Category Archives: Books

I’m reading slowly these days, although fairly steadily; I’m maybe 1/3 of the way through Dracula, and finding some more funny footnotes, although nothing as good as the ones here. The editor gets pedantic about the ways the blood transfusions in Dracula are completely unrealistic, peppering the narrative with corrective comments. Here are a whole series of footnotes to a passage that’s about a page long:

In real life the hugger-mugger blood transfusions that follow would almost certainly kill both donor and patient, since no effort is made by Van Helsing or Seward to match blood types, which, in any event, they could not have known about until nearly three decades later. For those living at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of AIDS, this can be an especially poignant scene.

Veins are never empty. They are full of serum plus red blood cells.

The brightest blood is dilute, anemic blood. On the other hand, adequate normal blood is dark.

Stoker lays the groundwork for the erotic meaning of the blood transactions that are to come.

Narcotics are for pain; narcoleptic drugs and hypnotics are for sleep.

Fibrin is the clotting material in blood.

Did he transfuse the blood directly or use a receptacle?

If the loss of blood was telling on Arthur, it would be because he had given Lucy more than two pints of his own blood. The healthy adult human body has four or five quarts of blood flowing in it. Modern bloodbank practice is to limit blood donations to one pint at prescribed intervals.

It makes its own story, doesn’t it? It IS rather Pale Fire-like.

This footnote made me laugh out loud; to understand its humor, you have to remember that there are no llamas or monkeys in the book (as least as far as I know — although other animals are important), and military bands make no appearance whatsoever:

The Zoological Gardens, in the northwest corner of Regent’s Park, were open daily from 9:00 A.M. to sunset. Admission was (in Stoker’s time) one shilling, except on Monday, when it was sixpence. Children were half price. In a more God-fearing age than ours, the zoo was closed on Sunday.

On summer Saturdays at 4:00 P.M. there was a military band concert at the zoo.

Visitors were cautioned not to get too close to the llamas “on account of [their] unpleasant expectorating propensities.” The unpleasant odor of the monkey house was “judiciously disguised by numerous plants and flowers.”

Readers of Dracula will want to know that unaccountably the zoo’s bats were kept in the monkey house.

I love the “God-fearing age” detail and I do wonder, I really wonder, why the editor thought expectorating llamas and smelly monkeys were necessary to mention. And okay, there IS a bat in the book, a very important one, but why I’d want to know that the zoo’s bats were kept with monkeys I’m not sure.

And finally, another reassurance that our editor is doing his research. Here’s a passage from the novel:

We went round to the back of the house, where there was a kitchen window. The Professor took a small surgical saw from his case, and handing it to me, pointed to the iron bars which guarded the window. I attacked them at once and had very soon cut through three of them.

Here’s the footnote:

An unlikely story. An energetic undergraduate, using a modern high carbon steel surgical saw against an iron strap one eighth of an inch thick, was able to cut one-fourth of an inch into the strap in half an hour. Assuming that Seward was cutting into bars of modest thickness, three quarters of an inch per bar, the task of cutting three such bars should have taken five hours. This is to say nothing about the condition of the surgical saw which, in the modern experiment, was rendered nearly useless for iron bars and absolutely useless for surgery.

On the other hand, Seward was desperate.

So how’s that for active, experiential learning?

Oh, and I do like Dracula itself, very much. One day I’ll post on it. It’s just that the footnotes are so … great.

I’ve begun reading Dracula and am discovering how closely it adheres to the gothic style, particularly that of Ann Radcliffe, two books of whose I’ve read, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. You have the journey south and east across Europe, complete with stereotypes of superstitious Catholics, exotically-dressed locals, threatening wild beasts, and dangerous climbs over rocky crags. You have the lengthy descriptions of nature, which is both beautiful and threatening — although I should say it’s sublime, to use the appropriate aesthetic term. You have the ever-increasing chaos and uncertainty the further from England the traveler ventures. It’s all quite familiar to this avid-eighteenth-century novel reader, except for the trains, but they fit into the pattern as well: “It seems to me the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?” We have a punctual, time-table-driven, proper Englishman — this part strikes me as the Victorian contribution to the eighteenth-century tradition — traveling to the “exotic” east.

