Dickens Month II - In which the characters, rich and poor alike, attempt to advance themselves (Books - Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)

250 pages into Our Mutual Friend and Charles Dickens Month, it has struck me that Dickens is something of a naturalist - sketching studies of his characters that are rich enough in detail so that the reader may see them and that always refer to their habitat.

Reginald Wilfer is a name with rather a grand sound, suggesting on first acquaintance brasses in country churches, scrolls in stained-glass windows, and generally the De Wilfers who came over with the Conqueror...But, the Reginald Wilfer family were of such commonplace extraction and pursuits that their forefathers had for generations modestly subsisted on the Docks, the Excise Office, and the Custom House, and the existing R. Wilfer was a poor clerk. So poor a clerk, though having a limited salary and an unlimited family, that he had never yet attained the modest object of his ambition: which was to wear a complete new suit of clothes, hat and boots included, at one time. His black hat was brown before he could afford a coat, his pantaloons were white at the seams and knees before he could buy a pair of boots, his boots had worn out before he could treat himself to new pantaloons, and, by the time he worked round to the hat again, that shining modern article roofed-in an ancient ruin of various periods.

Charles Dickens Month I - In which we are introduced to key players (Books - Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)

This is the first of my five January posts on Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, which I began reading just yesterday in this month preceding his 200th birthday. I have barely scratched the surface at about 50

BIG books in 2012 - (The Tea & Books Reading Challenge)

For Birgit (and her hero C.S. Lewis) size matters, which is why she has posed the Tea & Books Reading Challenge, which demands that we tackle 2 or more books that are 700 pages in length or

Join in the celebration... (International Anita Brookner Day - 16 July 2011)

On July 16th Anita Brookner, author of 24 novels, turns 83. Thomas and Simon have decided to celebrate with an event named just for her: International Anita Brookner Day. If you have always wanted to read one of her books but never have, or if you have been hankering to re-read some old favorites, now is your chance. Thomas makes it simple - here are his rules. I've only read The Debut, which I thought excellent, but with IABD on the horizon and having just won a copy of A Closed Eye from Thomas, I will give my attention to a second of her works. If you care to join in the fun, stop by Thomas's place and declare yourself.

Vastly differing approaches to the vanities of two men (Books - The Dead Fish Museum & Middlemarch)

I wrote yesterday about the contrasting experiences of reading Charles D'Ambrosio's contemplative, urban stories and George Eliot's sprawling 'Study of Provincial Life.' Last night after studying I read a little in each. D'Ambriosio's story Drummond & Son concerns a father who owns a typewriter repair shop and his schizophrenic son.

Hardly anybody used typewriters these days, but with the epochal change in clientele brought on by computers Drummond's business shifted in small ways and remained profitably intact. He had a steady stream of customers, some loyally held over from the old days, some new. Drummond was a good mechanic, and word spread among an amerging breed of hobbyist. Collectors came to him from around the city, mostly men, often retired, fussy and strange, a little contrary, who liked the smell of solvents and enjoyed talking shop and seemed to believe an unwritten life was stubbornly buried away in the dusty machines they brought in for restoration. His business had become more sociable as a growing tribe of holdouts banded together. He now kept a coffee urn and a stack of Styrofoam cups next to the register, for customers who liked to hang out. There were pockets of people who warily refused the future or the promise of whatever it was computers were offering and stuck by their typewriters. Some of them were secretaries who filled out forms, and others were writers, a sudden surge of them from all over Seattle. There were professors and poets and young women with colored hair who wrote for the local weeklies. There were aging lefties who made carbons of their correspondence or owned mimeographs and hand cranked the ink drums and dittoed urgent newsletters that smelled of freshly laundered cotton for their dwindling coteries. Now and then, too, customers walked in off the street, a trickle of curious shoppers who simply wanted to touch the machines, tapping the keys and slapping back the carriage when the bell rang out, leaving a couple of sentences behind.

Drummond had worked at the shop with his own father and now, with his son's illness and the disappearance of his wife, he brings his son to the shop. However, with his son bursting into disconnected monologues about umbrellas as sculpture and dropping to his knees to pray in the middle of crowded streets, he is unlikely to become the "& Son" part of this generation of the business. Drummond, like his customers, is a holdout because of love. He, too, is refusing the future. His is a clumsy and somewhat desperate love, but it is love just the same. D'Ambrosio renders this entire little universe with sweet precision in about 20 pages. A beautiful and sad story.

In about half that number of pages, Eliot delivers to us, the history of Lydgate, the young physician who comes to Middlemarch hoping to made an important discovery in the field of anatomy. But first she begins with an observation on the path of the ambitious:

For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till on day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions...Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures.

