Category Archives: Books

I enjoyed reading two posts on Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, one from Smithereens and one by Danielle, with two different reactions to the book. Both bloggers pointed out all the weeping, fainting, and quaking, all the passivity and sensitive emotionalism that the heroine Emily exhibits. It’s hard as a 21st-century reader not to get a bit annoyed by all this, but it helps, as Danielle pointed out, to know that this is simply what novelistic heroines tended to do at the time. Readers at the time expected it and ate it up. Radcliffe was writing when sensibility was all the rage — when everyone was talking about emotions, what they are, why they are important, where they lead us, and how they can possibly make us better people or can possibly distract us from more important matters. You see phrases like “exquisite sensibility” and “overflowing hearts” all over the place.

And the heroines tend to be models of perfection, which can also get annoying, since we are used to much more complexity in our characters. So often plots revolve around testing the perfection of the heroine who tends to remain static, rather than allowing the heroine to have flaws and grow and change. Not all novels are like this, by any means (see Wollstonecraft or Mary Hays or The Female Quixote), but so many heroines from 18C fiction are so irritatingly perfect, that you realize Austen’s genius in creating such well-rounded people.

Given all that, I do love the 18C novel, as you know. I find all the intense emotionalism fascinating, if strange, and I love the way the genre develops though the time period, emerging out of a rich mix of biography, autobiography, history, crime narrative, spiritual narratives, travel writing, etc. I love how weird the 18C novel can be — see The Monk or Tristram Shandy for examples. And I love how you see see political and social changes reflected in the writing — class struggles in Pamela, for example, or capitalism in Robinson Crusoe.

I must say, however, that I’m struggling a bit with my latest 18C novel — Sophia Lee’s The Recess. My initial assessment is that it’s interesting for historical reasons, but not something I’d recommend for someone interested in an absorbing read or someone just starting out on the 18C novel. The book has an odd rhythm to it. I’ve read only the first part out of six, and already I suspect I’ve been given way more historical detail than I need. I’ve come across two stories-within-the-story, both of which are pretty outlandish, filled with incest, murder, lust, and betrayal. That sounds like it might be fun, but the narrator rushes through it all, it’s too much to absorb, and I’m not sure she’s really making use of all the details she throws out there. The pace of the novel is awkward; it’s so fast, I begin to feel bored, oddly enough.

It’s interesting, though, because it’s an early example of the historical novel; it’s about two (fictional) daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester are characters. If I remember correctly, the editor of Waverly claimed that Scott is the first historical novelists, and that’s simply not true. I don’t know who the first is (if there is such a thing), but Lee certainly wrote historical novels before Scott did.

I’ll definitely finish it, so I’ll see if the remaining five parts pick up a little bit.

I recently finished listening to the latest Maisie Dobbs novel on audio, Messenger of Truth. Now I have to wait for Winspear to publish the next novel before I can read any more Maisie Dobbs! And then I have a dilemma — do I read the book when it comes out, or do I wait for the audio version to get made and delivered to my library? I’m so used to listening to these books that sitting down and actually reading one won’t feel right. And I do love to listen to the readers with their accents and inflections — hearing the book in my head in my own voice as I read quietly will be a different experience entirely. But it could be quite a while before the audio comes out. So, I have no idea what I’ll do.

You’ll probably guess from the above that I liked the latest Maisie Dobbs novel. Winspear explores a new theme in this one: art and the artist. The crime victim is a painter who painted scenes from World War I that many people found disturbing and controversial. So Maisie gets to spend some time thinking about art’s function and purpose, how people react to ground-breaking and controversial art, and what motivates artists to create what they do. She also gets to question traditional stereotypes of artists — that they aren’t practical or worldly or capable — since the artist she is investigating doesn’t quite live up to the stereotype.

She also finds herself caught up in a social scene full of artists and bohemians, and she has to think about how she does and doesn’t fit in. She feels both drawn to them and a little uncertain how to act in this new world of night clubs and parties and dancing. Experiencing this mix of emotions, she is forced to think about her longing for a little excitement and even frivolity, qualities that have been largely absent from her life.

As always, the story is absorbing and fun, and Maisie saves the day!

