Review: On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac’s vagrants are literate, self-pitying, afraid of women, and condescending towards Mexicans and African-Americans. No one will confuse them with Steinbeck’s displaced Okies, and no grapes of wrath are trampled out by them. Nor are they doom-eager dreamers like Gatsby, or monomaniac questers like Ahab, or benign wanderers like Huckleberry Finn. Comparing On the Road to the masterpieces of Classic American fiction is most unkind to Kerouac.

Harold Bloom

Whatever your opinion of old Harold Bloom (and my own cannot be described as favorable), that first sentence sounds about right. Kerouac's heroes belong to one of the nastiest species in the Western world's literary zoo: the dramatic young man (where "young" stands for a state of mind more than it does for a biological age - see also "man-child"). 

What's the dramatic young man's story in a nutshell? It is the story of easily-frustrated entitlement. The dramatic young man knows the world was supposed to be his oyster. But, alas, his life is marred by an atrocity, usually war or school, autocratic fathers, prolonged stretches of peace, dead fathers, the bourgeois, saintly mothers, literary rivals, modern art, promiscuous mothers, dead brothers, live brothers, old art, emancipated women, that sort of thing. One of these horrors, or a combination of them, has put a dent in the lovely oyster, such that our hero is loath to even touch what should have been his for the taking. He channels his self-pity into some form of rebellion against the world, which usually turns out somewhat less glamorous than he'd hoped for and ends with him either self-destructing or conforming to the rotten old world he tried to fight in the first place.

The beauty of this narrative is that it is essentially timeless, because everything in it apart from the young man at its center is a prop. To paraphrase one of the most famous passages from On the Road: "What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?" It almost doesn't matter when or where the story is set, the dramatic young man's drama is easy to recognize. (And for the record, I think young German hipsters at the turn of the 19th century were usually called "Oh, for Pete's sake, put that gun down, Werther was fictional!")

Review: The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault

I normally wouldn't discuss philosophy books here - and Foucault's histories are philosophy, regardless of their titles - but I read this one for The Literary Others event and I had to have something to show for it. But since we're talking of three volumes here, and we can assume both my time and your patience to be finite, I am just going to briefly outline some of the main ideas in this work and then say a little something about the style and readability of each volume, in case you decide to read them.

First, of all The History of Sexuality was supposed to be a six-volume work, but Foucault died with only three volumes published and a fourth almost completed (it hasn't been published to this day). His initial plan seems to have been to show that sexuality is socially and historically determined and tied up with power dynamics, in volume 1, and then write the history of modern sexuality from the 17th century onwards. But then this plan changed to comparing sexuality in the Greek and Roman antiquity with sexuality in the Christian tradition, as a better way to illustrate his point. He only got to work on one side of this comparison: in volumes 2 and 3 he explored the role of sex in the Greek and Roman antiquity, highlighting some elements that seem very familiar to the Christian culture as we know it, but that had very different functions in their historical context. So what are the three ideas that I took away from these books?

Review: Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

I read Giovanni's Room earlier this month, right after I finished A Single Man. I'll try to be honest with you: after Isherwood's airy, delicate prose, reading Baldwin feels like being hit by a ton of bricks. A ton of occasionally very beautiful bricks, but bricks nonetheless. When his sentences work, they achieve that sort of beauty that's almost indistinguishable from the effects of being hit in the stomach and left breathless. The world recedes, the rest of the book recedes; the sentences before and after blur out of focus. But the downside to this style is that, when it doesn't work, you'll know it doesn't. You'll have the metaphorical bruises to show for it. And I just wasn't sure whether, on the whole, Giovanni's Room didn't give me more bruises than moments of breathlessness. So I read it a second time and I think I figured out now what was good about it and what was...less than good.

Review: The Story of a Year by Henry James

Genre: short story
Published: 1865 (March)
Available online: here

I've been really unfocused lately. I am moving along in my Know Your James project faster than I feel like reviewing. And I do want to review because I fear I will just forget everything if I don't. I am half-assedly reading some literary theory. I struggle with my post on Villette, because it's just one of those books that give me feelings. More feelings than I know how to express. And on top of this, I will soon need to write boring papers on boring topics for school. But one thing at a time: let's focus on James' second published story. 