Here is the path of all vanity, she seems to say, and the paragraph could be merely devastating - the death of life's dreams. But then at the end, she comes in with a little barb, making both herself as writer and us as reader complicit in the failure of their ambition through our ordinariness. Brilliant! Lydgate, it seems, has a plan to avoid such a failure:

Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream of himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the great originators until they have been lifted up among the constellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who "Broke the barriers of the heavens" - did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk the earth among neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course towards final companionship with the immortals. Lydgate was not blind to the dangers of such friction, but he had plenty of confidence in his resolution to avoid it as far as possible: being seven-and-twenty, he felt himself experienced. And he was not going to have his vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldly successes of the capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry with that pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object with the assiduous practice of his profession. There was fascination in the hope that the two purposes would illuminate each other: the careful observation and inference which was his daily work, the use of the lens to further his judgement in special cases, would further his thought as an instrument of larger inquiry. Was not this the typical pre-eminence of his profession? He would be a good Middlemarch doctor, and by that very means keep himself in the track of far-reaching investigation.

One of the things I enjoyed about reading these two excerpts about struggling men side by side is that D'Ambrosio gives us only the barest essentials about Drummond's circumstances, a short paragraph about his business, a scant sentence about his departed wife, mostly we watch his behavior in the shop and on the streets of Seattle with his son. Eliot not only gives a detailed narrative about Lydgate's history, analyzing his reasons for his behavior (which we have not seen, but rather heard about), she gives us this behavior in the context of "the multitude of middle-aged men" and of "great originators." Yet both render whole characters before us, bringing them to fuller life, both build whole recognizable universes in which these men live, both elicited emotions from me, the D'Ambrosio is a more first-person sort of experience, let us say empathetic, whereas the Eliot is a more third-person type of experience, I feel sympathetic although I do have to crack a smile with her knowing quip at the end, that excludes me, the reader, from being as vain as Lydgate by classing me as a conformist and already a failure. I can't over how meanly clever that is. I have really enjoyed noticing on this last reading how similarly astute each writer is in their vastly different approach to the simple vanities of two men.

Books and Magic (Lirael by Garth Nix)

Lirael is a teenage member of the Clayr, a sect of seers. She has not come in to her power to see by seventeen, as she was supposed to. That is only the worst among many things that make her different from her community and are experienced by her mostly as a burden, something that makes her self conscious. She copes by isolating herself and using her magical powers to create a dog to be her friend. Sameth is the teenage son of Sabriel, the Abhorsen - the magical leader of a magical region of a land otherwise similar to our's. He too is posessed of magic powers and, like his mother, is a necromancer - can walk between the worlds of the living and the dead - demanding obedience of dead spirits by use of a set of bells. He is to begin to learn this art as he must one day assume the post of Abhorsen from his mother. Both of Garth Nix's teenage central characters in Lirael must assume the mantel of adult responsibilities, of one too little is expected, and of the other too much.

I'm enjoying the fact that Nix creates a world in which the Clayr can see not the future but possible futures - it's a nice twist on the classic theme of looking into the future that bows to our current models of time in the world of physics. The future exists in the realm of probability rather than certainty, so the Clayr's skill is an art rather than an absolute science.

If this gate was the beginning of a path named for her, it had been made at least a thousand years ago. Which was not impossible, for the Clayr sometimes had visions of such far-distant futures. Or possible futures, as they called them, for the future was apparently like a many-branching stream, splitting, converging, and splitting again. Much of the Clayr's training, at least as far as Lirael knew, was in working out which possible future was the most likely - or the most desirable.

I'm also enjoying the fact that, although Sameth will inherit the proverbial throne some day, at this point he is a moody teenager and, to his dismay, a younger brother. His sister is put in charge of the kingdom in his absence and forces on his all sorts of chores and activities for his betterment when Sam would rather tinker in his workshop. Nix describes his sullenness with accuracy and enjoyment.

One more item and I'll leave you for the world of neurochemistry, Lirael has discovered a magic book that appeals to my booklover's imagination:

Most of all, there was magic and power in the type. Lirael had seen similar, if less powerful, books, like In the Skin of a Lyon. You could never truly finish reading such a book, for the contents changed at need, at the original maker's whim, or to suit the phases of the moon or the patterns of the weather. Some of the books had contents you couldn't even remember till certain events might come to pass. Invariably, this was an act of kindness from the creator of the book, for such contents invariably dealt with things that would be a burden to recall with every waking day.

Sounds very Borgesian, no? I could really use that book that holds off on burdening you with some of its contents until you need it in my neurochem class! I don't know if I love or fear the notion of a book you can never truly finish. It's romantic on the one hand, torturous on the other. In a way, though, aren't some books just like that?

