Category Archives: Fiction

The Literate Kitten has posted the following:

Just for fun, I decided to get a little dialogue going over the Powers of Austen … Which one is your favorite and why? Which haven’t you read? Are you not as in love with Austen as most readers — why? How has Jane influenced your reading or writing? Let’s get plain about Jane!

Okay, I’ll play. I’m curious to see if the Slaves of Golconda will choose Austen’s Lady Susan or one of my other choices (vote in the comments to the post below! Right now Lady Susan is tied with Johnson’s Rasselas) because I feel conflicted about reading it. On the one hand I’d love to because it’s Jane Austen and she’s one of my favorite writers ever in the whole entire world. But on the other hand, there’s something wonderful about there being a Jane Austen novel out there I haven’t yet read. Isn’t there something to be said for not reading a novel in order to keep the pleasure of anticipation always before me? Once I’ve read Lady Susan, there will be no more Austen novels for me to read, except for the unfinished ones and the short fictions. But since I love Austen so much, how can I refrain from reading more?

I’m surprised it took me so long to figure out Lady Susan exists. Somehow it took me forever to figure out that there are more than the big six novels.

Anyway, I’ve read the six main novels, and of those, Pride and Prejudice is my favorite, with Emma, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility coming in somewhere after that, and Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey last, although I believe I’ve read Northanger Abbey only once, so I haven’t given it enough time to really grow on me. I have no idea how many times I’ve read the other novels besides Northanger Abbey. Mansfield Park I may have read only twice, but the others I’ve probably read something like 3 – 8 times each. Some of them I’ve studied in class, some of them multiple times. So at this point I can’t keep count of my readings, and I can’t keep the reading experiences separate. It all blurs together. Pride and Prejudice is my favorite because it’s just so much fun — Elizabeth is the best heroine ever and Darcy is an irresistable hero. Mansfield Park is at the bottom of my list because it’s a bit slow, but I still find it fascinating — the pleasure of that book is probably more intellectual than emotional. I like the sharp, biting narrator of Sense and Sensibility and also the way Elinor and Marianne play against each other, I like the quieter tone of Persuasion and find Anne utterly sympathetic, and I like the richness of Austen’s characterization of Emma.

And how has she influenced my reading? I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that she pretty much defines what a novel is for me. A novel should provide a long, satisfying reading experience, it should have deep, complex characters, it should have a satisfying plot, it should have an interesting narrator (one who perhaps becomes a kind of character him/herself), and it should be about at least some of the following: family, love, sex, money, class, social interaction, and the experience of living in one’s mind.  I’ve read and enjoyed novels that don’t do these things, but still, this understanding of the genre is what comes to me most naturally, and that’s because I’ve absorbed so much Austen.

I’m sure I’ve written before about how I would find it hard to write anything critical about Austen — I don’t mean critical as in negative, but critical as in literary criticism — because everything she does seems natural to me. I would find it hard to try to look at how she does what she does; actually, I’m happy to have other people point these things out to me, but I wouldn’t want to have to figure it out myself. She’s someone I prefer to experience in a more elemental way, if that makes any sense.

I have very mixed feelings about this book; at times I hated it and at others I laughed or admired the writing or felt I could appreciate what Schulz was doing. Sometimes I was horrified by it.

It’s a series of short stories, sort of — I think of the chapters as being on the boundary line between stories and sketches. Some of them actually told a story with a plot, while others were more descriptive, without much, or any, narrative. They are about a young boy’s family and his city; I think we are safe in assuming that the main character is at least partly based on Schulz himself.

These stories are often fantastical. They might start off in a realistic mode, but most of them eventually veer off into the dream-like and the impossible. I wasn’t expecting this, and so I spent a lot of time figuring out what Schulz was doing and how I supposed to approach his stories. I found the reading experience to be disorienting — which isn’t a bad thing, really, although it wasn’t purely pleasure, either. As I was describing the stories to the Hobgoblin, he asked if they might be called “magical realism,” and I thought not, because to me magical realism is more about describing the fantastical or the magical as though it were real — to treat it matter-of-factly — when what Schulz does is the opposite; he takes the real and makes it strange and otherworldly.

My favorite chapters were the ones that had more narrative, such as “Birds” or “Cinnamon Shops.” The more descriptive chapters drove me crazy; I felt like I was drowning in Schulz’s incredibly dense language. As I look over the book trying to find a passage to show you what I mean, I realize that this isn’t bad writing really, not bad in the sense that Schulz loses control of it and his meaning gets away from him. Here’s an example:

Once Adela took me to the old woman’s house. It was early in the morning when we entered the small blue-walled room, with its mud floor, lying in a patch of bright yellow sunlight in the still of the morning broken only by the frighteningly loud ticking of a cottage clock on the wall. In a straw-filled chest lay the foolish Maria, white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence talked, the yellow, bright, evil silence delivered its monologue, argued, and loudly spoke its vulgar maniacal soliloquy. Maria’s time — the time imprisoned in her soul — had left her and — terribly real — filled the room, vociferous and hellish in the bright silence of the morning, rising from the noisy mill of the clock like a cloud of bad flour, powdery flour, the stupid flour of madmen.

I’m fine with the passage for the first two sentences, and even the third, although I do wonder what kind of “chest” Maria is lying in. I like the description of her as “white as a wafer and motionless like a glove.” Then we get the silence talking, and I feel like we’re entering into deeper waters, but I like the idea of silence talking, and even arguing and being loud. The last sentence begins to lose me, though — Maria’s time is filling the room? I sort of get it, if I stretch a bit. I like the image of the cloud of flour filling the room, but why the “stupid flour of madmen”? This book is full of language you can struggle with for a long time, if you want. Or, I suppose, you can refuse to struggle with it and just let it wash over you.

