some comfort after a long day, whereas the book I’ve just begun, Against Happiness, will not.  But maybe it will make me feel better to write about somebody else’s problems with faculty politics and student drama rather than dwelling on my own.

Hearts and Minds is a thoroughly entertaining novel.  It takes place at Cambridge, specifically at an all-women’s college, St. Radegund’s, which has recently hired a male Head of House, to the consternation of many of the faculty.  James Rycarte is his name, and although he’s an able administrator and knows how to deal with difficult people, he finds himself with some formidable opponents, especially faculty member Ros Clarke, who is determined to undermine his leadership and see him gone.

The other main character is Martha Pearce, an Economics faculty member and Senior Tutor, an administrative post that is due to end at the close of the year, leaving Martha without a job.  Because of the demands of the Senior Tutor position, she has neglected her research, which will make it difficult to find another post.  In addition to this looming problem, her husband has been more and more distanced of late and her daughter is showing signs of serious depression.  She is left to manage this all on her own.

The plot thickens when a potential donor appears, a friend of Rycarte’s, whose money could save the library, which is sinking into the mud at an alarming rate.  This friend appears to be the college’s savior, until he declares that his daughter will be applying for admission and implies that he expects the donation and his daughter’s acceptance to go hand in hand.  Here is an issue that could potentially divide the faculty and give Ros Clarke the ammunition she needs to force Rycarte out.

I enjoyed the story and liked spending time with the characters, but another of the novel’s pleasures is reading about the college itself, with its traditions and oddities.  Very near the beginning of the novel Rycarte arrives on campus for the first time since his interview, and so readers can learn about the college at the same time he does, watching him figure out details like the powers of the Head Porter and the lack of copy machines, and can follow along with him as he figures out who’s who amongst the faculty.  It’s a good introduction to a place that in a lot of ways sounds charming — nearly everyone travels around on bicycles, which sounds wonderful — but which has its share of troubles, not least of which is a severe shortage of funds. The signs of financial hardship are everywhere, from the decision to stop offering the college’s residents breakfast to the existence of research fellowships that offer no stipend whatsoever.  The college has been limping along for quite some time now, and Rycarte hopes the potential donation will turn things around, but he is unsure at what cost.

One aspect of the book bothered me — Martha Pearce’s relationship with her husband was hard to take.  Martha is an extremely hard-working, extremely dedicated person, one who cares deeply about the college and is willing to do whatever it takes to serve the school and to keep her family going.  Her husband, though, spends his days lounging around, napping, and claiming to be working on his poetry.  He offers her very little support, most distressingly when their daughter is obviously suffering.  There were moments in the novel when I wanted Martha to walk out on him immediately and not look back.  Martha’s self-sacrifices happen in real life quite often I’m sure, so it’s not a failure of realism, but still I couldn’t help but get annoyed at this character that readers are clearly meant to sympathize with.

But this issue aside, I read the novel with great enjoyment; it’s a good book for when you want something that’s both smart and plot-driven, and I think lots of people would enjoy it, even those who haven’t set foot on a campus for decades.

I’m not sure I’m going to do justice to Cristina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban for a couple of reasons, one of which is that while I’m slowly emerging from my reading funk I still don’t feel like I’m reading well, and the other is that I’m particularly tired this evening but I’m also not willing to put off writing this post any longer. So I’ll just have to make the best of things.

I did enjoy reading this book, and I’m happy that the Slaves of Golconda chose it because otherwise I doubt I would ever have picked it up. It’s a good read — an entertaining and smart novel about the intersection of family, politics, and religion. I’ll admit that I’m generally not fond of the kind of point of view switching that goes on in the novel — it shifts not only from character to character, which I have no problem with, but between first and third person, which does irritate me a bit — but
since having multiple voices speaking throughout the novel is so obviously important to Garcia, I can see why she chose to do it. Part of the point of the book is to get multiple perspectives; not only does the narrative focus shift from character to character, sometimes rapidly, but we see at least some of the characters from the inside, where they sometimes speak for themselves, as well as from the outside. Interspersed throughout the novel are one character’s letters as well, offering another perspective on the story. All this has the effect of capturing a great amount of complexity in relatively few pages (240 or so); the technique mimics the interconnectedness and the web of relationships it seeks to describe.

The story is about a Cuban family as it changes throughout the politically turbulent years of the mid-20C. At its heart is the matriarch Celia, a self-sufficient woman living on the Cuban coast who gets caught up in the furor of the revolution headed by Castro, who is never named but is a powerful presence in the novel. Her two daughters (she has a son as well but we don’t learn much about him) follow very different paths as adults; one of them, Lourdes, emigrates to the U.S. and becomes a proper American capitalist, working hard and eventually owning two successful bakeries. Her daughter, Pilar, isn’t impressed by this success, however, and finds ways to rebel against her mother’s strident pro-Americanism and moral conservatism. She becomes a painter and attends art school; one of the novel’s best scenes tells of a painting she completes for her mother’s new bakery, which is supposed to be patriotic in its message and ends up being something quite else.

The other daughter is Felicia, who remained in Cuba and who struggles throughout her life with mental illness. Her story is a sad one, as she is caught up in a difficult marriage and has trouble raising her three children; one summer, the summer of the coconuts, she and her young son survive on nothing but coconut ice cream. Her children are torn between their need for and love of their mother and their curiosity about their estranged father; they suffer from their mother’s bouts of illness, but she, too, is a victim. Celia does what she can to help her grandchildren, but her interventions can only do so much good.

The novel is ultimately about the ways our families shape who we are — they define us, whether we live in close proximity to them or thousands of miles away. Several of the characters are haunted by the ghosts of dead relatives or are able to communicate telepathically with far-away family members. Others, such as Pilar, are haunted by memories of the lost home in Cuba; while her mother wants only to live securely in America, Pilar wonders what life is like on her lost island and what kind of relationship she could have with her grandmother Celia. No one can escape the influence of family, whether it be the memories they create for us or the standards they set against we can try, often unsuccessfully, to rebel.

No one can escape their political context either; the Cuban revolution divides the family both ideologically and physically, causing a rift that is symbolized by Celia’s picture of Castro which she has placed over a picture of her husband and which Lourdes flings into the sea in a fit of rage. The picture symbolizes how political and familial forces blend in intricate ways to shape each of the novel’s characters. They can’t change the circumstances of their birth; they can only respond to them in the best way they can.