All Bets Are Off (Books - The Gathering by Anne Enright)

I had my statistics midterm yesterday at 8 am and it was scary hard. I have no idea how I did but it didn't feel like I did well. It didn't matter much what came after that - a two-hour memory class, lunch with a friend, a couple of hours in the lab, and an hour-long walk home - I was too exhausted to do anything for school. So I finished The Gathering instead. This post along with this one constitute my thoughts about it. **Some spoilers follow. **



My opinion of the writing didn't change, it is luminous, but I was less interested in certain aspects of the story as the book went on. It gets into some childhood abuse issues in a way that didn't really interest me and rendered the story rather formulaic. I also found the novel's treatment of sex odd, I'm not sure I can place just how it was odd, but it was an appendage to the story while the issues of grief and family were the story. Maybe that was the narrator's relationship to sex, but somehow it made the story feel less of-a-piece. However, when it comes to grief and regret Enright is a master.

I make my way up to the top of the church and am drowned in the emotion, whether love or sadness, that floods my chest. My face sets into the mask of a woman weeping, one half pulled into a wail that the other half will not allow. There are no tears. My head twists away from whichever side of the church is more interested in my grief, only to show it to the other side. Here it is. The slow march of the remaining Hegarty's. I don't know what wound we are showing to them all, apart from the wound of family. Because, just at this moment, I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive.

What does not feel in the least formulaic is the way her fiction captures the oddity, the pain, the wrongness, of an important moment of being alive. A moment which follows none of the rules of TV, the formulas of picture books - it's not the way it's supposed to be but is, rather, the way it is - and she not only gets it just right, but makes art of it. I have had moments exactly like the one described above. One where I have thought - why didn't someone tell me it would be like this? Enright tells us in a paragraph, and that paragraph has the clarity and violence of Picasso's Guernica.

I thought about this, as I saw in the Shelbourne bar - that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go 'home' where I could 'have sex' with my 'husband' just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn't seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.

That seems to me to be the gift of shock, of grief, of any kind of radical life change that most people try to avoid like the plague. It makes us question everything, all the habits we have set up for the convenience of living. We don't necessarily want to notice that our FEET are in our SHOES all day long. It can make you feel suddenly as though you are walking in scuba diving flippers. Our nervous system helps us to not notice everything and to prioritize newer things, or louder things, or more dangerous things. We also have the ability to harness what we call attention to our will. There is too much information around us at any one moment to pay attention to everything, so attention helps us prioritize and saves us cognitive resources. To choose certain of those things instead of others. We also bundle the steps we take to perform ordinary activities - walking down stairs, driving to work - in one automatic series of actions we don't even think about any more. But these heuristics, though they save us time and cognitive resources, can get us stuck. We try to get efficient about everything we do. This can keep us from asking any questions at all. From noticing our world - whether that be to appreciate it or to detest it. Emergencies help us notice everything again. The really big ones make our brain say "all bets are off," that is probably what can be so disorienting about them. Enright's book captures that state beautifully.

Outmoded and overcommitted

Imani's first annual Outmoded Authors Challenge wrapped up yesterday. I challenged myself to read six books by four authors. Unfortunately, I never got to two of them. May Sarton was an old favorite, although Faithful are the Wounds was a re-read, it had been twenty-five years since my first reading and she not only stood the test of time, I think I could appreciate her even more. I was completely unfamiliar with Olivia Manning. The Balkan Trilogy consists of The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes. They were marvelous books, set in Eastern Europe during World War II. Reading them made me interested in reading her Levant Trilogy as well. In fact, maybe I'll just put that one on the acquisitions list. There are multiple posts for the trilogy, so I'll leave you to click on the Outmoded Authors Challenge label on my side bar if you would like to read them.

John Galsworthy - Fraternity
May Sarton - Faithful are the Wounds
Ivy Compton-Burnett - Manservant and Maidservant
Olivia Manning - The Balkan Trilogy

The colonizer finds herself in the world of her subjects (Book - Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the writer of the talented group that brought us most of the films named for the other two director and producer members of the trio - Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. If you have never seen their film adaptations of A Room with a View (1985) or Howard's End (1992) they are spectacular films - I think I watch A Room with a View at least once a year. They also made Heat and Dust (1983) before they had exploded onto the international film market. I remember seeing it when it was screened at MOMA. It's based on Jhabvala's Booker winning novel of the same title and which I am reading for Dewey's Booker Challenge.

