Category Archives: Books

I want to write just a few words about finishing Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; I don’t feel up to writing a big long summing-up post that tries to say smart things about what it all means, but I do want to say something. I am happy to have finished, but I do miss reading Proust a bit; I’ve been used to a near-daily dose of the narrator’s slow-moving, contemplative voice, and now I don’t have that.

It’s hard to see how a 3,000-page book without all that much plot, relatively speaking, could cohere, but I think it does. I found the ending, say, that last couple hundred pages, really did wrap things up; it provides an answer to the question that has haunted the whole book — will Marcel ever write his masterpiece? This is a question that has lingered from the very first volume when it becomes clear that Marcel has an interest in, and perhaps a talent for, writing. The answer the book provides is satisfying, and realistic, given everything that has happened up until that point.

My favorite volumes were the first two and the last one; the third and fourth, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah, got a little long, but then the fifth volume, which contains The Prisoner and The Fugitive begins to pick up a bit in preparation for the grand ending. It’s the long party scenes in some of the middle volumes that got tiresome. What I loved about the book are the insights into the mind, art, time, and love, but the novel is also obsessed with society and rank and how people behave at parties, topics that didn’t thrill me quite as much. But even here there are things to interest; Proust captures snobbery and hypocrisy and the deadness that can lie behind the glittering masks of high society beautifully well.

But mostly this novel is worth reading because of what it can teach about observing the world around you and in you. Proust has a meticulous eye for how the mind perceives input from the senses and for how we come to understand our experiences, and, of course, he has a beautiful way with a sentence to capture all that insight. I love how there can be so much wisdom and experience in one of those long sentences — how they can take in so much.

Most of this post will be about the second half of Don Quixote and the ending, so if you don’t want to hear about it, you might want to save this post for later. I loved the way the second part of the novel became a kind of commentary on the first (is this what people are talking about when they say that everything comes together in the second half?), how everyone Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet have read the novel’s first half and so are in on the story of his peculiar form of madness. Most of them decide to have some fun playing jokes on the two, to see just how far the madness of Don Quixote will go. So, in addition to all the metanarrativity that was already going on in the first part — the multiple authors and the long conversations on storytelling and the frequent mentions of Cide Hamete Benengeli — Cervantes adds his critique of the false sequel to Don Quixote published in between his two volumes and mixes up real life and fiction even more by having Don Quixote confront the results of his literary fame again and again.

It is this playfulness about fiction and authorship that I will remember about the book, long after I’ve forgotten individual episodes — episodes it probably won’t take me all that long to forget, in truth, because some of them dragged on a bit and my attention wandered. But I love that self-interrogation is built into the structure of one of the first novels ever, depending on how one defines “novel,” or, at the very least, one of the earliest and most influential novels. Don Quixote is a novel about madness, friendship, adventure, and love, but it’s also very much a novel about novels, and it starts a very long tradition of novels that reflect on themselves, a traditional so influential that even ostensibly realistic novels usually have some kind of self-reflexive element to them.

About the novel’s ending: it is so sad! I didn’t expect to see Don Quixote regaining his sanity, and even less did I expect that moment of sanity to be rather depressing:

“Señores,” said Don Quixote, “let us go slowly, for there are no birds today in yesterday’s nests. I was mad, and now I am sane; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, and now I am, as I have said, Alonso Quixano the Good. May my repentance and sincerity return me to the esteem your graces once had for me, and let the scribe continue.”

And he goes on reciting his will. It’s this melancholy at the end that convinces me (even further than I was already convinced) that Cervantes has great affection for his two main characters, in spite of their foolishness. It’s the energy of their madness that carries the story forward, so that as soon as Don Quixote regains his sanity, there is no story anymore, and the novel abruptly ends. Without Don Quixote’s madness, Cervantes has nothing. So, yes, Cervantes mocks Don Quixote’s foolish and naïve way of reading, but I think he glories in the energy and the fun of it too. To me, Don Quixote comes across as admirable in his imagination, his resourcefulness, his persistence, and his liveliness. I realize this is a very contemporary way of looking at the novel, and earlier readers may not have seen anything admirable in Don Quixote whatsoever, but I can’t help reading as a contemporary person, can I?

