Category Archives: Fiction

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?

I have begun reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, and I can already tell I’m going to need to read it again. I’m considering reading it again immediately after I finish the first time around, although I’ll wait to see how I feel when I get there. It’s a short book, 150 pages with large font, and I’ve already read about 45.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of it or even how to describe my difficulty knowing what to make of it. Perhaps quoting the opening line is the best thing to do:

Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin in which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms — gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken.

Yes, that gives you a taste of what it’s like to read this book. The prose is exquisitely well-crafted; I love how this sentence slowly winds its way around to its point, taking in along the way all kinds of information about Hedvig, who turns out not to be a character in the book at all, but is important, perhaps, for the way she sets the tone and gives us information about what kind of person that son will be — who is a character in the book.

The pace of the book is both fast and slow; after two chapters a lot of events have occurred — that son has grown up and now has a child of his own — but the narrator also lingers over conversations at length, allowing the character called “the doctor,” although I don’t think he really is one, to go on and on. I’m not always sure exactly what he’s saying. The characters seem a little like Hedvig, larger than life, not quite real, and fascinating.

You see why I’m going to have to read this book again? It’s not coming together for me in the way books usually do by the time I’m nearly 1/3 of the way through. But this book strikes me as good enough to spend some time with, trying to figure it out.

I finished! I’m sorry Walter Scott, I really tried. I wanted to like this book; I was patient and gave it time to get better after a slow start. I kept hoping and hoping that the action would pick up, the characters become more meaningful — and more comprehensible — the romances would get more interesting, but it never happened for me. Well, Walter Scott, you obviously have done quite well enough without my approval; you’ve got so many books in print after nearly 200 years, and you have lots of readers, including, as a matter of fact, my father, who reads every book of yours he can find. You don’t really need me.

I wish, though, that you had toned down those accents a bit. Baron Bradwardine was so nearly impossible to follow. His high-flown diction and his Latin phrases mixed in everywhere drove me crazy. The problem is, I stopped trying to figure him out after a while. I could follow the action without understanding every word he said, and so it turned out not to be worth my while to decipher his language. Couldn’t he have talked just a bit more normally?

I found myself having a hard time caring about any of the characters too. They were all types, not real people. Edward was foolish, though not irremediably so; clearly he was going to have to learn a lesson, but, also clearly, he would prove himself capable of doing so. Rose was the perfect young heroine, beautiful, modest, capable but not overly smart. It was crystal clear to me after I encountered her what her fate would be. And the same for Flora and Fergus, the Scottish siblings — there wasn’t much doubt what would happen to them. Both of them fascinate Edward, tempt him, lure him into questionable things, but both of them would ultimately prove themselves too dangerous. There was no suspense! Nothing to keep my interest for very long. And I’m generally very bad at predicting the endings of books. When I can figure it out, you’re in trouble.

And here’s another thing I don’t get: you’re Scottish, right? Why portray Scotland and the Scottish people as unstable and dangerous, and the English as the bastions of safety and normality and order? Why exoticize the Scottish? They lure Edward into all kinds of danger and you portray his attraction to them as understandable but flawed and a weakness he needs to outgrow. Well, okay, let me revise this — you’re really portraying the Highlanders as exotic and dangerous. The Lowlanders are merely odd. So am I supposed to see the Lowlanders as roughly aligned with the English in their “normalcy” and the Highlanders as the dangerous other? I’m not sure I like this.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t read other books of yours. I’m curious about why you were so popular, and I don’t feel I understand it yet. What was it about Waverley that fascinated people so much? Those Highlanders are kind of romantic and thrilling, but, still, even there I thought you could do a better job describing them and their lives. Anyway, maybe I’ll try Ivanhoe next. I’m willing to give you one more shot.

I thoroughly enjoyed Barbara Pym’s 1952 novel Excellent Women. It tells the story of Mildred Lathbury, a woman in her 30s whose life is taken up with part-time work helping “impoverished gentlewomen,” attending services and volunteering at the church, and maintaining friendships with the vicar and his sister. She also finds herself endlessly caught up in other people’s business:

I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people’s business, and if she is also a clergyman’s daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her.

She is one of the “excellent women” of the novel’s title, women who aren’t wrapped up in families of their own and so have time to — and are expected to — devote themselves to taking care of others.