The introduction to the novel amused me; the editor gives a brief history of gothic novels and vampire stories, and he’s got some rather strong opinions on things that he’s not afraid to share (I’ve got The Essential Dracula, subtitled The Definitive Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel). On The Castle of Otranto, he says:

I am myself fond of Otranto without being either moved or surprised by it. It seems precisely the sort of novel a neurasthenic antiquarian with bad dreams and plenty of time on his hands would write in two months time “without knowing in the least what [he] intended to say or to relate.”

He admires Radcliffe somewhat more:

With Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), we have the first fully realized Gothic romance in the history of the genre. Despite its sometimes endless descriptions of places to which its author had never been; despite lapses into fifth-rate poetry; despite even its author’s insistence on demystifying her first-rate mysteries, the work has a compelling fascination that commands respect.

High praise, yes? His description of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk strikes me as about right:

Lewis, at nineteen, as Walpole did at forty-seven, wrote his book at top speed, finishing it in the space of ten weeks. The Monk is a work of wonderful adolescent gusto. The young Lewis intensely enjoyed the lustful and violent extravagances of his villain, Ambrosio, and devoted himself to giving them to us in every macabre and delicious detail.

He does not at all like John Polidori’s The Vampyre:

The Vampyre is a work almost without merit, having neither memorable characters, a plot worth pursuing, nor any noticeable style,

but he likes another vampire tale, Thomas Presket Prest’s Varney the Vampyre a bit better:

Varney the Vampyre (1847), a work that has no literary pretensions, is for that reason much more fun to read. The book is an enthusiastic potboiler whose energy almost never flags.

I wouldn’t take this editor’s judgments too seriously, but he does capture the feeling of a lot of these books, which, with the possible exception of Radcliffe, are more about having a lot of fun than taking care with craft. And there’s something wonderful about writing a novel solely in order to have some fun, I’d say.

So I’ve now finished the first volume of Proust’s novel (and I’m counting each volume as a separate book!). It’s taken me about two months to read the entire thing; I’ve been reading in small chunks of about 10 pages or so, and read about 50 pages a week. For me, that’s the perfect way to read it; regularly enough to keep the story and ideas fresh in my mind, but at a slow enough pace to absorb it and to keep from feeling bogged down. This is most definitely not a book to rush.

And I’ve found it so very rewarding. Proust’s sentences are beautiful, long and digressive and convoluted, but they do yield their meaning, even if I have to read them a couple of times and turn the pages back and forth and back and forth to piece everything together. The book has sections that read quickly as well, particularly in the long middle section that tells the story of Swann and Odette. Here I found myself getting caught up in the story and the pages flew by. But best of all are Proust’s insights into consciousness, into what it’s like to be a young boy, for example, a very intense, intelligent, yearning young boy. We see him as both a little ridiculous – one of the things I liked was how I could imagine exactly why his parents found him exasperating – and as completely sympathetic and awe-inspiring and wonderful. His longing for his mother, and later for Gilberte, is moving; we know that such an intense, emotional child is bound to experience much struggle and pain.

This volume does have a carefully-wrought structure, although one entirely of Proust’s own devising; we begin with the unnamed narrator and a story of longing, and we end with that same narrator, a little older, longing still. All through the novel, Proust explores the way the mind mediates our experiences, shaping them through memory or desire; he considers how art affects his characters – the crucial role music and painting play in Swann’s love affair with Odette, for example. The novel is very much about reading; we learn a little about the narrator’s reading habits and desires in the first section, but also characters attempt to read one another, Swann desperately trying to understand Odette, the narrator reading much into everything his mother says, and then at the end turning the same attention toward Gilberte. The book trains readers to pay close attention, to their own minds and to other people and to the world. It contains some of most beautiful, detailed descriptions of nature I’ve read.