Susan Ferrier’s novel Marriage, published in 1818, is a good read and interesting in a number of ways, one of which is its Scottishness. Ferrier lived her whole life in Edinburgh, and her novel deals with the ideas Scottish and English people have about each other and the complexity that existed behind stereotypes of the day. The critic who wrote the novel’s introduction noted the multiplicity of “mixed” marriages — between Scots and English — to argue that Ferrier rejects the kind of nationalism developing in her time period. She also shows complexity within Scotland, portraying different areas and different types of people within it, and therefore undermining any simple idea of a Scottish “character.” Ferrier’s best characters are capable of living happily in both places, and they tend to combine the best traits characteristic of both areas.

Ferrier does, however, have some fun portraying comic characters who fail at her kind of worldiness — she writes about loud, blustery Highland lairds and foolish maiden aunts and spoiled English girls who refuse to live within their incomes. Ferrier uses these stereotypes for comic effect, and then has her more sympathetic characters critique the foolish, stereotypical ones.

Another main interest in the book is education, particularly women’s education — a topic so many, many novels of the time took up. Ferrier treats this subject largely through contrasts. She has three main female characters, Lady Juliana and her twin daughters Mary and Adelaide. Lady Juliana’s own education was abysmal:

Educated for the sole purpose of forming a brilliant establishment, of catching the eye, and captivating the senses, the cultivation of her mind, or the correction of her temper, had formed no part of the system by which that aim was to be accomplished.

Her father is largely to blame for this:

[He] was too much engrossed by affairs of importance, to pay much attention to any thing so perfectly insignificant as the mind of his daughter. Her person he had predetermined should be entirely at his disposal …

Women’s bodies matter more than their minds, according to this view, but what the father has forgotten is that after marriage women become responsible for raising children and they need a certain amount of sense to do this successfully. This was a common concern of the time — women should be educated not so much because of its inherent worth, but because women needed a certain amount of training to run a family well.

Marriage spells out the consequences of poor education for women (education in morals as well as academic subjects); Lady Juliana is a terrible mother and raises her daughter Adelaide to be much like she is — vain, selfish, and foolish. Mary, however, Adelaide’s twin, is raised by another woman, Mrs. Douglas, who does a much better job and trains Mary to be everything that Adelaide is not — kind, thoughtful, knowledgeable. Through these twins we can see how much is at stake in a young person’s training and education, and how Lady Juliana is perpetuating the cycle of ignorance. How is she supposed to know how to raise a daughter when she never received any attention or training herself? No one was there to teach her how to be selfless and patient.

Many of the characters in this novel are either thoroughly good (Mary, Mrs. Douglas) or thoroughly bad (Lady Juliana, Adelaide), so it was a pleasure to come across Lady Emily who is neither. It’s in this sense that Marriage feels like an 18C novel to me — so many 18C novels have perfect heroines, annoyingly perfect ones, leaving the more minor characters to have some complexity. Lady Emily is flawed — according to the standards of the book — by being too critical, too
quick to speak her mind, too witty, too independent. Mary as heroine could never get away with displaying these traits; they are too unfeminine. But Emily is sympathetic too; she does her best to take care of Mary when she needs it, and she has a sense of her own flaws. Mary is drawn to Emily but worried about her future; she may be a little too wild for her own happiness. This uncertainty is left unresolved. Readers today are probably more likely to sympathize with Emily than with Mary, who can be a little insipid and annoyingly obedient. I’m not so sure what readers at the time would have thought.

This puts Austen’s novels in an interesting light — her heroines are not the perfect Mary types; they have flaws, such as Emma’s self-absorption and they make mistakes like Elizabeth Bennet’s too-quick judgments. It seems that other novelists were more likely to explore flaws, not in their heroines, but in other characters. The heroines remain saint-like.

I love reading novels from this time period; I think Marriage is an interesting one to look at for what it says about national identity and about women’s place in society, but it’s also a fun read — a good story with lots of comic touches.

I just came across some wonderful passages in Proust; I’m about 150 pages from end, determined to finish it and Don Quixote by the end of the summer. The narrator has just had a series of experiences of involuntary memory, where something in his present — a sound or taste or sight — will trigger a memory that recreates in his mind whole sections of his past that he had previously forgotten. The madeleine scene from Swann’s Way is the most famous of these, although there are many. Immediately before these memories come to the narrator, he despairs of ever becoming a writer; he has spent years and years of his life wasting time, avoiding doing the writing he has always wanted to do. The memories start the process of bringing him back to his vocation, and they set him off on a long meditation on literature, writing, and the relationship of art and life.  I thought I’d share some short sections:

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never “developed” them … it is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.