The book is a multi-layered affair in which a young English woman in the 1970s travels to India to learn more about the story of her great-grandmother Olivia, who though recently married to an Englishman whom she then joins in India, runs off with an Indian Prince. This all happened in the 1920s. Muti-layered because it combines a present-day narrative of the young woman's trip, written as diary entries, with imagined memories of Olivia's life in the 1920s that, in turn, are taken from her letters to her sister. The writing style is sparse, almost reportorial. It is very event-driven, I feel like I can see (with my 20/20 hindsight) how Jhabvala's writing suits the medium of film, where the visual details can be lingered upon, if desired. Where we can be shown rather than told. I've read about half of this short novel and much of the early action consists of Olivia's boredom with the social scene in India as a recent immigrant:

He had been in India for over twenty years and knew all there was to know about it; so did his wife. And of course so did the Crawfords. Their experience went back several generations, for they were all members of families who had served in one or other of the Indian services since before the Mutiny. Olivia had met other such old India hands and was already very much bored by them and their interminable anecdotes about things that had happened in Kabul or Multan. She kept asking herself how it was possible to lead such exciting lives - administering whole provinces, fighting border battles, advising rulers - and at the same time to remain so dull. She looked around the table - at Mrs. Crawford and Mrs. Minnies in their dowdy frocks more suitable to the English watering places to which they would one day retire than to this royal dining table; Major Minnines and Mr. Crawford, puffy and florid, with voices that droned on and on confident of being listenined to though everything they were saying was, Olivia thought, as boring as themselves.

Olivia seems to be one of those people who fancies herself an adventurer in her head, but when push comes to shove she is skittish, naive, and rather whiny. But the writing is simple and confident and there are some wonderful observations of this strange and interesting culture that was the English empire in India. So I continue.

Next day Olivia went to visit Mrs. Saunders. She took flowers, fruit, and a heart full of tender pity for her. But although Olivia's feelings towards Mrs. Saunders had changed, Mrs. Saunders herself had not. She was still the same unattractive woman lying in bed in a bleak, gloomy house. Olivia, always susceptible to atmosphere, had to struggle against a feeling of distaste. She did so hate a slovenly house, and Mrs. Saunders' house was very slovenly; so were her servants. No one bothered to put Olivia's pretty flowers in a vase - perhaps there was no vase? There wasn't much of anything, just a few pieces of ugly furniture and even those were dusty.

I do enjoy the description and yet feel it fails somehow to come to life. I can't help thinking what Dickens would have made of such a character. But now, as I'm nearing the beginning of the affair (I think) things are beginning to heat up a little. The colonizers have a policy against the tradition of a widow throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband and fail, one day, in enforcing it. It become the subject of a lively dinner conversation in which Olivia finally drags herself out of her protective skin of judgment to enter the world in which she is living:

"...She sat for four days on a rock in the river and said that if she wasn't allowed to burn herself then she'd starve herself to death. In any case she wasn't going to be left behind. In the end Sleeman had to give way - yes he lost that round but I'll tell you something - he speaks of the old lady with respect. She wasn't a fanatic, she wasn't even very dramatic about it, she just sat there quietly and waited and said no, she wanted to go with her husband. There was something noble there," said the Major - and now he wasn't being tolerant and amused, not in the least.

"Too noble for me, I fear," said Beth Crawford - as hostess, she probably felt it was time to change the tone. "Fond as I am of you, dear man," she told her husband across the table, "I really think I could - "

"Oh I could!" cried Olivia, and with such feeling that everyone was silent and looked at her. Douglas also looked - and this time she dared raise her eyes to his: even if he was angry with her. "I'd want to. I mean, I just wouldn't want to go on living. I'd be grateful for such a custom."

Now is she just trying on that sentiment, like a teenager trying on a piercing, a radical haircut, or a new controversial opinion? Perhaps. But she thinks she means it, and rather than stand at a distance any longer from those her country colonized, she dares to step inside. Olivia is waking up to herself. This may get interesting.

Fiction within a fiction within a fiction (Books - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood ) cont'd.

The upside to having been awake for several hours last night during which I would have rather been asleep is that I am half way through The Blind Assassin. In what I'm assuming is the "real story" as opposed to the fiction within the fiction (unless Atwood is going to pull a switch on me), there were two sisters - one dreamy and other-worldly, capable only of interpreting words literally, or as Atwood puts it:

She had a heightened capacity for belief. She left herself open, she entrusted herself, she gave herself over, she put herself at the mercy. A little incredulity would have been a first line of defense...

...Laura touches people. I do not.

the other sister, though just as naive, is more practical, capable of irony, and has a thing for a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. The narrator is supposedly this second sister, around 80 years old at the telling of the story. Now, even with the meta-fictional elements that I complained about in yesterday's post, that story seems to have me in its grip.