As the novel opens, a new couple is moving into the flat above Mildred’s; they are Helena and Rocky, and Mildred does not know what to make of them. Helena is an anthropologist and not terribly interested in her marriage; she spends her time with fellow-anthropologist Everard, working on writing up their field notes. She is a terrible housekeeper, a fact that disturbs and intrigues Mildred. Rocky is utterly charming and perhaps a trifle fake; Mildred quickly falls for him, but also wonders, as she does, whether Rocky really means to charm her, or whether he simply can’t help but make women fall in love with him.

Helena and Rocky disrupt Mildred’s quiet life. She is quickly doing things she has never done before, such as attending lectures in anthropology and mediating marital squabbles. Her life is further disrupted when the vicar — her close friend and up to now a confirmed bachelor — begins a flirtation and gets engaged.

The novel is told in the first person, which Pym uses very cleverly to capture Mildred’s thoughtful, intelligent voice, but also to make clear to the reader her naivete and lack of experience; Helena, for example, hints that the vicar might be gay, but this passes right over Mildred’s head. And yet Mildred knows she hasn’t experienced much — she’s very aware of her limitations, painfully aware at times. She does her best, wading into the deeper waters recent experience has led her to, but she also longs for things to be the way they once were, quiet and comfortable.

As much as she is aware of her lack of experience, however, Mildred has a strong sense of identity; she knows who she is, what her social role is, and how she wants to live. As an “excellent woman,” she accepts that many people expect her to help them out — why shouldn’t she, after all? What else does she have to do? She tries to be useful, but also to keep from being used — and here she fails now and then, as each of the main characters takes advantage of her at one point or another. It’s frustrating at times to watch Mildred trying and frequently failing to maintain the balance between taking care of others and taking care of herself.

For me, the pleasure of reading this novel lies in Mildred’s astute understanding of her small world; she knows it’s a small world, but what’s important is that it’s hers and she wants to enjoy it. She’s capable of viewing it with a critical, satirical eye, but also of loving it. She strikes me as courageous — both in accepting her life as it is and in remaining open to the ways it can possibly change.

I’m in the middle of listening to the third Maisie Dobbs novel on audio for the second time; I listened to it about a year ago, and then listened to the first and second novels in the series last spring and this fall. I decided to listen to the third one again partly for the pure pleasure of it, and partly to get the whole story in the proper sequence. I’m trying to get the fourth one from the library (although my library system is a little skittish about sending CDs from one library to another, which is annoying). I wonder what it would be like to read one of these books … I’ve come to associate them so closely with a voice speaking to me as I drive to and from work.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think in the third installment Winspear is ridding her prose of some of the tics that annoyed me a bit in the second book. One of these is the habitual list of clothing her major and minor characters, and even those who are too minor to count as minor characters, are wearing: e.g., “the assistant, dressed in a blue cotton dress and matching cap decorated with yellow piping ….” Everyone seemed to get this treatment.

A little more serious, in my opinion, is the way Maisie never eats. In the second novel, she’s always picking at her food, skipping meals, realizing she’s hungry and then losing her appetite, asking for just a bit of dry toast, please. As far as I can tell, this doesn’t play into any of the novel’s themes in any way; it’s just a habit, and one Maisie seems to have lost by the third novel. I hate it when people don’t eat! As I was listening, I was trying to figure out how Maisie made it through her days with no food in her stomach and why she didn’t pass out from hunger at least once. I believe in all the other ways Maisie is a perfect character — I’m happy to believe in her amazing intuition, her ability to read body language, her way with setting people at ease — but I don’t believe she can make it through a day without eating.

I realize I may sound a little odd complaining about this. I’m kind of sensitive about my sensitivity about food. But as someone who can’t stand (can’t stand!!!) to be hungry, ever, even for a short while (I think my illness has made this worse), I got so distracted by Maisie’s refusal to eat. When I don’t eat, trust me, you should stay far, far away.  I don’t quite get why other people aren’t the same way.

The not-eating thing feels like a quirk, but it also feels like a way of getting across the idea that Maisie is simply too important and too busy to spend much time or energy on food. It’s a way of saying she’s too wrapped up in her mind to take care of her body. Eating is too gross, too physical, and all Maisie’s energy has to go toward more ethereal things such as the mind and the emotions.