I think I would have happier with this being James' first effort. It's not that I didn't appreciate some of the elements of A Tragedy of Error, because I did, but I just couldn't understand what made James publish it, what made him look at that material that could have been improved in so many ways and decide it was something he wanted the whole world to see. It just wasn't a piece to write home about. I do understand why he'd choose to publish this second story, though. The writing is more polished; the plotline more developed; the meaning, I think, subtler. 

John and Elizabeth and two young people that get engaged during John's leave from the Union Army. From the beginning, it is clear what the pattern of their relationship is. John is the reasonable one, the adult, and Elizabeth looks up to him. When John tells her he might die in the war, she replies with "Oh, my dear friend! [...] I wish you could advise me all my life." It's really a telling statement. She's saying she wants him to live, but the phrasing also hints at a need for guidance. Elizabeth's found in her fiancé an incentive to be good:

Review: Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster

I've been procrastinating on this review for two weeks now. This is the third Forster novel I've read and I have mixed feelings about it. I'm not quite sure how to go about as not to present it too harshly. So I'll try to lay down what I thought this novel was about and then, separately, my own reaction to it and whether I think it achieved its goal.

The Central Theme

[only minor spoilerage in this section, but skim to the next if you want] 

Where Angels Fear to Tread opens with Lilia, a young unsophisticated widow, being driven to the train station by her in-laws, the despotic Mrs. Herriton and her children, Philip and Harriet. They are sending her on a trip to Italy in the company of the young but trustworthy Caroline Abbott, to prevent her from making a bad match in England. Lilia's trip and its results introduce a clash between two worlds in the novel, and a clash between beauty and morality.

On one side, we have the stifling world of Sawston, England, your typical small town full of dust, virtue and narrow-minded matrons. Life in Sawston is not beautiful. Life in Sawston is not particularly moral either. Life in Sawston is conventional. Mrs. Herriton, the velvet-gloved tyrant, is its prototype; Harriet, the humorless zealot, its most exaggerated form. They tried to mold Lilia and failed, and are now trying to mold her young daughter in the same style. You can't blame the other characters - Philip, Miss Abbott, even Lilia - for striking out against this life and trying to escape.

All that winter I seemed to be waking up to beauty and splendour and I don’t know what; and when the spring came, I wanted to fight against the things I hated—mediocrity and dulness and spitefulness and society. I actually hated society for a day or two at Monteriano. I didn’t see that all these things are invincible, and that if we go against them they will break us to pieces. --Miss Abbott to Philip

Review: George Eliot - The Lifted Veil

I was always able to pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with a book. It's the moment my mind strains to move faster than my eyes while, at the same time, longing to stop and marvel at the view. That feeling, the push and pull of loving a book? I never got it with George Eliot. Don't get me wrong - I like her books quite a lot. So far I've read Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda, and admired their construction, their characters, the style - was in awe of them at times, to be honest. I would call her one of my favorite writers. But my appreciation of her skills is still only intellectual. She has never left me breathless. (The only possible exception? The first chapter of Middlemarch. I walked around convinced that I was Dorothea Brooke minus "that kind of beauty" for a full day after reading it.)

I wondered why that was and came to the conclusion that it was probably the way the moral and intellectual themes are sometimes spelled out in her books. It stood to reason. The preachier a narrator gets, the less I enjoy a book, which is precisely why The Mill on the Floss is my least favorite of Eliot's novels. So, I said to myself, what better way to test this theory than by reading a novella that was described to be a. very different from the rest of Eliot's work and b. free of her omniscient (read: know-it-all) narrator? You can see the results below, and they're not at all what I expected.

The Lifted Veil - Summary & Quotes

[land of shameless spoilers. do scroll down if you're not into that.]

The Lifted Veil is written as a deathbed confession, except that its narrator, Latimer, is not on his deathbed yet. He can, however, see the future so he knows that his end is near and inevitable. One month from now he'll die in his office from a heart attack, while his servants are too busy bickering to attend to him. In the meantime, he plans to write the strange story of his life in the hopes of garnering "some pity, some tenderness, some charity" that he feels have eluded him during his lifetime.