Within the fiction within a fiction there is a second fictional world, a verbally related science fiction story being woven during some tryst scenes. That story is meant to be bad and yet meant to also be meaningful to the reader. However, being poorly told, even while it's tongue is planted firmly in its cheek, I don't care about it. While I really enjoy some fantasy fiction I only enjoy it when the exposition of the world and its elements is very skillfully woven into the story telling. I am frustrated when a fantasy begins with dozens upon dozens of unfamiliar terms - names of creatures, of places, of objects - all completely new to me, all without any meaning in my vocabulary - when I read them I usually cannot keep them all straight. I start reading very slowly, trying to commit these new terms to memory, feeling I must master them in order to get the story. I usually end up feeling very frustrated. I can't string the narrative together because I can't remember what I've read because I don't know what the narrator is talking about. I usually put the book down in despair before I've reached page fifty. That's always what happens whenever I've tried to read Tolkein. I don't have the right kind of memory for it, but I also have this obsession with mastering it before I proceed. I can't leave it alone, ignore the fact that I don't get it and just read my way into the narrative, being confident it will seep in after 100 pages. So it's my problem. I get that. I do the same thing with scientific articles, I obsess over the details in the sequence they're presented and can't retain anything that follows until I feel I've mastered the terms. But it seems to me that revealing enough so that I care, but not so much that the mystery is ruined would be one of the ingredients of good writing, and in this element of The Blind Assassin Atwood does not succeed. However, I do like the primary narrative enough to deal with this obstacle by skimming the fiction within the fiction within the fiction, accepting the fact that I am retaining nothing and hoping it won't matter. It has begun to be revealed to me that elements of this fantasy world may become significant in ways I won't spoil in case you are planning to read this book. I hope I am not now going to have to go back and figure out what gnarr are and how many moons the planet Sakiel-Norn has, which, incidentally, is based on ancient Mesopotamian culture.

Atwood is, otherwise, an extraordinarily skilled writer. Creating living, breathing characters, convincingly different voices for the two sisters and their nanny/cook, creating some really funny scenes, and evoking detail in imaginative and lucid language:

I spent that night lying huddled and shivering in the vast bed of the hotel. My feet were icy, my knees drawn up, my head sideways on the pillow; in front of me the arctic waste of starched white bedsheet stretched out to infinity. I knew I could never traverse it, regain the track, get back to where it was warm; I knew I was directionless; I knew I was lost. I would be discovered here years later by some intrepid team - fallen in my tracks, one arm outflung as if grasping at straws, my features desiccated, my fingers gnawed by wolves.

Flirting with meta-fiction (Books - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood)

In the first of eights sections in the booker winning The Blind Assassin from 2000, Margaret Atwood flirts with meta-fiction, alternating newspaper obituaries with, classic narrative fiction, with tryst scenes in another time period in which one of the two lovers invents a bad science fiction story for idle amusement. In a book where one of the major characters is killed off in the first sentence, I really thought the writing would be action packed and to-the-point, but the switching between forms felt amateurish and distracting and while Atwood seemed to be having a good time playing with form, I wasn't having a good time reading. The little sci-fi story particularly irritated me, partly because it was so bad. Either this is obviously bad, I thought, which I find hard to believe since I am such an admirer of Cat's Eye - a brilliant novel - or it's tongue-in-cheek, but either way fifty pages of it wore me out regardless of the reason and I nearly abandoned the book. Then the form changed to a classic narrative alternating between present day and memory, told to us by an elderly woman who is related to all the people of whom we read obituaries. The writing seems surer handed now, as I would expect from Atwood, and the story has me much more interested, but after about 100 pages or so it looks like we're changing back to the meta-fictional hodgepodge. Maybe having some of the narrative context will help, if it ends up being a bad as last time this may be the last you read of this book.

Big Fat 'n' Greasy Books - yum!

Now I've done it; I've gone and signed up for another challenge AND it's to read big, fat books - but just let me say in my own defense that most of these chunksters (as they are called in the official parlance) are part of other challenges or are already on my TBR pile, in fact their girth might be keeping it from collapsing in a heap on top of me while I'm sleeping and drowning me in books. The books of 450+ pages (hardly chunky in my estimation if it's under 600, but then I supposed I should start my own super-chunkster challenge, so I'll keep quiet about it) I have pledged to get through in this calendar year are:

Lirael by Garth Nix (I was already committed to this one)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (already on my Booker Challenge list)
Darkmans by Nicola Barker - (also on the Booker list and one I'm really looking forward to)
Nathasha's Dance by Orlando Figes (already on the Russian Challenge list, now if you are going to participate in a Russian challenge you are bound to have a few chunksters, the character's many names alone guarantee that the book is going to be as third as long as the same story written by, say, a Swedish author
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (I'm already pushing it by putting this on the Russian Challenge list so what the hey)
Middlemarch OR Daniel Deronda by George Eliot - I'll be damned if these are both going to remain on the TBR pile for yet another year un-read
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann - ditto above
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - (This book of intense suffering in the Russian gulags should by rights make one feel as though one has gone through something)

There it is. Don't laugh. This challenge now means I will have Fats Wallers Fat 'n' Greasy going through my head for the rest of the day.