But, thank heavens, in the third novel, she’s finally recognizing she needs food; I just listened to a scene where she declares to her friend Priscilla that she’s starving and wants her lunch. Much better.

I’m in the middle of two novels right now, and let’s just say that the experience of reading these books has been quite different.

One of my novels is Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which, I’d like to say, is a truly excellent novel. I’m about 2/3 of the way through, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I’ll write more about it when I’ve finished, but for now, here’s the opening paragraph:

“Ah, you ladies! Always on the spot when there’s something happening!” The voice belonged to Mr. Mallett, one of our churchwardens, and its roguish tone made me start guiltily, almost as if I had no right to be discovered outside my own front door.

This opening captures the tone of the novel perfectly. The phrase “ah, you ladies” suggests that we are going to be dealing with gender stereotypes, which we certainly are — the “ladies” of this phrase and the “excellent women” of the title refer to unmarried women who find themselves wrapped up in other people’s lives. The narrator’s startled guilt is perfect too; the narrator turns out to be Mildred Lathbury, and she never feels quite at home anywhere. She takes silly accusations like Mr. Mallett’s seriously, does her best to please everybody, but still never quite finds herself fitting in anywhere. The reference to churchwardens is a clue that the novel has much to say about the church; Mildred is a clergyman’s daughter and her best friends are the vicar and his sister. The novel is so delightfully English.

The other novel is Walter Scott’s Waverley, which is very English in its own way, and not nearly so delightful. I’ve tried my best with this novel, people, and it’s just not working for me. I’m going to finish it, but that’s only because I simply must read Walter Scott, since I study his time period and he’s so important in it. But oh boy, is this a tough one. I thought it was just the beginning that was slow and that it would improve as it went on, and I suppose it’s improved marginally, but only marginally.

Part of the problem is the slow pace of the action, but that’s not it entirely because I really don’t mind books with slow paces. I like them, in fact. I love books like Clarissa, which is exactly where you turn if you want the slowest pace possible. The other problem is the Scottish dialects Scott uses and the quirky forms of speech he gives his characters. What do you make of passages like this one:

I crave you to be hushed, Captain Waverley; you are elsewhere, peradventure, sui juris, — foris-familiated, that is, and entitled, it may be, to think and resent for yourself; but in my domain, in this poor Barony of Bradwardine, and under this roof, which is quasi mine, being held by tacit relocation by a tenant at will, I am in loco parentis to you, and bound to see you scathless.

Or this one:

“It represents,” he said, “the chosen crest of our family, a bear, as ye observe, and rampant, because a good herald will depict every animal in its noblest posture: as a horse salient, a greyhound currant, and, as may be inferred, a ravenous animal in actu ferociori, or in a voracious, lacerating, and devouring posture. Now, sir, we hold this most honourable achievement by the wappen-brief, or concession of arms, of Frederick Redbeard, Emperor of Germany, to my predeccessor, Godmund Bradwardine …”

and on and on. I can only handle so much of this before I put the book down and move on to something else. Sorry, Walter Scott.

Thank you, Litlove, for recommending this book to us! Andrei Makine’s The Woman Who Waited was the Slaves of Golconda group read this time around; it’s a short novel about a woman, Vera, waiting in a small Russian village for her lover to return from the war. She’s been waiting for 30 years. Actually, what the novel is really about is the unnamed narrator’s attempts to tell Vera’s life story. The Woman Who Waited is the story of how he tries to understand who she is and why she has waited so long, instead of leaving the decaying town and forging a life elsewhere. She’s a mystery the narrative dances around.

The narrator has come to Vera’s town, Mirnoe, on a research project; he is supposed to write reports on “local habits and customs.” His instructions are to “go and jot down a few fibs about the gnomes in their forests” and on the side he will gather material for an “anti-Soviet satire.” And so, befitting this project, he comes to the town with a detached and ironic attitude, ready to observe and pass judgment on the simple villagers clinging to their old ways.