I love the idea that we all have the materials of art within us; the difference between artists and everyone else is that artists learn how to make use of those materials. Proust calls art “translation” — taking our experiences, whatever they are, and plumbing the depths of them to find meaning and to transform that meaning into something beautiful. And he says it requires courage. We like to live with certain illusions about ourselves; we whitewash our darker characteristics and cover over our failings, but the artist will look for the truth, no matter how difficult it is to face.

Here’s another passage on art and life, this time about imagination and sensitivity:

It may well be that, for the creation of a work of literature, imagination and sensitivity are interchangeable qualities, and that the second may without any great disadvantage be substituted for the first, in the same way as people whose stomach is incapable of digesting pass that function over to the intestine. A man born sensitive but with no imagination might none the less write admirable novels. The suffering that other people cause him, his efforts to prevent it, the conflicts that it and the cruel other person created, all of this, interpreted by the intelligence, might make the raw material of a book … as beautiful as it would have been if it had been imagined …

So making art isn’t the same thing as making things up. I’ve never liked the idea that imagination is as simple as making things up; to me, it has more to do with putting ideas together, making connections, seeing what’s in front of you in a new way. So in my way of thinking, the sensitivity Proust is talking about, combined with intelligence, is actually a certain kind of imagination.

And finally, here’s a passage on criticism:

[Criticism] hails a writer as a prophet, on account of his peremptory tone and his very public scorn for the school that preceded him, when in fact he has absolutely nothing new to say. These aberrations on the part of criticism are so constant that a writer might almost prefer to be judged by the general public …. For there is a closer analogy between the instinctive life of the public and the talent of a great writer, which is no more than an instinct religiously listened to while imposing silence on everything else, an instinct perfected and understood, than between it and the superficial verbiage and shifting criteria of the recognized arbiters of judgment.

Apparently Proust isn’t so fond of critics.  (Although he’s not so fond of the general public either — to shorten the quotation I took out a parenthesis on how the general public generally doesn’t understand what an artist is doing.) He gives an interesting definition of art here, doesn’t he, that it’s “instinct religiously listened to”? And I do buy his argument that critics often get it wrong, that they take loud voices for true ones and newness for greatness.

Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, by Aoibheann Sweeney is an enjoyable read; I breezed through it in just a couple of days, which is unusual for me.  Which is not to say that it’s light reading, necessarily, just that it’s a book I was happy to spend hours with.  My copy came recently as a review copy from Penguin.The novel tells the story of Miranda, a young girl who lives first on an island in Maine with her father and later, after she finishes High School, in Manhattan. Her mother died somewhat mysteriously when she was three, leaving Miranda and her father on their own, although they are joined at times by Mr. Blackwell, a friend from the town across the bay. The father is working on a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but as time passes, it becomes clear that this is a project that will probably never be complete.  It is a pretense of work that keeps him occupied and give him a reason to live in such isolation.

About the first quarter of the book takes place in Maine, covering Miranda’s entire childhood, and then her father arranges for her to work at the Institute for Classical Studies in Manhattan amongst old friends of his. Once there, she struggles to make her way in a strange city and to absorb the new information she learns about her parents, and also about herself.

Miranda’s relationship with her father is one of the novel’s central story lines; the father spends most of his time lost in his studies and has no practical sense and little skill in maintaining a household, and so Miranda, with the help of Mr. Blackwell, learns early how to cook and care for the house and how to navigate across the bay on her own to get to school. She learns how to type so she can type up her father’s manuscript. She spends so much time alone with her father and devotes so much time to caring for him, and yet he is emotionally remote, caught up in the past and living with secrets that Miranda discovers only when she goes away.

Miranda’s father reads to her from his translation of Ovid often enough that the tales in Metamorphoses come to be familiar, and she tells several of the stories throughout the book (it’s in first person from Miranda’s point of view). They become a way for her to think about her own metamorphosis, or lack thereof, as she grows up curious about change and yet longing for things to stay the way they are. Ovid’s stories are about desire and its transformations, and they become the lens through which Miranda views the changes desire wreaks in others and in herself:

The tales in Metamorphoses rarely ended happily; the process of transformation, of hands turning into claws and feathers sprouting on shoulders, was sometimes a punishment and sometimes a reprieve. But mostly it was a compromise of some sort, a way to negotiate the chasm between desire and mortality, between human nature and human need.