It is hosted (appopriately) by So Many Books, So Little Time

It's just a freaking number.

Four loads of laundry, eight grocery bags, vacuuming, dusting, party decorations, preparing the vegetable platter, and the guests come in three hours - what do you think my chances are of having read 50 books in 2007? I haven't even cracked #49 So Long, See You Tomorrw by William Maxwell, much as I'd have liked to. Unless I pull out Harold and the Purple Crayon it ain't gonna happen. It's just a freaking number. 48 has a nice feel to it. I read four dozen books last year, I will be able to say. Sounds very round - very complete.

A Happy and healthy New Year to everyone.

Fantasy limited by imagination (A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle)

I was surprised by my own reaction on rereading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. I enjoyed the domestic scenes so much - they are warm and inviting - and I recognized a lot of Meg in myself - the obstinance and quick reactions - and while I admire L'Engle's imagination of distant worlds, new modes of travel, and languages and creatures that are unlike humans, I found the book very limited by its insistence on a christian basis for its message. That love is a great power has been experienced by more than those people who worship in that one faith and could be communicated without reference to the stories that the people of that faith share. Obviously that is not L'Engle's interest but as a result I felt the story very obviously was not written for me. It made it narrower rather than more universal. Having just spent some time in middle America, I was reminded how I feel there (although not among the ragazzo's immediate family). Particularly when I visit smaller towns, I experience the smugness that comes from societies that practice rituals to create an experience of homogeneity. I supposed we all do this to some extent within our social networks, whatever they are, but I find the blithe assumption that I couldn't possibly live without a church, or that I must be married (or whatever) obnoxious. Unfortunately, that is also how I experienced those parts of this otherwise lovely story that insists only symbols relating to faith, and in this case one particular faith, will do when it comes to stories of love and redemption.

40. The Spoilt City - Olivia Manning
41. Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning
42. Nerve Damage - Peter Abrahams
43. The Stolen Child - Keith Donohue
44. The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick
45. Tell me Everything - Sarah Salway
46. Experiment in Love - Hillary Mantel
47. The Pilgrim Hawk Glenway Wescott
48. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
49. So Long, See You Tomorrow - William Maxwell
50. Abhorsen - Garth Nix

Not soothing the savage beast (books - The Pilgrim Hawk)

This is what always happens. Even if I've set the limits myself, as in the list of books to round out the year, I end up finding others more interesting. I'm probably not going to read the Garth Nix books on the list right now. In fact, The Pilgrim Hawk had been sitting on my pile for over a year and just attracted my interest and replaced one of the other books I had originally on the list. Actually, one of the reasons it ended up on this end of the year list is because it is a novella. It has something of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in it, only it's set in a house in France in 1929 and the occupants are a writer, his wife, their idle Irish friends the Cullens, Mrs. Cullen's hawk, Lucy, the Chauffeur, the cook and a manservant. The hawk becomes a device through which these people not only see each other, but in some cases express their feelings towards each other. A predator can be domesticated, this novel seems to say, but not its nature. It's a strange novella that, I must admit, I did not find entirely satisfying. The narrative voice seemed a distant, even disinterested one. Alcohol flowed, people were hideous to each other, still it was curiously interesting.

Needless to say, the twenties were very different from the thirties, and now the forties have begun. In the twenties it was not unusual to meet foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you, your peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to know them in an afternoon or so; and perhaps you called that little lightning knowledge, friendship. There was a kind of idealistic or optimistic curiosity in the air. And vagaries of character, and the various war and peace that goes on in the psyche, seemed of the greatest interest and even importance.

40. The Spoilt City - Olivia Manning
41. Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning
42. Nerve Damage - Peter Abrahams
43. The Stolen Child - Keith Donohue
44. The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick
45. Tell me Everything - Sarah Salway
46. Experiment in Love - Hillary Mantel
47. The Pilgrim Hawk Glenway Wescott
48. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
49. Lisrael - Garth Nix
50. Abhorsen - Garth Nix

And that brings me to #48 (this is never going to happen, is it). In honor of Madeleine L'Engle, who we lost this past year, but whose delightful talents live on, I'm going to re read A Wrinkle in Time. And it most certainly does count.