At the end of the audio book was an interview with Winspear, and one of the questions was about the research she does to prepare for the books. It was quite fascinating to hear what she had to say. She described being interested in the post-WW I time period for a very long time, so that she has been doing research for the books even when not working on them directly. She described reading archival letters from soldiers writing to family back home and realizing that she might be the first person reading them after the original recipient. These letters help her in her quest to get the language just right; she works very hard to make sure the characters in her novels speak as people at the time spoke. She also works hard to get the clothing and accessories right (which explains all those mentions of clothing I was complaining about in an earlier post!), and to give the novels a sense of time and place by working historical events into the narrative.

And she spoke about how Maisie is a typical woman of her day in the sense that she is one of the many “surplus” women, left without a husband or lover after the war and forced to make a new kind of life for herself. Some women never adapted to these demands, but others, like Maisie, took on new challenges like owning businesses and becoming professionals of various sorts.

Maybe what I should do is read the book and then listen to the audio afterwards … that would be fun.

Rosamund Lehmann’s A Note in Music fascinated me; not much happened in it, and yet so much happened — Lehmann is excellent at capturing inner worlds, the way moods shift and feelings come and go, and the way other people impinge upon our consciousness, often making us unhappy as they do.

The novel tells the story of Grace Fairfax, a 34-year-old woman living in a town in the north of England; she is married to kind but bungling Tom, who loves her but is also mystified by her. Grace figured out early on in their 10-year marriage that she made a mistake when she married Tom, but she has tried to make the best of it and they have muddled along, not happy, although not perfectly miserable either. Their life together feels indifferent, as though it means little or even nothing. In fact, Grace’s life is full of nothingness, which Lehmann makes clear from the very beginning; when Grace’s friend Norah tries to persuade her to see a fortune-teller, she refuses, fearing she will see only nothingness in her future:

For the truth was that she was afraid of the fortune-teller. She had a vision of the woman, scrutinizing her palm and saying finally:

‘This is a most curious case. There is nothing here: nothing in your past, nothing in your future. As for character — lazy, greedy, secretive — without will or purpose.’

The novel also tells Norah’s story; she too is unhappily married, in her case, to Gerald, an emotionally distant professor who retreats to his books to avoid any complicated human interaction.

Into this stew of discontent comes Hugh and his sister Clare; Hugh is a young, attractive man who is being groomed to inherit the company where Tom works as a clerk, and Clare is an old friend of Norah’s. Both of them bring life and energy into Grace and Norah’s small world, and Hugh quickly becomes an object of desire for both of them, with his handsome blonde hair and his charming, casual manners.

One of the most painful parts to read — in a book that is full of painful and yet at the same time pleasurable descriptions of emotional turmoil, pleasurable because of the accuracy with which they are detailed — occurs when we realize just how oblivious Hugh is to the impact he has on Grace and Norah both. For the women, encountering Hugh is a life-changing event that will give them food for thought for years and decades to come. For Hugh, his time with them is a brief interlude between much more exciting events in his life, a way of passing the time until the next episode begins. When Grace and Hugh develop a friendship that surprises them both, Grace feels that … well, that she is living up to her name, that Hugh’s presence and the love she feels for him have descended upon her as though they were gifts from heaven. Grace knows that these gifts are fleeting things, and that soon she will return to her quiet life with Tom, but they have changed her.

Lehmann uses a shifting perspective that gives us glimpses into the minds of all of the major characters at one point or another, including Tom and Gerald, so that we see just how the various characters are making sense of what occurs. This technique increases the emotional impact of the novel, as, for example, Tom’s earnest love for Grace is contrasted with Grace’s barely civil tolerance of Tom, or Norah’s good-natured attempts to please Gerald are contrasted with Gerald’s irritation at her fumbling and bumbling about. All the characters seem at odds with one another, which makes moments of emotional connection that much more meaningful.

I love this sort of book, although I can imagine people reading my description and thinking the book sounds claustrophobic and boring — but, in my opinion at least, it’s not; it’s a book that describes the type of life that many people lead, one where not much happens, and yet so much is happening, at every moment.

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?