There are many mysteries in the book — what exactly happened to Miranda’s mother? why is her father so reclusive? what exactly is the nature of his relationship to Mr. Blackwell? — some of which get resolved and others of which don’t. One of the most intriguing mysteries for Miranda is the mystery of desire itself — what it is and what it makes people do.

As in all first-person narratives, the pleasure of the reading lies in the reader’s response to the storyteller. Miranda speaks with a voice that is vulnerable and questioning, but there’s a toughness too, and even a kind of reticence — her life has not been easy, but she doesn’t spend her energy mourning it so much as trying to understand it.

The book was a pleasure to read — smart and meditative, with a narrator that enjoyed spending time with.

I’ve been trying to decide what to say about Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick for quite a while now, and I’m still not sure. I feel conflicted not so much about the book itself but about what I actually feel and what I think I should feel about this book. I want to like non-traditional, experimental fiction. And I’d really like not only just to like it but to unequivocally enjoy the reading of it. But that doesn’t always happen. With Wittgenstein’s Mistress I appreciated it and thought about it a lot and am glad I read it, but I didn’t savor the experience. I didn’t mind putting it down after a while.

With Sleepless Nights I felt something similar. I appreciate what she’s doing, and I enjoyed the reading of it — more than I enjoyed Wittgenstein’s Mistress — but I also didn’t mind putting it down after a while. I read this book in short chunks — and the structure of the book makes that easy, with short “parts” and shorter sections within those parts — and I don’t think I could have read it fast if I’d tried.

Maybe the most damning thing I have to say about it (in my mind) is that I find myself not having a whole lot to say about it. With Wittgenstein’s Mistress, at least, I felt like I had a lot to say. As I sit here and try to pull together my thoughts on Sleepless Nights, what comes into my mind most often is the question of how I felt as I was reading it. I have already forgotten many of the book’s details, and I don’t have a strong sense of the book’s mood or atmosphere or a strong sense of character that might make me look back on my reading experience with pleasure.

But — enough of this navel-gazing. The book is short, about 130 pages, and is a collection of the thoughts and memories of a woman named Elizabeth. This is way the book opens:

It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today ….

…..

If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from the shelf.

This makes a suitable introduction to the book, as it introduces the narrator and her task — to gather her memories and write them down. But it also warns us that what she remembers may be distorted, that she is not giving us a history of her life, but rather a picture of her life as she remembers it now. Everything is filtered through her present consciousness.

The narrative doesn’t follow chronological order, skipping around from place to place and year to year, as our memories do. So we get glimpses into her life — a youth spent in Kentucky and adulthood in New York City, Boston, Maine, and Amsterdam. She describes lovers, friends, and acquaintances, events and observations. There isn’t any connective tissue to any of this, no transitions that tell us how one story relates to another; instead they are simply bump up against one another, again, as our memories tend to do.

The narrator’s mother haunts many of the pages; early on she describes her life:

My own affectionate, tireless mother had nine children. This fateful fertility kept her for most of her life under the dominion of nature. It was a thing, a presence, and she seemed to walk about encased in the clear globe of it. It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.

The narrator makes sure that she does not share this fate; instead her own story is of freedom and independence, of writing and travel and experience. She rejects her mother’s femininity (“an ineffable femininity, tidal”), and yet she’s aware of how it shapes her writing:

Tickets, migrations, worries, property, debts, changes of name and changes back once more: these came about from reading many books. So, from Kentucky to New York, to Boston, to Maine, to Europe, carried along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank verse, of little books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian — all consumed in a sedentary sleeplessness. Is that sufficient — never mind that it is the truth. It certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all, “I” am a woman.

She is not writing an adventure tale of the type that men can much more easily experience and record; rather, her life and therefore her book are shaped by the domestic and by the reading she has done in those domestic spaces. This passage declares her refusal to write a traditional novel with a clear beginning and end and with action and adventure and drama; the novel that will portray her experience as a woman cannot be traditional. Instead it experiments with the elements of storytelling that have been passed down to her, in an attempt to write something new that can capture the memories circling around in her head.

There were moments when I read with pleasure, enjoying a portrait of a character Hardwick drew with skill. Her description of Billie Holiday, for example, is devastating. The book didn’t sustain that level of interest or pleasure, however.  I’m very curious to hear what other people thought!