Possessing Oneself (books - An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel)

I worked five hours in the lab yesterday with a 6 year-old who has ADHD and we had theater tickets last night for the 500 Clowns Christmas (see my review of 500 Clown Frankenstein here) and in between we had sushi, so I didn't get in as much reading as I had hoped. I just finished Hilary Mantel's An Experiment in Love. I was really crazy about Mantel's Beyond Black, I wouldn't say this is an inferior book by any means, but it is less showy, certainly less funny. It tells of the growing up of a young woman from the English north country, of her aspirations, and of the experiences and friends that formed who she is as an adult. Mantel's narrative voice is sure her descriptions direct and a little wry, her adult's perspective is subdued by the failings of parents, friends, her school but bolstered too by their greater energy, greater risk taking, their obsessions, and their love. There is both wisdom and some regret in the adult's voice we hear. It's a really good read. A story of what it takes to learn to possess oneself. Here is a description to enjoy:

The Holly Redeemer was an academy well-thought-of in the district where it was situated - that is to say, it valued the social manner of its girls above their originality or wit. The girls themselves were lively, boastful, vain; a few were shy, a few snobbish, a few rebellious. In the seven years between our arrival as first formers and our departure from the Upper Sixth, characters changed of course- but they didn't change much. It was the girls' appearance that was subject to volcanic, dismaying alterations. Little gilt girls grew coarse and dark, gangling girls grew svelte; modest girls grew great bosoms and dragged them about like the sorrows of Young Werther. Others, pale and self-effacing as novices, whispered unnoticed through their days hardly embodied inside their solid maroon-and-clay uniforms, creeping out of the school at eighteen on the same mouse feet that had brought them in at eleven. A number of such girls secured lovers and husbands at once, without the trouble of looking for them, and began upon tumultuous and dazzling erotic careers. Some needed just a year or two to blossom into women who occupied the normal amount of space and breathed their ration of air. Some of them blossomed at thirty, no doubt, and some will find themselves at forty; some will creep on those mouse feet into old age.

And now on to # 47 The Pilrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott.


40. The Spoilt City - Olivia Manning
41. Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning
42. Nerve Damage - Peter Abrahams
43. The Stolen Child - Keith Donohue
44. The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick
45. Tell me Everything - Sarah Salway
46. Experiment in Love - Hillary Mantel
47. The Pilgrim Hawk Glenway Wescott
48. The Last Town on Earth - Thomas Mullen
49. Lisrael - Garth Nix
50. Abhorsen - Garth Nix

Everything I want in a book (Books - Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway)

I'm enjoying my meaningless challenge much more than I expected because I have gotten to read some really meaningful books. Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway would have to win my best book of 2007 award, if I had one. (Bleak House would be a close second.) I opened it last night and didn't stop reading it until I had finished it. Thank you Scott Pack at Me and My Big Mouth for the recommendation. The nearest voice I can think to compare Sarah Salway's to is Lorrie Moore's, and coming from me that is a big compliment.

Molly experiences a few breaches of trust as a young woman that leave her seriously wounded. She closes down and protects herself by eating, when we meet her she has become one of life's castaways, seriously overweight without a job, a home, or any sense of herself. She meets five people - Mr. Roberts who gives her a job, Mrs. Roberts, Tim - a man of mystery she meets in the park, Liz - a librarian who recommends French authors, and Miranda, a hairdresser. With these relationships she begins, in a way, to reclaim herself. The story is observed in exquisite detail.

I love the description of Molly's initial meeting with Mr. Roberts:

He caught me crying at one of the cafe tables they put up outside the church on the high street during spring and summer.

Despite the cold, I'd been sitting there for one hour and forty-two minutes, refusing all offers of refreshments, even though I could see the volunteers pointing me out and tut-tutting among each other. Then a plump, peachy woman in a white blouse and flowery skirt - with one of those elasticized waists women her age wear for comfort although they're always having to hoist the skirt back down from where ti's risen up under their tits - came out and told me I wasn't to sit there anymore. That the cafe tables were for proper customers only.

I didn't say anything, just started to cry, and suddenly this old man came up and told the waitress it was all right. That I was with him.

It was Mr. Roberts, althougt of course I didn't know that then. I was just relieved that everybody was now staring at him instead of me. He said nothing at first. Just bought me a cup of tea, pushed it over and sat there in silence until I raised my head.

"What do they mean about being proper?" I asked.

"I supposed they want people who'll pay," he said. "They're traying to run a business here after all. Although the Bible does have something to say about merchants in the temple."

"I might not want anything to drink," I said, "but that doesn't mean I'm not proper. They should be more careful about what words they use. Words matter. That sticks and stones staying is rubbish. Names can break you."

"I know that pet," he replied. "You don't want to worry about church people. They've no taste. They can't see how special you are."

This made me cry even harder. Mr. Roberts didn't say anything, just got up so I thought he was leaving me too, but he came back with a handful of paper napkins and handed them to me.

"Dry yourself," he said. "And then we'll sort you out."