When he arrives in Mirnoe, however, he quickly finds that the reality of the place will not let him keep his distance or maintain his ironic pose. In one episode, the narrator and Vera travel to a nearby village to persuade its last inhabitant to leave her home and move to Mirnoe. The narrator finds himself shaken by what he sees:

I went over to them, offered my help. I saw they both had slightly reddened eyes. I reflected on my ironic reaction just now when reading that sentence about Stalin ordering the defence of Leningrad. Such had been the sarcastic tone prevalent in our dissident intellectual circle. A humour that provided real mental comfort, for it placed us above the fray. Now, observing these two women who had just shed a few tears as they reached their decision, I sensed that our irony was in collision with something that went beyond it.

He sees the real human suffering that lies behind historical events, events he had only understood before in their broad sweep.

But it is the narrator’s changing feelings toward Vera that really shake him out of his detachment (some spoilers ahead). He cannot understand what motivates her to continue waiting; he cannot pierce the mystery that he sees whenever he observes her. And much of the novel is exactly that — the narrator watching Vera, following her every move, trying to figure out what she is doing, where she is going, what she is feeling and thinking. The novel’s opening portrays his attempts to understand her and the way that language fails him; we first get a sentence of description in quotation marks, as though it’s from a journal or an essay, followed by this:

This is the sentence I wrote down at that crucial moment when we believe we have another person’s measure (this woman, Vera’s). Up to that point all is curiosity, guesswork, a hankering after confessions. Hunger for the other person, the lure of their hidden depths. But once their secret has been decoded, along come these words, often pretentious and dogmatic, dissecting, pinpointing, categorizing … The other one’s mystery has been tamed.

The statement and commentary that comprise the novel’s first page show the limits of language one encounters when trying to understand another human being. The novel is a kind of unraveling, moving from this certainty toward uncertainty and surprise. The narrator never does really understand Vera, and he tries in many ways, spending time with her, talking with her, stalking her, finally becoming her lover. She always eludes him, and ultimately she proves herself to be much more sophisticated, rational, and in control than he could ever be. She may seem foolish and pathetic for having spent her life waiting for a lover who will never return, and yet she has found peace and beauty and a kind of contentment.

The novel’s writing is beautiful, spare and suggestive; it captures the landscape of northern Russia with its forests, lakes, and snow. It makes me long to be there. I must admit that this is one of those books that I’m liking more and more as I write about it; at first my reaction was admiring but a little dispassionate. The more I think about it, though, the more I appreciate what a wonderful creation Vera is and what a powerful evocation Makine has given us of one person’s fumbling attempts to grapple with the mystery of another life.

I wrote earlier about how much I liked Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and I’d like to try to explain why a little further. I’m generally not a science fiction reader, and that may not change, but I did enjoy this book enough to be open to other recommendations, or perhaps to reading other Ursula Le Guin books (thoughts, anyone??).

Ultimately what did it for me is the personal relationship the novel describes. I’ll always go for the social and personal dynamics in a novel, rather than for its other attractions — in this case, the political dimension Le Guin develops. I can’t really describe the relationship that develops between the two main characters, Genly Ai, the alien visitor on the planet Gethen, and Estraven, a Gethenian political leader, because it would give too much of the story away. But the novel opens with an encounter between these two, and as they meet and interact throughout the novel, their ideas and feelings about each other change in dramatic and satisfying ways. It’s through these two that Le Guin explores most deeply what it’s like to confront “otherness” in someone else and to try and understand that person, in spite of cultural obstacles. There is much they say to each other that the other misinterprets, and it’s a pleasure to watch them realize their mistakes and try to overcome them.

But the political element of the novel is fascinating too; the two countries on the planet Gethen that we hear about, Karhide and Orgoreyn, are going through a transformation, within themselves and in relation to each other. Karhide has modernized itself in many ways but has not yet developed some of the problems our modernized countries on earth experience, such as war or the consequences of the industrial revolution. Its citizens are not nationalistic in their thinking. And yet these things are changing; Karhide finds itself under new leadership that seeks to foster fear and hatred of other peoples and countries in order to consolidate power. Orgoreyn is a much harsher place; it has a system of surveillance and a powerful government reminiscent of fascist states here on earth. Tensions between these two countries are rising.

Into this political situation comes Genly Ai, a representative from the Ekumen, an alliance of planets dedicated to furthering, as Genly puts it:

Material profit. Increase of knowledge. The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. The enrichment of harmony and the greater glory of God. Curiosity. Adventure. Delight.