The sections that describe the father were the most powerful; it was these sections that horrified me. He goes back and forth between sanity and insanity, and during his insane times, he does things like keeping a flock of birds in the attic and crawling across the floor like a cockroach. And the family can’t really do anything about it. They often act as though he’s not there, as though there weren’t a completely insane man living in their midst. I wonder if some of the book’s mixing of fantasy and reality is the boy’s response to his father’s madness; in the world the boy lives in, how is he supposed to distinguish what is real and what is not? What does he have to hold on to that’s solid and certain?

Preparing myself for the one ride on the indoor trainer I’ve done so far this winter (mentioned in yesterday’s post), I went to the library to get an audiobook to listen to while I pedal. I picked up Tobias Wolff’s Old School, which I’d read an excerpt of a while back in the New Yorker, and which has stuck with me all this time. Alas, it didn’t make riding on the trainer any easier — I was hoping I would get caught up in the story and forget I was pedaling, but no such luck — but it has been an excellent book to listen to. I’ve taken it with me to listen to in the car a couple of times now and am about halfway through.

It’s hard for me to separate what I’m liking about the book and what I’m liking about the reader and having the book read to me; I didn’t like the reader’s attempts at a southern accent all that much, but otherwise he’s done such a good job I’m finding myself laughing out loud as I’m driving along, something I rarely do when I’m reading, rather than listening to, a book. I often respond more emotionally to books I’m listening to as opposed to books I’m reading, and I’ve decided I must keep up the habit of listening to audiobooks, a habit I dropped when I stopped doing my ridiculously long commute of a couple years ago. I find it troubling that I have a stronger response to audiobooks than regular books, since that makes it seem like my response to regular books is weak, and I wonder what this says about me. But I suppose there’s nothing to do about it except listen to audiobooks regularly.

In the novel, Wolff’s first person narrator describes life in a boarding school, and at least for the narrator and his friends, literature and writing are very important. The school has a regularly-held contest where a famous writer comes to campus, reads student fiction or poetry, and selects a winner; that winner then gets to have a private audience with the famous writer. So far, the school has held two contests; for the first one, Robert Frost came to campus, and for the second, Ayn Rand.

What I love about the novel is the humor with which these visits and all the excitement they provoke are described. The narrator’s voice is wonderfully well-done, very sympathetic to his boyhood naivete and earnestness, but also able from the adult perspective to point out how funny he could be — how funny all the students could be. With each author’s visit there’s a set-piece where the author gives a speech or does a reading and the students and teachers challenge him or her and the authors talk back in a characteristic manner, Frost waxing eloquent about the value of poetic form, and Rand getting huffy and haughty and insisting that the best American novels ever are The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

And the boys’ attempts at writing are funny — I don’t mean that in a mean way, but they are typical productions of adolescents who take themselves very seriously. The boy who wins the Robert Frost contest writes a poem in a very earnest Frost-like manner, but apparently it’s so bad Frost thinks it’s a send-up of his style and chooses it as the winner because he thinks the boy is brave for making fun of him. When the narrator finds out that Ayn Rand will be visiting campus he reads The Fountainhead and becomes a convert, looking with contempt at the silly, self-sacrificing, weak people surrounding him who so foolishly fail to appreciate the value of selfishness. If you’ve ever gone through an Ayn Rand phase, you will find this section hysterically funny and just a little bit painful.

And I’m only halfway through the book. I’ll be sure to report back on the pleasures to be found in the second half.

A couple days ago I finished Mary McCarthy’s novel The Groves of Academe, and found it just the thing I needed back when I needed something fun to read. I must say that I’m fonder of her essays than I am of her fiction; her fiction is good but her essays are great. That said, I recommend this book, especially if you like academic satire. This book didn’t make me laugh out loud in quite the same way Richard Russo’s Straight Man did and it’s not as comprehensive a picture of college life as Jane Smiley’s Moo, but the writing is smarter than in either of those two novels, and more wicked. McCarthy is someone that, if I knew her when she was alive, I’d make sure I stayed on the good side of. She’s got one of the sharpest wits of any writer I know.

The story is about English professor Henry Mulcahy, who, we learn on the novel’s first page, has just been fired. He immediately jumps into action to get his job back, dragging his department into a controversy that soon engulfs the whole school. At issue here is Henry’s communist past (was he a member of the party earlier in his life and might he still be today? The novel was published in 1951 to give you some idea of why this is such a big deal) and his sick wife whose health might be irreparably harmed if she found out about the firing — a fact Henry claims the college President was fully aware of when he wrote the letter of dismissal. But most of all it is Henry’s personality that becomes the focus of the novel’s controversy.

For Henry truly is an awful human being. One of the chief pleasures of this book is the way McCarthy presents Henry to us; she recounts his thoughts with little editorializing, so that we get Henry’s self-justifications directly and can see the extent of his selfishness by watching his mind at work. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a character as self-absorbed as this one. Other faculty members make great sacrifices for him to try to save his job, and rather than being grateful, he gets angry because they did not make the sacrifices in precisely the way he wanted them to, and he pouts because by making great sacrifices in their own particular ways these people are shifting the attention away from him, where it should properly be. He is incapable of recognizing that he has ever done something wrong or that he has flaws and has responsibilities to people that he often fails to meet; everything he does it right, or at least it deserves justification and defense.

But he doesn’t come across solely as an awful human being; he also comes across as someone with great energy and great intelligence — admittedly, the sole use of which is to make life more comfortable for himself. But what makes the book so enjoyable is watching the characters respond to these positive things in Henry — the energy, the life, the color — and then watching them recover as they realize that he hasn’t told them the complete truth about his life. Henry is the riddle the book offers to the other characters and to readers: How come he has succeeded as much as he has in academia and what does it say about academia that he has done so? Is he worth defending? Should he stay at their school? Just when, if ever, is he telling the truth?

McCarthy’s portrait of college life is delicious, complete with academic in-fighting, competition, gossip, lying, and betrayal, and also intelligence, loyalty, great conversations, and, sometimes, the sincere desire to educate young people.

This is my last post for a while, as the Hobgoblin and I are heading out to my parents’ place in western New York state tomorrow. As they have very slow dial-up, I think I’ll have to do without blogs for a few days. It’ll be hard, but I’m going to try my best not to let it get to me. I’ll be back by the middle or end of next week.

I finished Orhan Pamuk’s Snow last night and was very impressed. It’s a beautiful book and one that taught me a lot about Turkey and Turkish culture. I don’t mean to make it sound didactic, but I do think that reading novels is a good way to get a sense of another country and culture. Snow dealt a lot with the conflict between Eastern and Western Europe — the main character Ka has been in exile in Germany for many years and in the novel returns to the Turkish city of Kars, and throughout, he is faced with questions about what it means to have become westernized but not to be fully western. Connected with this cultural conflict is the religious one — shortly after Ka arrives, the city of Kars undergoes a military coup, meant to keep religious conservatives from winning the upcoming election, and throughout the novel religious differences turn violent. Ka takes part in many philosophical and theological discussions about what it means to have given up his faith and about whether or not he has become an atheist.

Ka wanders the city and gets himself involved in adventures; he isn’t all that interested in all the conflict going on around him — he’d really rather write poems and talk to Ipek, the woman who is the real reason he has journeyed to Kars (the ostensible reason is to investigate a rash of suicides committed by young religiously conservative women who want to keep wearing their head scarves). All this is a way for Pamuk to write about religious and political conflict, but it’s also a way for him to consider the relationship of the artist to the political world. It seems like nearly everybody in the novel has aspirations to be a writer; so many people Ka talked with had poems stashed away somewhere or used Ka to try to find a publisher for their work. The novel’s closing section centers around a play, an incredibly loose adaptation of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which brings together all the novel’s themes and works through the conflict the city is experiencing.

One thing I found particularly interesting is the way the narrator becomes a character himself, gradually talking about himself more and more as the story proceeds. The narrator’s name is Orhan, making him a stand-in for the author himself, or perhaps another version of the author. At first I found this narratorial intrusion awkward; I wasn’t sure who the narrator was supposed to be and what his relationship to Ka was. All this cleared up gradually, however, and by the end we know quite a lot about him and his presence in the novel adds a layer of complexity to it. His relationship with Ka reminds me of Richard Holmes’s book Footsteps, which I’m currently in the middle of, and also a little bit of The Places in Between by Rory Stewart; in all these examples, one person is following in the footsteps of another, trying to puzzle together what that person’s life is like and to see what that person saw. And then each person writes a book about it. In the case of Snow, the narrator is doing research on a novel about Ka, walking where Ka walked and talking to the people he knew. He follows the exact route Ka took on a book tour, staying in the places he stayed and asking audiences what they remember about Ka.

All this brings me back to travel metaphors, the subject of an earlier post, because part of the narrator’s writing process is traveling (which is true for Holmes and Stewart as well), but writing about travel is itself also a kind of travel (one could say all writing is a kind of travel), as the writer follows the map of the journey, this time in words. And it’s true for the reader too. Following in someone’s footsteps can be done by crossing a landscape but it can also happen as a book gets written and as it gets read. So the narrator tries to relive Ka’s life twice — once by following his path through western Europe and Turkey and another by writing about the experience.

There’s another sense in which the novel is about writing itself. Pamuk talks about what a novel can and can’t do; in one scene, the novel’s narrator talks with another character, Fazil, who is troubled that the narrator plans to write a novel about him and the other residents of Kars. This is what Fazil says to the narrator:

“But I can tell from your face that you want to tell the people who read your novels how poor we are and how different we are from them. I don’t want you to put me into a novel like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t even know me, that’s why! Even if you got to know me and described me as I am, your Western readers would be so caught up in pitying me for being poor that they wouldn’t have a chance to see my life. For example, if you said I was writing an Islamist science-fiction novel, they’d just laugh. I don’t want to be described as someone people smile at out of pity and compassion.”

In another scene, the narrator asks Fazil what he would like him to put in his novel, and this is Fazil’s answer:

“If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.”

“But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel,” I said.

“Oh, yes, they do,” he cried. “If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.”

So we come up against the problem of whether a novelist can capture the truth of somebody’s experience so that a reader can really understand it, so that the reader can get beyond expectations and stereotypes and keep from pitying the poor people of Kars, and so that the novel won’t just be another way of reinforcing the separation between east and west. I opened this post talking about what I learned from the novel, so I guess I do believe that reading novels can tell us something true about other people’s experiences and can help people bridge cultures, but I appreciate this warning about what a complicated process it can be.

I finished Barbara Noble’s 1946 novel Doreen this weekend and found it quite interesting; I’m grateful to my new book club for getting me to read it, as I’d never heard of it before. I can’t say I thought it was a brilliant novel, but it was a fun read and it gave insight into an interesting time period.

It’s set in World War II and is about what happens to children evacuated from London; Doreen is a 9 year old whose mother has decided she has taken her chances keeping Doreen in the city for too long, and when the opportunity arises to place her in a good home in the country, she takes it. Of course, this is difficult for mother and daughter both, but Doreen settles into her new home fairly quickly.

Here is the problem, however, since Doreen’s new family — the childless Geoffrey and Francie Osbourne — quickly fall in love with her, and Doreen’s mother, when she finds out about it, becomes jealous. Doreen is caught between her love of her mother and her affection for the Osbournes and enjoyment of her new life. The novel centers around this conflict; most of the adults are well-meaning, but they find themselves at odds with one another and the unwilling Doreen must try to keep peace.

The novel is interesting because of its depiction of London and the countryside during the war; Noble gives descriptions of bomb shelters and air raids in the city, and the quieter but still unsettled life of the country. Even more so, it’s interesting because of the class dynamics among the characters. Doreen’s mother is working class; she cleans offices and struggles to keep up a respectable life while living in a decaying house turned into apartments on a seedy street. Doreen’s mother and father are separated, which makes things even more complicated. The Osbournes, on the other hand, are comfortably middle class. They live on a hill above a town, a situation meant to indicate their status relative to the town’s working class residents.

So Doreen experiences new comforts with the Osbournes — her own room, a garden, occasional presents — and it becomes harder and harder to imagine her going back to her cramped London life. Her mother is torn between wanting to keep her daughter safe and fearing that she will lose her loyalty and affection. The book showed me a little of the attitudes toward class distinctions at the time — surprisingly strict, I thought — and it probed the psychological effects of the disruptions of war and evacuation very effectively.

It’s a slow-moving novel; I wondered for a long time when something exciting was going to happen. It did, eventually, but this book is more meditative than action-packed. It isn’t a stunning novel, but in its quiet way, it’s quite good.

I finished listening to the audio version of Jacqueline Winspear’s Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel, and I thought it was a lot of fun — I like Maisie a lot and the story was good. I thought perhaps the ending dragged on a bit long; I could feel things wrapping up for a good two of the nine CDs I was listening to, but that was the only flaw.

One of the things that intriqued me about the novel was its touch –just a touch really — of eastern thought. The implication seems to be that Maisie’s particular insightfulness comes from a mix of her “western” rationality and her “eastern” spirituality and insight. She meditates, she’s gotten training from someone of eastern origin — I have to be vague because I listened to the book and so can’t go back and check my source — she’s acutely aware of other people’s states of mind and how these are reflected in their bodies. She’s not a hard-nosed detective type but finds success through intuition as much as logic. There’s something just a little bit mysterious and mystical about her.

I’m now realizing how gendered this is. Of course she’s not a hard-nosed detective! She combines “masculine” strength and resolve and logic with “feminine” compassion and intuition and that’s what makes her so good at what she does.

I liked this book enough to want to seek out other Maisie Dobbs novels, perhaps also in audio. I must see what my library has.

I’ve also finished Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. I find myself with little to say about it, although I continue to enjoy reading the novel a lot. It’s so rich I should have much to say about it; I think, though, that I have been letting it wash over me and haven’t tried to back away to get some critical distance in order to write something. Perhaps this is a sign of defeat — maybe I should try to get some critical distance on it — but I don’t really have the energy, and, more importantly, I’m enjoying the experience plenty as it is.

I’ve begun Barbara Noble’s novel Doreen for a book club meeting next week, at which I’ll meet Emily. This will be fun!

I finished The Lover over the weekend. It’s a very short novel, more like a novella, really, at 115 pages, and a fascinating read. If you’re interested in the novel, you should check out Litlove’s post on Duras. There she discusses The Lover plus Duras’ life and reputation.

It’s a story about a girl of fifteen who lives in Indochina with a difficult, poor family — her mother and two brothers — and who has an affair with older Chinese man. But the novel doesn’t stay focused solely on the affair; it skips around in time, telling stories of the narrator’s later life in France and of what happens to her family members. We watch her as she realizes she wants to be a writer, and as she struggles with her love/hate relationship with her mother, and we see all this from different perspectives in time. At the beginning of the novel Duras describes the beginning of the affair, and at the novel’s end she describes the lovers’ fate, but in between, Duras takes us to many different years, often abruptly with rapid switches.

The narrator’s voice is simple and spare; the sentences seem empty of feeling, although emotion lurks under the surface, unexpressed but present. Here is a sample (from early in the book — I’m not giving anything away):

My younger brother died in three days, of bronchial pneumonia. His heart gave out. It was then that I left my mother. It was during the Japanese occupation. Everything came to an end that day. I never asked her any more questions about our childhood, about herself. She died, for me, of my younger brother’s death. So did my elder brother. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. They don’t mean anything to me any more. I don’t know any more about them since that day.

The voice is halting and obviously pained but also detached, as though she’s trying to make sense of her experience but only can repeat sentences about the meaninglessness of it all.

The narrator is isolated; she feels loyalty to her family and yet the family fails her in many ways, she attends school but has few friends, and she quickly gets a bad reputation because of her sexual experience. She travels to and from school in an odd outfit that marks her as the outsider she feels herself to be.

The love affair is described in a similarly matter-of-fact manner; it is all-consuming — the narrator spends all her time with her lover and sneaks home late at night — but it seems emotionless. We learn very little about the lover, except that his father refuses to let him marry the narrator.

This is largely the story: the novel tells how the lovers meet, gives us some stories about the difficult family dynamics, describes the narrator’s desire to be a writer, and moves forward in time now and then to give glimpses of the narrator’s future life. What The Lover excels at is creating a mood; through its shifts in time and its short, simple sentences, it creates a feeling of a writer haunted by her past, exploring it but grazing across the surface of it rather than digging in deep.

Set in Indochina in the 1930s, the novel also gives a sense of what it was like to be a French family far away from their home country. It describes race and class tensions, as well as familial ones.

Although the story is a dark one, I enjoyed the experience of reading it; there’s something compelling in the voice of the narrator, haunted by the past as she is. I don’t usually like prose styles one might call “lyrical,” as one can call the prose in this book, but the blunt honesty and courage of the narrator saves it for me.

The novel is largely aubiographical; I’m curious to find out more about Duras and her life. She seems like a fascinating figure.

This book is part of my “From the Stacks” challenge — one down, four to go. Next up will be Alice Munro’s Runaway.

I just finished Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and ended up enjoying it quite a lot. You’ll find my earlier post on the book and my musings on Brookner’s reputation here. The ending — I won’t give anything away — was satisfying; it was suitably, quietly dramatic. I’m eager to read more Brookner, but I’m thinking, based on comments people made on my earlier Brookner post, that she’s probably best read occasionally rather than all in a rush. She strikes me as someone, like Elizabeth Taylor, who is good to have on hand for when the right mood strikes. I’m going to try to get her latest, Leaving Home, when it comes out in paper, and I’m curious about Look at Me after the wonderful review on Book World.

The main character, Edith, is a romance novelist, and it seems to me that it might be fun for an author to have a main character who is a writer. You can play around with ideas about writing and what authors are like and what they do and you could explore some of your own feelings about writing, or maybe create a writer who’s very different than you are.

Brookner plays around with the genre of the romance a bit: Edith can be said to have a romantic outlook on the world and on her life, in the sense that she believes in love’s power to transform. She refuses to take a more “practical” approach to her life, although many people put pressure on her to do so when she has the chance to marry a good man she does not love. We find out early on that she is involved in an affair with a married man, and the drama of the rest of the book is not so much about what will happen to that relationship, but about whether Edith will give up on love itself. Hotel du Lac is not at all a romance novel of the type Edith would write, but it is a romance novel in another sense – it’s a novel that ponders what it means to be devoted to the ideals of romance.

The hotel itself is almost a character in its own right. It’s an out-of-fashion resort hotel where one finds people who have gone there for years out of habit, and it’s a place where families and friends send women they aren’t quite sure what to do with, women who need some rest and recovery, who may have strayed from acceptable behavior and need some time to ponder their sins. Edith is there for this reason, to get herself back to normal, and, as one might expect in a novel, this is precisely what she doesn’t do. As you can imagine, a hotel of this sort is a wonderful setting for a novel – it’s a confined space full of interesting people, and Brookner makes good use of it.

What makes this novel work, I think, is the strength of the main character. I loved seeing the world through her eyes. In several scenes, Edith sits in her hotel room writing letters to her married lover, describing the hotel’s odd characters and the slow pace of life there, and I was struck as I read those letters at the way Brookner creates a sense of a gap between how Edith felt about her life and how she wrote about it in her letters. She’s trying to give shape to her life and inject some energy into it through her writing – this is true of her novels too – and the writing seems very brave and hopeful but also that much sadder because we know that real life isn’t like what it is in novels and brave, cheery letters. Edith comes across as heroic – an odd sort of hero, but a hero nonetheless.

In addition to the four books I’ve had going in recent days, I’ve begun reading Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time. I’ve got mixed feelings about it. It’s kind of fun, and it keeps me interested and happily turning the pages, but … I’m just not that impressed with her book discussions. The idea behind the book is that she’ll read a book a week for a year and then write about them. The chapters are short meditations on some of those books — she’s also got a list at the back of books she read but didn’t discuss — where she writes about how she found the book, what the book’s about, what she thinks about it. The chapters tend to have more on context, how she found the book and the circumstances in which she’s reading it, than about content.

She’s got a chapter on “The Clean Plate Book Club,” about how she learned to set down books she’s not enjoying rather than suffering through to the end, and another on what it means when a new friend gives you a book — it’s the moment of truth, when you find out for sure if this friendship will last. She writes about how important the location and the timing are in determining how much you will enjoy a book, and about what it feels like to get completely wrapped up in a book so much so that you can’t put it down.

All that’s good. But I’m reading along and thinking that my blog writer friends do this exact same thing and do it better. It’s a reading diary, and an exploration of what it’s like to be a reader, and a discussion of a lot of individual books, and I love that stuff, but I’m thinking I now prefer to get it from a bunch of blogs rather than a book. It strikes me as much nicer to read a person’s reading diary as it gets produced, in regular blog posts, and to be able to comment on it and maybe influence how that reader thinks and what he or she reads, and to be able to respond on my blog, and do all the things book bloggers do. As far as reading diaries go, they seem much more interesting on blogs than in books, where they can be interactive and immediate.

I’m also not connecting with Nelson’s choice of books, which accounts for some of my mixed feelings. I picked up the book hoping to get some good recommendations, at least, but nothing she’s reading is really getting my interest. For this type of book to work, the author has to win the reader over, and I’m feeling a little bit resistant still. I’m hoping to get a little more excited about the book as I read further (being a loyal member of the Clean Plate Book Club, I’m afraid), and it is reliably entertaining, but I’m coming away from it feeling more than justified in all the time I devote to reading book blogs.

I finished the book last night, and I liked the second half almost as much as the first (which I posted on here). A couple things bugged me, though. The first is that I felt the novel got a bit long; about 2/3 of the way through it, the pace slowed down and I felt ready to get to the end.

The bigger thing that bugged me was a conversation Henry and Clare had when Clare confessed to Henry some of her sexual experiences before their relationship began (The adult relationship, that is — they’d had a friendship going on when she was a child and he was time-traveling to her as an adult … it’s complicated). Henry had slept with lots of women before he met her and Clare didn’t have much trouble with that fact. She worried, though, about what Henry would say about her own experiences, and I kept waiting for Henry to point out the potential double standard or for Clare to realize it, but neither of them did. That struck me as strange.

And then at the end (I’m not really giving anything away here), Niffenegger gives us a quotation from The Odyssey about Odysseus and Penelope reunited at long last, and I’m reminded of how Penelope spent the whole Odyssey waiting, and I realize Clare spends the whole book waiting too; in fact, the first words of the book are “It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he is okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays.” I’m bugged by the stereotypes here. These two things together — Clare as the woman waiting and as a woman who worries that her husband will be angry that she slept with another man, well before their marriage — are making me rethink my response to the book.

So, if this is a kind of retelling of The Odyssey, in a very loose sort of way, does Niffenegger do any updating of the traditional gender roles in that ancient story? I’m thinking not, but maybe I’m missing something. Any thoughts, those of you who have read this??

BUT, the experience of reading this book was great, and I do recommend it, the above reservations aside. Its chief pleasures, for me, were trying to wrap my mind around what it would be like to time travel and meet myself as a younger or older person. Also, Niffenegger does interesting things with the problem of how knowing the future can possibly change the future; Henry refuses to tell some things about the future, saying that he feels it would be wrong, but there’s nothing to stop him from giving things away, and, in fact, he uses his ability to time travel to make lots of money on stocks and lotto. He does tell people what will happen to them now and then. But he always says that those things will happen anyway no matter what people do and that they can’t change it — and in a few cases he creates future events by telling people that those events will happen.

So we’re left with the question of free will: it seems from what Henry says that the future is set and we can’t change it, and yet sometimes he seems to interfere with the future. But when he interferes with the future, is he really changing it or is he living out what would have happened anyway, no matter what?

The book makes you think about interesting questions like this — and it’s an entertaining love story. Not bad, eh?

Last week I wrote about experimenting with listening to audio books while riding on the trainer. My update is that I haven’t actually conducted the experiment yet; fortunately for me, the weather has been good enough that I could ride outside — yesterday, for example, I rode outside for two hours and although my toes were a bit cold when I returned, I did fine.

I have been listening to my chosen audio book, however, Jacqueline Winspear’s Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel; I’ve just been doing it in the car. I’ve got a half hour commute to work, and while I usually listen to NPR to keep up with the news, I was so excited about the novel that I decided to listen to it right away.

I used to listen to audio books all the time, back when I had a really horrendous commute of 1 1/2 hours. They were what kept me going; I could only listen to NPR for so long before the stories started to repeat and I started to go crazy. Listening to Winspear’s book now, I’m reminded of how much I like listening to audio books, and how I missed listening to them after we moved and I didn’t have as much time for them anymore (although I definitely did not miss that long commute). For most of the books I listened to, I liked the reader — which is crucial in an audio book — and I felt like the reader became a character him or herself, one that I could get to know a bit. I found myself responding much more emotionally to an audio book than to a regular book. Sometimes I’d be crying as I drove down the highway. I wonder if anybody ever noticed. I’m not sure what this means, exactly. Is my reading with a regular book detached and more cerebral somehow? There’s something about a real voice telling a story that makes it seem intimate and very real.

The reader for the Maisie Dobbs novel is great; I love her voice and it’s fun listening to her do different British accents. For all I know she may be butchering some of them, but it all sounds good to these American ears.

And I’m enjoying the novel too. I don’t read mysteries all that often, and now I’m wondering why. Luckily, all I have to do is check out Danielle’s post over here to find a whole bunch of them that look good. I’ll write in more detail about the novel when I’ve finished it, but so far, I like the main character a lot, and I’m interested in the time period — it’s set in 1930 and it deals with the aftermath of World War I. One of Maisie’s assignments is to investigate the deaths of two British soldiers in France in the war. And it’s got an element of eastern mysticism and philosophy that’s intriguing. More on that later.

I’m about half way through The Time Traveler’s Wife and it was exactly what I’ve been needing: something absorbing and long but that reads quickly so that I don’t feel I’m getting bogged down or that I’ll be reading it forever.

What an interesting book it is! The basic premise — and I’m not giving anything away — is that of the two main characters, one of them, Henry, travels through time. The other, his girlfriend/wife, Clare, doesn’t. What makes the book interesting, I think, is that time traveling turns out not to be glamorous at all; rather, it is a huge pain in the neck. Henry has no control over when he will travel through time, so he’s constantly worried about disappearing at the wrong moment. He won’t drive a car, for example, for fear that he’ll time travel while driving and cause horrible accidents.

And when he time travels, he leaves a pile of clothes behind him and lands in his new time completely naked. So the first thing he has to do, always, is find clothes before people find him and he gets into all kinds of trouble. He becomes a first-rate thief in order to steal clothes and food — he’s also always ravenous when he time travels. He runs obsessively to keep in shape so he can flee pursuers. Clare loves him deeply but just about everyone else in the novel finds him suspicious, and it’s clear that Henry is a complicated, potentially dangerous, mysterious, and difficult person.

He tends to travel to times and places in his own life that caused him great stress. This means he revisits some awful memories again and again. Because he travels to scenes in his own life, he meets older and younger versions of himself. He also visits Clare, which creates some very odd situations. He visits her when he is older, in his 40s, for example, and she is younger, say, 6. Can you imagine such a scene? Meeting your spouse when he/she is a child and you are an adult? So when Clare meets Henry in “real time,” she’s already spent hours and hours with him because of his time traveling.

This book is a mind-bender.

It’s written in first-person, switching back and forth between Henry and Clare, and the switches occur frequently, so I sometimes get confused about who is talking and have to turn the page to check. The effect of this, I suppose, is that the two main characters blend together, although I do like getting their different perspectives on the same scene.

One of the interesting characteristics of Henry’s time travel is the way he’s more likely to disappear into another time when he’s under a lot of stress. So he tries to keep himself calm in order to stay in one place. This leads to some high drama on his wedding day — because what could be more stress-inducing than going through a wedding ceremony? His particular problem is that this stress might mean that he leaves his bride stranded at the altar.

Henry talks about his efforts to keep calm as attempting to stay in the present moment. So the phrase “staying in the present” that we use to mean staying focused on what’s going on around us rather than wandering off to other places in our minds becomes, for Henry, something physical as well as mental. His “staying in the present” means, literally, not traveling to the past or the future. So in a way, Henry’s struggles to stay in one place become a way of thinking about the efforts we might make to “stay present,” or “stay grounded.” Who wants to be absent from their own life? The novel plays with the mind/body relationship: is a wandering mind that much different from a wandering body?

I shall let you know how I like the second half of the book …

I liked this book very much; unfortunately, I wasn’t in the mood to focus closely as I read it or to take notes or even gather my thoughts much about it as I read, so I won’t have a long or particularly intelligent post.

But I do recommend it if you haven’t read it and are interested. It’s a good story, and it takes up a lot of interesting ideas, chief among them, for me, about women’s lot in a society run by men. Indiana doesn’t get a great education and she doesn’t have much experience in the world. A lot of what she learned about matters such as love and marriage come from novels — always a sign of danger to come. It is a long and venerable tradition to use a novel to warn against novel reading.

She is married at 16 to an older man so she has no time to explore life and look around her as an adult. She lives in a time when emotional displays are valued in women, but rationality is not; Indiana seems not to have had the opportunities to develop her mind and the male characters seem lacking in the ability to value emotion. How is she to judge Raymon when he comes along? How is she to know she should stay far, far away? She has no real grounding from which to make sense of her situation.

And what an odd situation it is. She is married to Colonel Delmare, a jealous and violent man; she is watched over by the reserved and mysterious Ralph, a childhood friend; and she is pursued by the charming but untrustworthy Raymon. Her closest female friend dies early in the novel, leaving her quite alone. So the men vie for her attention and she falls for Raymon, not realizing that he is incapable of returning her love. The novel becomes the story of Indiana slowly making that realization — that she is a much better, stronger person than the one she loves — and dealing with the consequences.

I was shocked at the descriptions of Delmare’s violence toward Indiana. This struck me as a harsher, more direct condemnation of men’s power over women than I’m used to seeing in novels of the time period. Stefanie pointed out the horrifying scene when the dog Ophelia is brutally killed, and I think you can see this as an echo of what happens to Indiana herself — she is portrayed as an innocent creature brutally struck down by a cruel world.

Ralph is an odd character, with his perfectly impassive face and his seeming heartlessness, although we learn by the end of the novel that seeing him as heartless is a mistake. But through most of the novel he hovers about, shadowing Indiana and rescuing her repeatedly, but not making clear his intentions or his role until the novel’s end. And what makes Ralph an even odder character is his semi-incestuous relationship with Indiana. He’s described as being her brother, her guardian, and her lover. In this sense, I’m not sure what it means that Indiana ends up with him at the end — has she found her true love, or has she settled for something more familiar and calm and safe?

I understand that the novel’s ending is controversial. The question seems to be whether we should see Indiana as subdued once again by the patriarchy — she seems lifeless and spiritless at the end — or whether this is actually a hopeful ending, illustrating how one woman escaped from the two men who caused her so much pain and established a comfortable life devoted to helping others. For she and Ralph decide to spend their time and energy and money buying the freedom of slaves.

I feel conflicted about this. It was my impression as I read that Indiana’s voice and energy were written out of the text; in the final pages Ralph tells her story and all she seems to do is retire early to bed. This didn’t seem like the Indiana of the earlier part of the novel. On the other hand, though, she has escaped, and, most importantly, escaped alive and she will live on to affect the lives of many people — those slaves that she and Ralph are working to free. We are led through the novel to expect her death and to see death as her only option, but the novel’s final word thwarts this expectation.

I’ll be curious to see what others have to say about this.

As Nicholson Baker nears the end of his novel The Mezzanine, his narrator begins talking about Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. We learn he has begun to read this book because of “a glowing mention in William Edward Hartpole Lecky’s History of European Morals (which I had been attracted to, browsing in the library one Saturday, by the ambitious title and the luxurious incidentalism of the footnotes).” And here Baker inserts a footnote. This footnote starts off with anecdotes from Lecky’s book and modulates into a discussion of footnotes themselves. This is the sentence with which the footnote ends:

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

I’m not entirely sure if that’s a brilliant sentence or a terrible one. Maybe it’s brilliant in its awfulness. But I love the idea that footnotes connect the book to the rest of the library, to a wider reality.

But back to the beginning — Baker’s narrator repeats a couple of the anecdotes from Lecky’s book, one of which tells us that Spinoza “liked to entertain himself by dropping flies into spiders’ webs, enjoying the resultant battle so much that he occasionally burst out laughing.” The narrator considers why such side notes, such digressions are so much fun, and in doing so, he quotes Boswell on Samuel Johnson:

Upon this tour, when journeying, he [Johnson] wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.

The narrator goes on, and here we get to the heart of his footnote on footnotes:

Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a tough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of “ibid.s’s” and “compare’s” and “see’s” that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one’s mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, a gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom.

At the risk of boring you, here’s a bit more:

Digression — a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument — is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, “essay-like” footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going? (They have removed this blemish in later editions.)

This whole book is an illustration of what Baker means by “luxurious incidentalism”; we find this in his footnotes, but we also find it in the text itself, which wanders from topic to topic as the narrator’s mind wanders on his lunch break. I begin to wonder, not how Baker could write 135 pages about one morning, but how he could capture the whole morning in a mere 135 pages.

Footnotes on one’s own thinking interest me. How does one decide what belongs in the main text and what belongs in a footnote, especially when the main text is itself already very digressive? To footnote someone else’s text I understand, and to footnote one’s own scholarly work with further details and explanations and documentations I understand, but to footnote a record of one’s own thoughts, a record that is by no means smooth and sequential to begin with and is already full of footnote-like digressions — that shows just how complicated it is to try to capture what goes on in a mind. If the “outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph,” then neither is the “outer surface” of the mind.

I’m curious about this because the book ends with two endings, two climaxes, one in the main text and one in a footnote. The ending in the main text is quite simple: the narrator makes it to the top of the escalator. The footnote ending is about the resolution of the shoelace dilemma (what, exactly, wears them down and causes them to snap?) After researching the question exhaustively, the narrator finds a 1984 volume of World Textile Abstracts, with the following entry by the Polish researcher Z. Czaplicki:

Two mechanical devices for testing the abrasion resistance and knot slippage performance of shoe laces are described and investigated. Polish standards are discussed.

Here is the narrator’s response:

I let out a small cry and slapped by hand down on the page. The joy I felt maybe difficult for some to understand. Here was a man, Z. Czaplicki, who had to know! He was not going to abandon the problem with some sigh about complexity and human limitation after a minute’s thought, as I had, and go to lunch — he was going to make the problem his life’s work … A great man! I left the library relieved. Progress was being made. Someone was looking into the problem. Mr. Czaplicki, in Poland, would take it from there.

He doesn’t discover what makes shoelaces wear out, but there is somebody out there just as fascinated by the question as he is. The footnote ending shadows the main text ending, but in a way it is more important than the main text ending. The footnote ending points the reader out of the novel, out of the narrator’s mind, out to the world; it is an example of those “finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.”

I finished The Mezzanine last night and loved it. If you’ve ever been tempted to read Nicholson Baker but haven’t yet, or even if you’ve never been tempted, I’d say give him a try. This is one sort of book I love very much — a non-traditional narrative that’s more about thoughts and ideas than about plot. It’s the kind of book where the narrator’s personality makes or breaks it; it’s all about voice. If the voice is good, it doesn’t matter what the subject is. It’s a novel that’s closer to the essay than it is to more traditional novels.

The subject of this book, that I say doesn’t matter so much? Let’s see. The main events include riding an escalator, contemplating why the two shoelaces on a pair of shoes snapped within a short time of each other, shopping at CVS, eating a cookie and milk, talking to work colleagues, and visiting the bathroom. The book describes the escalator ride from the vantage point of a few years afterward, and it moves backward from the escalator ride to describe the morning at work which precedes it and the lunch break which the ride brings to an end.

But these things aren’t really the subjects of the book. The real subjects are the way the narrator’s mind works and his enthusiasm for the little details of modern life. This enthusiasm is boundless. When the second shoelace snaps shortly after the first one did, the narrator sets off on a quest to discover how shoelaces wear out. Is it because of the stress caused by pulling the laces tight when he ties them? Or is it the wear on the laces caused by the slight friction of lace against shoe every time he takes a step?

Now that I think about it, I realize that there are a number of more traditional narratives and genres that the book plays with, one being the quest narrative. While a quest to discover why shoelaces wear and break might seem small, what this narrator is really after is knowledge of those details that shape our day-to-day lives that most of us don’t even notice, much less understand. He’s showing that those details matter — they are our lives, after all. We are surrounded by things we don’t understand, things we use without knowing where they came from or how they got to us, or how they function and why they break. He wants to dig those details out and examine them and understand them.

He also wants to understand the way the mind works. In one passage, he considers the “periodicity of regularly returning thoughts,” the number of times he thinks of a particular thing a year. If he can study and chart this, he can understand his mental life much better; without this study, he has only a vague impression of what thoughts he actually devotes his energy to. He realizes how complicated such an endeavor would be, but he makes a chart with his best estimates, a chart that occupies a couple pages of text, and tells us that he thought about how “people are very dissimilar” about 16 times a year, and about how “people are very similar” about 12 times a year. And he thinks about staplers 7 times a year and escalator invention 12 times.

This sounds rather Proustian, doesn’t it?

Some of these thoughts are inspired by Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a book the narrator carries with him on his lunch break. Here is another traditional form Baker draws on, for his own book could be called meditations — meditations on the world the narrator has found himself in. He never reads very much of Aurelius’s Meditations, but he has it with him because he fell in love with one line he came across by chance while looking at the book in the bookstore. Here’s the line:

Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!

The narrator’s response to the line is this:

Wo! I loved the slight awkwardness and archaism of the sentence, full of phrases that never come naturally to people’s lips now but once had: “condition of life,” “so well adapted for,” “chance finds you,” as well as the unexpected but apt rush to an exclamation point at the end. But mainly I thought that the statement was extraordinarily true and that if I bought that book and learned how to act upon that single sentence I would be led into elaborate realms of understanding, even as I continued to do, outwardly, exactly as I had done, going to work, going to lunch, going home, talking to L. on the phone or having her over for the night.

And that, you could say, is the book in a nutshell, from the enthusiasm in that opening “Wo!” to the list of things that make up an ordinary day at the passage’s end, to the idea in the passage’s middle that one can live an ordinary life profoundly.

And lest you think this book is all seriousness, let me say it’s hilariously funny, and I often laughed out loud as I read. The bathroom scene — generally I’m not big on bathroom humor, but that bathroom scene — ah, just read it.

I haven’t even gotten to the footnotes yet, but perhaps I’ll come back to them tomorrow. I must talk about the footnote on footnotes and the footnotes on the resolution of the shoelace conundrum. It’s a very moving passage, something I never thought I’d say about a passage on shoelaces.