I wiped the tears away and looked up at him nervously, but he shook his head. "Not yet," he said, and pulled out a sheet of newspaper he had neatly folded away in the pocket of his tweed jacket. It was the racing pages and he started studying the form closely.

He was right too. As soon as I realized his attention had wandered away from me I started crying again, loud, gasping sobs. When he didn't seem to mind, I ignored the sour looks I was getting from the church woman and let it all come out. The pile of napkins was sodden by the time I was finished, and his facing columns were full of the little Biro marks and comments. He must have been sixty, with steely gray hair cut forward over a bulging forehead. It was his mouth I noticed most. It was prim and womanly, with perfectly shaped teeth he kept tapping his pen against. It wasn't the first time I'd noticed that the older men get, the more feminine their mouths and chins become. It's the opposite of women, who start to sprout bristles and Winston Churchill jowls. In fact, most long-term couples look as if they've swapped faces from the nose down.

Isn't that scene marvelous? I really want to share more of her beautiful writing with you, more of the perfectly wrought descriptions, more of her complex observations about human beings' private fantasies and pains, more of her cogent story telling, but what you really should do is get this book for yourself and read it. It's magnificent and meaningful writing and would start off your year's reading with a bang.

40. The Spoilt City - Olivia Manning
41. Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning
42. Nerve Damage - Peter Abrahams
43. The Stolen Child - Keith Donohue
44. The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick
45. Tell me Everything - Sarah Salway
46. Experiment in Love - Hillary Mantel
47. The Last Town on Earth - Thomas Mullen
48. Lisrael - Garth Nix
49. Abhorsen - Garth Nix
50. Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks


That brings me to #46 Experiment in Love.

Count Down

I should amend my thoughts about The Stolen Child (see the last post) to say, it's not merely about the young self and an old self that exist side-by-side, but about changes of all kinds that we experience in life. One could equally read in it, the dream world and the thinking world, or the inner life and the outer life. It really is a wonderful story.

I should also thank Mary of Mary's Library for recommending The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It is a wonderful young person's book - a combination of a traditional text and graphic novel. It's full of imagination, adventure, and even some history and it's set in an old train station. A great book to read on a winter's night in a bed and breakfast in the old mining town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.

Now we're home again. Yay! Time for #45 and I've three days left. Don't know if I'm going to make it.

40. The Spoilt City - Olivia Manning
41. Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning
42. Nerve Damage - Peter Abrahams
43. The Stolen Child - Keith Donohue
44. The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick
45. Tell me Everything - Sarah Salway
46. Experiment in Love - Hillary Mantel
47. The Last Town on Earth - Thomas Mullen
48. Lisrael - Garth Nix
49. Abhorsen - Garth Nix
50. Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks

I won't grow up!

A stolen minute between gift opening, eating, and playing with the nephew for The Stolen Child. This is a modern tale of fairies, well hobgoblins actually. It's a fascinating twist on the story of the changeling in which a hobgoblin replaces a child, and transforms himself to approximate his appearance and personality, living with his family and otherwise appropriating his life. The actually child ends up living with other hobgoblins in a strange, renegade sort of existence where he remains a child. The novel alternates back and forth between the lives of the two Henry Days - the changeling and the original. I imagine they are eventually going to intersect but the book is keeping me in suspense as to how.

What I'm enjoying most is that as there are two overlapping worlds in the story, it can also be read in two ways - one is at the level of novel alternating with fantasy - taking the two existences literally. The other is seeing the changeling myth as a way to evoke the change that happens when a child grows up. Seeing the fantasy world as one in which the child has never grown up. The changeling kids are alot like Barrie's Lost Boys (but there are girls too), the theme is similar too except the parallel worlds coexist. Just 70 pages left to go, with any luck I can finish the book in the care on the way back through Pennsylvania. I would like to personally thank the 5 people in the hotel room next door to us last night who shouted and otherwise whooped it up until 1:30 am so that I could get so much reading in rather than going to sleep. Oh, and let me just say I really made out on the gifts this year - favorites included an asparagus steamer, some favorite movies on DVD and not one but two barnes and noble cards!! Woo hoo.

Merry update

I hope all those who did christmas had a merry one. We haven't yet done our major gift exchange, so busily are we covering the Ragazzo's releatives throughout Ohio, but we did cook dinner for 14 yesterday. Later today we'll open presents.

Insanity update:

40. The Spoilt City - Olivia Manning
41. Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning
42. Nerve Damage - Peter Abrahams
43. The Stolen Child - Keith Donohue (making slow progress)
44. Tell me Everything - Sarah Salway
45. Experiment in Love - Hillary Mantel
46. The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick
47. The Last Town on Earth - Thomas Mullen
48. Lisrael - Garth Nix
49. Abhorsen - Garth Nix
50. Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks