Category Archives: Books

I finished Elizabeth Taylor’s novel In a Summer Season over my vacation, and although I had some reservations about it at first, by the end, I was converted. It is a slow-moving book, and although some dramatic things happen at the novel’s end, for the most part, the book is quiet in tone and action. My reading of the book suffered from comparison with my previous fiction read, Jose Saramago’s Blindness, which was about large-scale social and political events and about barely hanging on to humanity and life. In contrast, Taylor’s themes of marriage, money, and the problems of leisure seemed small.

But that was entirely unfair, since for many people those themes are not small, and I really do like the type of novel that excels at anatomizing relationships and conversations and everyday struggles. Once I had thoroughly moved out of the world of Blindness, I adjusted to Taylor’s different pace and atmosphere and began to enjoy it.

The story is about a widowed woman, Kate, in her 40s who has married again, this time a man 10 years younger than she. Before her first husband died, she had seemed to be heading into a quiet life of reading and walking and listening to music with her cultured husband; she has two children who are nearly grown up, and plenty of money with which to live comfortably. The new husband, Dermot, changes all that, however — he is a completely different type, interested in nights at the pub rather than in the living room, unable to get Henry James references Kate’s friends make, a little too interested in fancy cars and aware of the attractiveness of younger women. Everyone around Kate expects the marriage to fail; they are all waiting for it to happen, rather gleefully. Kate knows this, and she also knows that she loves Dermot, and part of the novel’s interest is in what happens to their marriage — the ways Kate makes sense of what is happening to Dermot and to herself.

Kate’s old friend Charles and his daughter move back into their neighborhood, and the novel traces the relationships among the two families, the way the past weighs on them all, for Charles’s wife has died, and the two dead spouses haunt the living.

What is so delicious about the novel is Taylor’s probing of the characters’ minds. The reference to Henry James is not gratuitous: Taylor dissects the speech and body language and interactions of her characters in a wonderfully Jamesian manner. This, I think, is one of my favorite novelistic modes. But Taylor refers repeatedly to one specific James novel, The Spoils of Poynton, a book about people’s obsession with taste and houses and objects. One of Taylor’s characters gets involved in an antiques business, an obvious reference to Spoils, but the entire novel explores the relationship of people to their place and their possessions. Dermot feels more like a guest in Kate’s home rather than someone who belongs there, and this awkward relationship to place tells us something about his character.

I’m curious as to why Elizabeth Taylor is better known in Britain than America; before becoming a blog reader, I had never heard of her and I don’t think people I know have heard of her either. It interests me the way reading tastes and author fortunes differ on either side of the ocean.

I’m about 100 pages into Swann’s Way and noticing how often Proust talks about art, and how he even more often talks about reading. His descriptions of the experience of reading are among the best I’ve ever read. (I feel, as I’m reading this, that I find something blog-worthy on just about every page. How do people who try to write something large and definitive about this book do it?) When it comes to writing about Proust, what I most want to do is give you a quotation and say, isn’t that great? And then another quotation and another, and say, isn’t that just brilliant? Don’t you love it?

On the narrator’s grandmother and books:

Though she judged frivolous reading to be as unhealthy as sweets and pastries, it did not occur to her that a great breath of genius might have a more dangerous and less invigorating influence on the mind even of a child than would the open air and the sea breeze on his body.

That’s the wonder and the danger of books, isn’t it, that you just never know what effect they will have. Yes, children should read great works of genius, and, no, you absolutely cannot control how they read them or what they will learn. This lesson seems worth learning, though; again, about the grandmother:

In fact, she could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive an intellectual profit, and especially that which beautiful things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasure elsewhere than in the satisfactions of material comfort and vanity.

The novel describes a tension between art for the sake of beauty and art for the sake of moral edification. The tension appears in the grandmother’s attitude – she wants art to teach an anti-materialistic lesson and yet she thinks in terms of “intellectual profit.” The language of materialism is still there. Are we supposed to “gain something” from art? Or are we supposed to seek out beauty for beauty’s sake? Or, in seeking out beauty for beauty’s sake, do we gain something, perhaps unintentionally? The narrator (and presumably Proust) comes down on the side of art for art’s sake. This is about the narrator’s mother reading aloud from a George Sand novel; Sand’s prose:

always breathes that goodness, that moral distinction which mama had learned from my grandmother to consider superior to all else in life, and which I was to teach her only much later not to consider superior to all else in books too …

What the narrator wants is not moral distinction, but beauty. For him, any lessons to be learned from art begin with beauty, not with a moral sense.

The narrator often thinks in artistic terms, in terms of how a novelist or a painter might see the world. He thinks about his childhood view of Swann, so different from the Swann he knew as an adult, and says about the mistaken, childhood version of Swann that he “resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality.”

This reminds me of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie where every portrait Mr. Lloyd paints comes to look like Miss Jean Brodie rather than the ostensible subject. The artists in both examples see what they want to see, paint what they are really thinking about rather than what appears in front of them. The way people make sense of their lives, then, the things they are willing to see and the things they aren’t, what they choose to focus on and what they block out, is similar to the way artists take the materials they have around them and transform them to fit into their own vision. It’s all an act of interpretation, and we all do it, all the time.

This interpretation, this transformation of the everyday, can happen in conversation too. Describing the “lady in pink,” the narrator says:

She had taken some insignificant remark of my father’s, had worked it delicately, turned it, given it a precious appellation, and encasing it with one of her glances of the finest water, tinged with humility and gratitude, had given it back changed into an artistic jewel, into something “completely exquisite.”

An “artist” can be found anywhere, transforming the seemingly insignificant into something beautiful. I can see why Virginia Woolf admired Proust; this scene reminds me of Mrs. Ramsay and her dinner party; Mrs. Ramsay is another artist whose medium is people and conversation, an artist who can transform a meal – a thing that happens every day – into something exquisite and perfect.

I haven’t even gotten to the reading scene, so I must return to it later, or perhaps someone else will write about it. It is a wonderful description of the way the book, the mind, and the outside world blur when one is reading.

I finished Blindness by Jose Saramago recently; this is the first novel of his that I’ve read, and I liked it very much; it’s a powerful novel that is dark and violent but profound and moving too. The story is about a plague of white blindness that hits an unnamed city; it begins with an old man driving, stopped at an intersection, who suddenly can see nothing but white. The blindness spreads from person to person, eventually reaching nearly everybody. The city government desperately tries to do something to fix the situation; it quarantines the earliest victims in a mental hospital. They are essentially abandoned. Since no one knows what causes the blindness or how it spreads, except from person to person like a virus, everyone is terrified of contact with another blind person, and the blind people in the hospital are left to organize themselves, receiving only semi-regular deliveries of food from soldiers who stay as far away from them as possible.

For most of the book we follow a small group of internees as they struggle for survival in the hospital, which quickly turns into a vision of hell. They try to organize themselves to find their way around, to distribute the meager food rations, to find beds for everyone, to stay healthy, but how do you organize a hospital full of blind people? Even simple things like counting how many people are in a room become complicated, especially when these people have no reason to trust each other, beyond the idea, which not everyone shares, that trusting each other might help them survive. It becomes a question of deciding whether to trust other people, and risk being taken advantage of, or trying to make it on one’s own.

As I read, I found myself thinking a lot about what it would feel like to be blind, and, in a testament to how engrossing this book can be, imagining that I was blind, so that I would have to look up from my book and remind myself that I can see after all. I became so absorbed in trying to understand what life in the mental hospital was like, that I had to remind myself, no, you won’t have trouble walking out of your study and down the stairs, because unlike these characters, you can actually see. The book inspires a level of empathy that can be frightening at times.

None of the characters are named; they are known by some short description, the girl with the dark glasses, for example, or the doctor and the doctor’s wife. And their dialogue isn’t clearly separated either. Saramago doesn’t use quotation marks or new paragraphs for new speakers, and he doesn’t separate the dialogue out into separate sentences either. Everything blurs together, so that it’s difficult sometimes to know who is speaking what. He writes in long sentences, with many run-ons. I haven’t settled on a good reason why he does this, and I’d be happy to hear other readers’ thoughts on this.

But I suppose all of these techniques heighten the sense that this horror could be happening anywhere, to anybody. It’s not really important to have a specific city and specific characters’ names (although the characters themselves are well-drawn and distinct), and even to know who says what all the time. What are important are the power dynamics among the groups of people: the soldiers and the internees, the various groups formed among the internees, the men and the women, the young and the old, the healthy and the sick. Another blogger asked me what I thought of the book’s portrayal of women; I noticed the narrator drawing on gender stereotypes now and then, but it’s difficult to sort out what to make of this because the narrator is an elusive figure. The narrator moves in and out of the characters’ minds, giving us their thoughts, but at times, that narrator seems to speak for the city itself, and I don’t think I would conflate the narrator with Saramago. And at one point one of the women in the hospital, knowing she is about to be raped, worries that she will find some pleasure in it. This moment was jarring, a false note, I felt, but the rape itself is pure violence, as the woman immediately realizes. One of the novel’s main characters, a rape victim, finds a way of subverting the power dynamic involved in the rape, and this becomes an important turning point in the novel.

This is most definitely a dark and emotionally difficult read, with plenty of insights into just how depraved human beings can become. But it has a lot to tell us about what might happen in an expected disaster – both the atrocities people are capable of committing, and the beautiful, compassionate actions they are capable of as well.

Writing about Proust makes me nervous, just like the thought of reading him once did. But now I’ve read enough to know the reading is not so very, very difficult. And now’s the time to learn that writing about him isn’t so very, very difficult either.

For me, the trick to reading Proust is patience; I can’t read too many pages at once, or I’ll feel like I’ve got too much to absorb. What this means is that I’ll be reading Proust forever, which, at this early point at least, I’m thinking isn’t so bad. Because what a companion the narrator is turning out to be! I love following his thoughts wherever they lead, and they do lead all over the place, from one time to another, one story to another.

Most of the first section is taken up with the narrator’s memories of his childhood, and especially his childhood attempts to claim his mother’s attention – specifically, to make sure she gives him his goodnight kiss. The pain he feels when he can’t have her attention is overwhelming – I feel his despair and sadness very strongly. It reminds me that children, with very little experience of the world, have no larger context with which to understand their sufferings. The narrator as a child has nothing else in his life but his family; they are his universe, and when the universe doesn’t follow its regular patterns, it is, truly, a catastrophe. The novel begins with the narrator as an adult looking back on his childhood; this structure leads us to wonder what the true meaning of this childhood suffering is. Is it really that the child lacks a larger context with which to make sense of pain and loss, and when he gains one, this suffering at his mother’s absence will subside? Or does gaining a larger context change nothing, so that one’s childhood sufferings really become the defining moments of one’s life? This passage leads me to think it is the latter:

But for a little while now, I have begun to hear again very clearly, if I take care to listen, the sobs that I was strong enough to contain in front of my father and that broke out only when I found myself alone again with Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is now becoming quieter around me that I can hear them again, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamor of the town during the day that one would think they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.

In the midst of the child’s suffering, however, I found humorous scenes, particularly of the narrator’s great-aunts. When Swann gives the family a case of wine (for those of you not familiar with the novel, Swann is a friend of the narrator’s parents, and a frequent visitor at their house), the aunts thank him in a manner so obscure Swann could never recognize the thank you for what it was, but the aunts are confident they have done their social duty. They comically refuse to recognize Swann’s true social status, much higher than they give him credit for. One of the great-aunts:

Had him push the piano around and turn the pages on the evenings when my grandmother’s sister sang, handling this creature, who was elsewhere so sought after, with the naïve roughness of a child who plays with a collector’s curio no more carefully than with some object of little value.

This mistake leads the narrator to consider the uncertainty of identity:

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

The “Swann” that the narrator’s family sees is very much their own construction – they see only parts of him, the parts they are comfortable with and that make sense to them – and the “Swann” that other people see will be very different.

Not only is our perception of other people incomplete, contingent, shaped by what we are willing and able to see in them and not what is really “there, ” but our perception of ourselves is equally uncertain. It is this idea that introduces the famous “madeleine” scene. About our relationship with our own past, the narrator says:

It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.

The narrator then goes on to discuss the madeline dipped in tea and the memories this suddenly and unexpectedly invokes in him. He has no control over these memories; they are involuntary, coming to him without any foreknowledge or effort on his part. Because of the tea and the madeleine, consumed at just the right time, memories flood him, memories that, as I understand it, he will spend many of the following pages describing. But he might possibly have missed this experience entirely; it is chance that allows us to access our own pasts, our chance encounters with objects that can suddenly unlock memories held unknowingly in our minds. When the objects that surround us do speak to us in this way, telling us something about who we are, then we can only accept it as a gift we are giving to ourselves – a gift of ourselves to ourselves.