The members of the Ekumen have left behind many of the problems Karhide and Orgoreyn are only now beginning to face; they do not understand patriotism or nationalism and do not participate in war. The story, then, is about how well Genly fares in his quest to get the countries of Gethen to join the enlightened Ekumen, which can potentially change the course of their development.

So there’s all this going on, which is a pleasure to read, and there’s also an adventure tale of a trek across glaciers that’s incredibly exciting. And there are also sections interspersed between many of the chapters that tell of Gethenian myths, legends, and historical events so you get a sense of the history and culture of the people who inhabit Gethen. And there are the fascinating sex practices and gender dynamics that are so different from those on earth, which I wrote about here.

It took me a little while to get fully involved in the story — I supposed I’m not used to learning about a brand new world as one usually must when reading science fiction — but once I got a little ways into it, I was hooked and didn’t want it to end.

Remember how I was complaining that the opening of Waverley is a bit slow? Well, Walter Scott has read my thoughts and kindly apologized:

I beg pardon, once and for all, of those readers who take up novels merely for amusement, for plaguing them so long with old-fashioned politics, and Whig and Tory, and Hanoverians and Jacobites. The truth is, I cannot promise them that this story shall be intelligible, not to say probable, without it … Those who are contented to remain with me will be occasionally exposed to the dulness inseparable from heavy roads, steep hills, sloughs, and other terrestrial retardations; but, with tolerable horses and a civil driver … I engage to get as soon as possible into a more picturesque and romantic country, if my passengers incline to have some patience with me during my first stages.

Thank you for the warning! I’m not quite to the “picturesque and romantic country” yet, but I’m certain I’ll get there and this novel will be fun — it surely was so popular for a reason. Can you imagine a contemporary author asking for the reader’s patience in this way? Yes, the novel will be dull in places, but bear with me; I promise there’ll be good bits.

Actually, there are good bits even in the introductory chapters; the very first chapter doesn’t begin the story at all but is a discussion of the novel’s title, and if you know me, you’ll know I can’t resist this kind of novelistic navel-gazing. What he’s doing in discussing the title is placing his novel in its context amongst other novels of the period. He found the choice of “Waverley” relatively simple, but his subtitle plagued him for a while. He considered “Waverley, a Tale of Other Days,” but that sounded too Radcliffean; if he had used that subtitle:

… must not every novel-reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited, and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts?

He considered “Waverley, a Romance from the German,” but then readers would have expected:

a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors, and dark-lanterns.

“Waverley, A Sentimental Tale” would have meant (this one is particularly good):

a heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of transporting from castle to cottage, although she herself be sometimes obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, and is more than once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but a blowzy peasant girl, whose jargon she hardly can understand.

And the last one, “Waverley, A Tale of the Times,” which must have involved:

a dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal thinly veiled, and if lusciously painted, so much the better.

Sorry for all the quotations, but I find them irresistible. Scott gets away with both establishing what his own work does and doesn’t do, and making fun of the stereotypes of the fiction of his time. What he settles on is “Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since,” a time not so long ago as to be exotic nor so recent as to make people think they are reading a commentary on modern times. Instead, the time period allows him to put the focus on his characters and on their passions, instead of on their context. He wants characters likely to be seen as universal types, and he decides this is the best way to achieve them.

So, yes, after that wonderful opening chapter and with the promise of excitement to come, I’m willing to put up with a little dullness.

I have very mixed feelings about the introduction to my edition of Walter Scott’s Waverley; I’ve read only part of it, as I don’t like to hear an editor’s thoughts on the plot and characters until I’ve finished the novel, but I do like to read about the author’s life and context, so from that section of the introduction, I can quote a bit I found immensely annoying:

Scott’s triumph became a triumph for the form he wrote in. The novel gained a new authority and prestige, and even more important perhaps, a new masculinity. After Scott the novel was no longer in danger of becoming the preserve of the woman writer and the woman reader. Instead it became the appropriate form for writers’ richest and deepest imaginative explorations of human experience.

Yes, it’s the idea that women’s concerns are narrow and small, things that no man need worry about, but men’s concerns are wide and rich and universal. And heaven save us from those ubiquitous women writers and readers who are always threatening to take over everything. What the hell? The introduction was published in 1972, which is not to excuse it because of its relatively early date, but to wonder why Penguin couldn’t bother to get a less sexist editor in all that time.

The editor somewhat redeems himself with his discussion of Scott’s faded reputation. Scott was immensely, hugely popular in his time and was surely one of the most influential novelists of the 19C, so what happened? The editor claims that the 20C’s reaction against Victorianism and especially against Romanticism is to blame. His comparison of Scott and Austen is useful; he describes how his fortunes fell as hers rose:

Where Jane Austen is strong, Scott is weak: her careful sense of form and structure against his slack and slow-moving narrative procedures; her superb control of the complexities of tone against his pedestrian heavy-footedness; her profoundly ironic vision of human nature and human society against his complacent conventionality of attitude; her flexibility of language and style against his stilted, formal rhetoric.

I’ve been trying to imagine a world where Scott is valued more highly than Austen, and I can’t quite do it; it’s very hard for me to see why not everyone in all times and all places would see the genius of Austen and the lesser light of Scott as I do, but maybe that’s just me.  Oh, wait — I haven’t actually read Scott yet.  Mustn’t rush to judgment.

I’ve begun the first few chapters, and … well … they aren’t that good. I found them kind of obscure and hard to follow. But I know things will get improve and I fully expect to enjoy the book. As Sandra has rather wonderfully pointed out, 19C novels don’t tend to begin with a bang.

What a pleasure this book was to read. Many thanks to Emily for giving me a copy for my birthday!

Palace Walk by Naguib Mafouz is a long, sprawling saga about a family in Cairo who finds itself caught up in political turmoil at the end of World War I. The earlier sections of the novel are devoted to describing the family — a father and mother with five children — and its dynamics. As I’ve described before, the father, Al-Sayyid Ahmad, has an extremely tight hold over the rest of the family; he dictates what everyone does and where they go.

This is particularly hard on the women, as Al-Sayyid Ahmad insists they follow extremely strict traditional rules of modesty — the mother, Amina, is not allowed out on the streets at all, except for a very occasional visit to her mother. In one incident when Al-Sayyid Ahmad is away from home for a day, Amina breaks this rule and visits a local temple. It is an act of devotion, but it only lands her in trouble: out on the streets she gets hit by a car and when Al-Sayyid Ahmad discovers her injuries and finds out where she has been, he banishes her from the house. Only after his children and friends beg him to take her back does he allow her to return.

The novel describes the struggles each of the children have with this patriarchal authority; one son wants to marry, but Al-Sayyid Ahmad believes he is not ready and refuses to give permission. A daughter receives a marriage proposal she would gladly accept but the father is angry when he finds out the suitor has caught a glimpse of his daughter’s face through the window.

What the children don’t know, however, is that Al-Sayyid Ahmad spends his nights getting drunk, carousing with friends, and having love affairs. Amina sees his drunkenness every night, but even she doesn’t really know how he spends his time. Al-Sayyid Ahmad believes he is talented enough a person and strong enough a father to keep this double standard going; he is a model father as far as he is concerned, and he sees no need for consistency in his behavior.

As you can probably guess from this set-up, Al-Sayyid Ahmad is in for a world of frustration as his children find ways of doing what they want, in spite of their fear of him. The novel charts the increasing difficulty the father has in controlling them, a difficulty made much worse by increasing political unrest. The later sections of the novel become more political in nature, and tell the story of Egyptian demonstrations against the English occupiers. Violence takes over the city, putting the family and its traditional ways at risk.

The novel is slow-moving in the very best sense — it’s never dull or plodding, but rather rich and detailed about the lives and emotions of its characters. With his omniscient point of view, Mahfouz does a good job giving the reader a glimpse into the minds and emotions of many characters, and he can make us understand and even sympathize with the most unlikeable people. I like the way Mahfouz blends the personal, family story with the political one; I didn’t feel that the family story was told in the service of the political one or vice versa, but that Mahfouz wove the two together, showing how national dramas affect people’s intimate lives, and how the private world reaches out into and shapes the public one.

Fortunately for me, this is the first novel in a trilogy, so I have the pleasure of reading further in the lives of this family.