And the novel’s length strikes me as necessary, and not only because Proust needs the length to say what he wants to say about his characters and his ideas; there is something about living with this book for a long time, in much the same way that in reading Clarissa we come to feel like she is a companion, that we live with her, that we know her and she is a part of our lives. In Proust, we spend many, many hours luxuriating in the complexity of the mind and of emotion. We are forced – if we read carefully – to experience things slowly and to pay attention, to dig deeply into life.

And the way the narrative moves around in time, from the narrator as an older man describing himself as he is now, to the narrator telling stories from his childhood, to the narrator telling Swann’s story which took place before he was born, forces us to consider how our experience of time differs from “regular” clock time. In our minds, we move through time, back and forth, from past to present to future, easily and quickly. Proust’s central theme is memory, that capacity that holds us together and gives us a coherent identity. Except that our memories are not ours to control. A coherent identity may be an illusion, one fostered by memory, our ability to hold together disparate chunks of time, and undermined by memory too, since we can remember and forget involuntarily.

I’m looking forward to the other volumes; I’m curious about what Proust does with plot, oddly enough, perhaps. What will happen to these characters? Or will we even stay with these characters, or move on to others? But most of all, I’m looking forward to the company of Proust’s prose and his mind.

I’ve begun Alison Lurie’s novel The War Between the Tates, and I’m finding it quite good. It’s a family drama, and it’s also an academic satire, although not a satire in the comic mode of Jane Smiley’s Moo or Richard Russo’s Straight Man. It has funny moments, but the predominating mood is serious. Brian Tate, the husband, is a political science professor who has dreamed of being an important political consultant, although he now knows he never will be. He begins an affair with a graduate student (we learn this early on — no spoilers here) and the quality of his life plummets from there.

The novel begins with his wife Erica who has recently realized that she hates her two children, Jeffrey and Matilda. They have reached the sullen early-adolescent age, and have become unbearable. I like the way she is honest with herself about this feeling; while she’s no child abandoner or neglecter, and while I’m left thinking that she must, deep down, feel loyal toward her children, the feeling of hatred penetrates fairly deeply. I felt conflicted as I read about this relationship because I was just such a sullen, unbearable, anger- and frustration-inducing adolescent myself. I understand completely why the children act as they do, and I understand completely why Erica hates them for it. If I ever have children, which is most definitely not in my future plans anywhere right now, I’m certain I’m going to have just such a sullen child myself, because I deserve it completely. So Erica is unhappy in many ways, and she is learning just how much of this is her husband’s fault — he’s at fault for the affair, of course, but also for manipulating her and shutting off opportunities for her and generally being insufferable. This is a story of Erica beginning to take some control of her life.

I like Erica’s character, and I also like the narrator’s way of dealing with Brian, who is very much a jerk, but the narrator lets us see his thought processes and motivations in such a way that makes him understandable, if not likeable. And Brian’s character offers some great opportunities for academic satire:

Teachers, especially university professors, often have an elective affinity with their subjects. Whether through original tropism, conscious effort, or merely long association, language instructors born in Missouri and Brooklyn look and act remarkably like Frenchmen and Italians; professors of economics resemble bankers; and musicologists are indistinguishable from musicians …

These affinities also profoundly influence the functioning of the various Corinth University departments. They determine, for instance, which academic issues will take the longest to resolve and arouse the strongest feelings. Members of the Maths. Department tend to quarrel over the figures in their annual report, and members of the English department over its wording. In Psychology, analysis of the personality traits of candidates for promotion sometimes ends in ego-dystonic shouting; and the controversy over the new men’s washroom in the Architecture Building (during which two professors who had not designed an actual building in twenty years came to blows) has already passed into University annals.

But the political science department is the worst:

Since every member of the Political Science department is in outward manner and inner fantasy an expert political strategist, every issue provokes public debate and private lobbying. Even when there is little at stake, eloquent speeches are made; wires are skillfully pulled and logs rolled out of simple enjoyment of the sport.

We get a wonderful description of a political science department meeting, which, as you can imagine, is excruciating.

I think this book is extremely well written; the novel is set during the Vietnam War, and the war, besides hovering in the background of the plot, becomes a metaphor for what is happening to the family:

Brian and Erica, like their friends, students, and colleagues, have spent considerable time trying to understand and halt the war in Vietnam. If he were to draw a parallel between it and the war now going on in his house, he would have unhesitatingly identified with the South Vietnamese. He would have said that the conflict, begun a year or so ago as a minor police action, intended only to preserve democratic government and maintain the status quo — a preventive measure, really — has escalated steadily and disastrously against his and Erica’s wishes, and in spite of their earnest efforts to end it. For nearly two years, he would point out, the house on Jones Creek Road has been occupied territory. Jeffrey and Matilda have gradually taken it over, moving in troops and supplies, depleting natural resources, and destroying the local culture.

And Lurie goes on in this vein for another couple of pages. The cleverness of the writing doesn’t distract from the family drama; rather, it provides some comic relief from a dark tale. I’m impressed with the way Lurie effortlessly places the story in the context of the war and of the feminist movement without any awkward exposition; it comes naturally through the characters’ conversations and the narrator’s descriptions of the family dynamics.

I’ve only read the first half of the book so far; I’ll be sure to let you know how I like the second half.

I finished Elizabeth Taylor’s The Sleeping Beauty recently, the second Taylor novel I’ve read in a few months. I like reading multiple books by the same author like this — I did this also with Muriel Spark recently — but I don’t do it much. Too many other books by new authors I haven’t read before are out there enticing me to try them. But spending a little more time with an author than just one book yields so many insights into the way that author works. To put it in boring English teacher terms, you can do some comparing and contrasting and draw some deeper conclusions.

I’m seeing about Taylor that she writes about middle-aged women very well; both books I’ve read have women of that age at their center. The Sleeping Beauty has a younger woman as a love interest — the sleeping beauty herself, but at least as interesting is Isabella, a widow with a grown son, who hopes to be the love interest and is disappointed. In a Summer Season tells about a woman who has married a significantly younger man and how this enlivens and disrupts her rather sedate life. Taylor writes about middle-class sexual repression and expression extremely well. The Sleeping Beauty isn’t set in a town called Seething for nothing. Isabella and her friend Evalie spend a significant amount of time and money on beauty treatments trying to make themselves look younger and more sexually attractive, all the while interfering when they can in the love lives of others. The class issue arises most clearly when Isabella insults her son’s girlfriend, who is a nanny, and therefore unacceptable for her educated, talented son. Another character, Rose, does what she can to keep her sister Emily locked up in the prison of her home, keeping her from wandering out into the larger world where she might meet a man who will take her away.

And yet the surface of Taylor’s novels is serene and quiet. Both books took a while to get some momentum, and, although events do happen in them, they don’t happen often and they aren’t described dramatically. These are books that you should read slowly, because if you rush through them, you might miss the subtle dynamics of a conversation, which is where the story lies. Taylor excels at writing scenes charged with emotion, but with emotion that is usually kept hidden, below the surface. She is at her best in The Sleeping Beauty describing a particularly excruciating tea with Isabella, her son, his girlfriend, and two other guests, an event that goes so horribly wrong I’m left cringing at the brutality of it, even though no actual violence occurs. Middle-class decorum is forever at odds with jealousy, fear, and fury. And hypocrisy — Isabel and Evalie condemn gambling one moment and the next moment are whispering to each other about what horse to bet on. They both project self-satisfaction and self-righteousness, but their actions are, arguably, the cruelest in the novel.

I like the way Taylor shows the dark side of lives that seem so sedate and ordinary. Behind any normal-looking comfortable small-town or country home can lurk suffering and longing and regret. And most of all — interesting stories.

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be posting on this today or tomorrow, but I figure that if it’s supposed to be tomorrow, you all can come back and read this then. I’m also not going to do this book justice, since I read it in a rather distracted state of mind. I felt as I was reading that I should re-read in order to fully appreciate it, but I didn’t have the time.

At any rate, I enjoyed the novel very much. This is my first experience of Wells, and I’m tempted to read the two other novels in my edition, The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. I’m curious what people make of the frame narrative – is there something complicated going on here, or is it simply by way of explaining and setting up the narrative to follow? Wells participates in an old tradition of frame narratives, whether it’s the frame story of escaping the plague in Boccaccio’s The Decameron or the multiple frame narratives that encircle the creature’s narrative in Frankenstein, or the explanation Defoe gives at the beginning of Robinson Crusoe that the narrative is a true one that Defoe had stumbled upon and decided to publish. Wells’s use is certainly not as complicated as Mary Shelley’s was, but the frame does give the reader a sense of the mysteriousness to come in the main narrative, and it tells us the interesting fact that Prendick “subsequently … alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment he escaped from the Lady Vain.” Did he find that his attempts to explain what he saw on the island were so impossible that he gave it up and simply said his mind was blank to avoid explanations entirely?

I’m reminded of Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown” where Brown journeys into the woods, discovers the horrors that (supposedly) exist in the human heart, and returns home a changed man, unable to live at peace with his family again. And also Gulliver, who after his travels becomes a bitter, cynical man. In both of these books, and in Wells’s novel too, one of the central questions is about what it means to be human: are humans like the houyhnhnms or the yahoos, or neither? The ending of the novel is moving; Prendick lives in fear and horror of his fellow humans and isolates himself from people, devoting his time to scientific studies. He writes:

They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow, I can witness that, for several years now, a restless fear has dwelt in my mind, such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel. My trouble took the strangest form. I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that.

At the heart of the novel, I think, is the conversation between Prendick and Dr. Moreau where Moreau explains the nature of his experiments. This dialogue is all about the relationship of human beings and animals – a topic that has fascinated writers since the time of Gilgamesh, another work that tries to define humanity by considering how people differ from the gods on the one hand and the beasts on the other. The question in Wells’s novel centers around pain – what it means to be able to feel pain and how we should respond to our own pain and that of others. Moreau says:

For it is just this question of pain that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick, so long as your own pains drive you, so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin, so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels … A mind truly opened to what science has to teach must see that [pain] is a little thing.

Pain is an aspect of animal experience, not human, according to Moreau; as humans separate themselves from the animal world, pain will carry less and less significance. That he brushes aside Prendick’s objections to his cruelty shows that he has lost something essential to his humanity and has become much less than an animal, which would never behave as cruelly as he has. By working so horribly on animal bodies and denying the significance of the pain they experience, Moreau shows his abhorrence of bodies in general – he desires to leave the body and all its weaknesses behind. But in denying the body, he perverts human nature into something it’s not – the body is as central to human experience as the mind.

Moreau cannot succeed in turning animals into humans to his satisfaction because he misunderstands what it means to be human and animal both. He says of his animal/human creations that:

Least satisfactory of all is something that I cannot touch – somewhere – I cannot determine where – in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear.

He wants to drive what he sees as the beast out of the human, and yet what he considers “beast” – the body that feels pain and experiences instincts and cravings – is inseparable from the human. Prendick separates himself morally from Moreau when he recognizes the humanity of one of Moreau’s creations:

It may seem a strange contradiction in me – I cannot explain the fact –, but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realized again the fact of its humanity.

This is a redeeming moment for Prendick, who, rather than allowing this creature to enter Moreau’s torture chamber once again, shoots it. This is an act of mercy.

Okay – there is so much more going on in this novel, but I’ll leave it up to my fellow Slaves to point those things out.