Review: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Furthermore, I shall pose the problem of feminine destiny quite otherwise: I shall place woman in a world of values and give her behavior a dimension of liberty. I believe that she has the power to choose between the assertion of her transcendence and her alienation as object (...).

History gives to some works a value they probably wouldn't have in an atemporal lineup. I honestly can't say how much I would have appreciated this book without knowing that it was published in 1949 and believing that it was the first to draw a bunch of distinctions that needed to be drawn. Perhaps that belief is wrong, my knowledge of feminist history is not all that it should be, but it is what accounted for my enthusiasm every time I thought "Simone de Beauvoir gets it!" and, conversely, what tempered my annoyance whenever I felt that she was misguided. That is perhaps not giving The Second Sex the respect it deserves. But, you see, there was something tricky about this book, something that made it very hard to assess it as a whole.

The question at the back of my mind while reading it has constantly been "Is this still relevant?". It's hard to answer that, for two reasons. First, because de Beauvoir's argument flows so directly from an existentialist philosophy that I'm not sure to what extent they can be separated. Second, because a lot of her claims about how women are and how women act are framed in such a way that I don't have the tools to evaluate them, not without doing some historical research. You'll see what I mean below, if you can suffer through me discussing existentialism as practiced by Sartre and de Beauvoir first. (I can't blame anyone who is seriously bored/annoyed by existentialism, but there is a picture of a cat below the fold, if that makes it any better.)

Review: Orlando by Virginia Woolf

I shouldn't have liked this book. Consider the following:

1. I don't like Virginia Woolf. It's weird, since "modernist" and "feminist" are THE two words that I would have sworn can make me automatically like someone, but there you have it. I'm aware of the qualities of her writing intellectually, I realize they're qualities I usually appreciate in other people, but I can't help it. I get zero pleasure from reading her. And because I know I should like her, this makes me feel inadequate. Virginia Woolf makes me feel like I'll never be mature enough - or smart enough, or sophisticated enough - to get her.

2. I don't like magic realism. (And I would classify Orlando, anachronistically or not, as playing in magic realism.) I like my fictional worlds to have clear rules. I don't particularly like fantasy either, but at least there you know where you stand. Breaking the laws of nature and having a very matter-of-fact tone about it makes me... twitchy and unhappy. I might still like or even love the books (I did go through a Read All The Rushdies phase as a teen), but my enjoyment of them will be inevitably marred to an extent.

And yet I loved Orlando. I loved it because it was like a cavalcade through history and that more than made up for the fact its hero(ine) inexplicably took more than three centuries to reach the age of thirty, while kings, queens and poets flitted in and out of hir life. I loved it because each century had its own atmosphere, and the Victorian and Edwardian periods in particular were so strikingly captured. I loved it because it was clever enough when it played with and gently mocked the conventions of the biography in the first part, but it got almost unbearably clever once the great twist took place and Orlando, so far a handsome and accomplished young man, became a woman. I loved it because it went there. I loved it because it was a sharp critique of gender roles. I loved it for its wit and humor. I loved it for the way said wit and humor didn't seem to completely demolish their targets. This was a satire of so many things, and yet it never left a bad taste behind, which satire sometimes does.

Were there still moments when my old problem with Woolf came back? Yes. There were moments when I felt bored and totally disconnected with this book and wished I were reading something else. But unlike my previous experiences with Virginia Woolf (hi there, The Years, did you know you made me give up reading for a whole year after abandoning you in the middle?), there always came something that made it worth it. Sometimes it was a cutting comment about women's position in the Victorian society. At other times it was some impressive description, like the moment black clouds cover the sky at midnight and we're told that "All was dark; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun." But most often it was some patch of pretty writing, like this:

Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.

Orlando is above all a playful book and a book that exudes a love for words and for writing. It seems wrong to dissect it, wrong to label it, especially when one isn't very eloquent to begin with. It is against its spirit. So these impressions are all I have. This is a book to be savored. I enjoyed it much more than I expected and I encourage you to do the same.

Don't forget that we're offering this book in our giveaway. If this review made you curious, you can still enter here for a chance to win Orlando.

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This post is part of The Literary Others: An LGBT Reading Event hosted by Adam of Roof Beam Reader. If you're curious about what other people are doing for this event go here. If you want to see what else we read or will read for this event, keep an eye on our Literary Others tag.

Review: A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

It's been a few days since I finished this book and I couldn't find the words to review it. To tell you the truth, I only felt the need to say two things: 1. that this is a beautiful novel and everyone should read it and 2. that Isherwood has a wonderful ear for dialogue. But if this didn't make you close the window immediately and go hunt down a copy of A Single Man, I suppose I could find another thousand words or so to say about it. 

In the spirit of Mrs. Dalloway, which partially inspired it, A Single Man chronicles a day in the life of one character. This character is George, a middle-aged professor at a university in Southern California. George is British and George is gay, and these two aspects, but particularly the latter, make him something of an outsider. We see him alone, getting ready for his day: a succession of little domestic acts interspersed with his thoughts. He misses Jim, his partner, who's been dead for a year. He reflects on the suburban community from which he's an outsider. We see him on the freeway driving to the university. He has violent fantasies about various categories belonging to "The Establishment": thoughtless modernizers of the California landscape, homophobes, politicians eager to escalate the Cold War. (This takes place in 1962, right after the Cuban missile crisis.) We see him teaching and interacting with his students. We see him discussing the prospect of nuclear annihilation and contrasting, facetiously or not, the American and European ways of life.

Review: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Internet, I cheated. I wanted to wait until October to dive into the titles for Adam's LGBT reading event, The Literary Others, but brain is flesh and flesh is weak. So I caved in and the last two days of September saw me reading my first book for this event - Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. And I have no regrets.

To start by addressing the most obvious question - yes, the book's title is a metaphor. Yes, it is exactly that transparent metaphor you're thinking of. Acting as if oranges are the only fruit and trying to impose that belief on others is the equivalent - in silliness, not toxicity - of acting as if only one set of values and one way of life are the right ones. And yes, oranges and all the ways in which they're really Symbols for Something Else (mostly traditional-to-fundamentalist Christian values and heterosexuality) feature quite heavily in the narrative. The effect is not as bad as you might expect.

Reviews: The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton and To Marry An English Lord by Gail McColl and Carol Wallace

Today I'm wrapping up my reading for A Victorian Celebration with a joint review of two books that complement each other wonderfully, and thus must be reviewed together: The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton and To Marry An English Lord by Gail McColl and Carol Wallace.

As I'm sure you've noticed, astute readers, neither book was written in the Victorian period, although both discuss a most peculiar and fascinating aspect of the late Victorian period: the mad dash of American heiresses across the pond to marry members of the English nobility. Many of these marriages were mercenary at heart on both sides--dollar princesses trading their fortunes for marriage to cash-strapped, but titled, English gentlemen in need of money to support vast estates and other trappings of aristocratic life.

The Buccaneers offers a fictional look at the privileges and pitfalls faced by one of the first bands of American girls to go husband-seeking in England. Edith Wharton's last novel, The Buccaneers was unfinished at the time of her death in 1937. It was later published posthumously, with the ending completed by Wharton scholar Marion Mainwaring, drawing from Wharton's notes. To Marry An English Lord offers a look at the real-life heiresses that inspired Wharton's fictional tale (she borrowed heavily from the lives of New York society girls in her orbit) and thus offers a delicious counterpart to the novel.

Because we've got twice the territory to cover here, I'm going to keep things short and sweet in my reviews. Here we go!

The Buccaneers: Pros and Cons

The Buccaneers is somewhat of a departure from Wharton's normal writing style. Here she adopts a dizzying multi-narrator style, with the story switching perspectives through a host of characters, including multiple American heiresses and their mothers, several British gentlemen, and one very loyal British governess, just to name the main players. The characters are both the story's biggest strength and its weakness--they aren't as finely drawn as Wharton's memorable figures from earlier works (Annabel St. George, the main heroine, is no Lily Bart). Yet, although the portraits are more superficial, they are nonetheless satisfying and keep the reader engaged through the various plot twists and turns.

It's clear the novel was very much a work in progress at the time of Wharton's death--the writing feels unfinished, the social commentaries (always Wharton's great strength) sketchier. However, the elegance of Wharton's writing remains and some of her passages about English life and the English countryside are just magnificent. And, for her part, Mainwaring does an admirable job finishing out the final quarter of the novel in a very credible imitation of Wharton's writing style.

The Buccaneers: The Bottom Line

Overall I give The Buccaneers 5 out of 5 stars. Now, I am something of an Edith Wharton groupie, so do keep that in mind here. But, quibbles aside, the story is a lovely one and it offers a fascinating portrait of the strange joys and sorrows known to young American girls living in England in the heady days of the Gilded Age. 

To Marry an English Lord: Pros and Cons

Do me a favor. If you're now intrigued by The Buccaneers, do not read it until you've first read To Marry an English Lord--or at the very least, the first few chapters of this great nonfiction book. Why? To Marry offers a fascinating inside look of the many real figures that Wharton borrowed liberally from to create her band of buccaneers. One part-gossip column, one part-historical analysis, To Marry is a treasure in its own right to be sure, but it also makes The Buccaneers a much richer and rewarding book to enjoy. With amusing details about New York and London society, the mores of the British upper-class, and the husband-hunting tactics of American heiresses, To Marry is a fun and informative read--and a real-life primer for The Buccaneers.

To Marry an English Lord: The Bottom Line

I give To Marry an English Lord 4 out of 5 stars. Why does it lose a star after I've raved about it so much? Style points, really. The authors adopt a snarky tone at times that becomes a little grating and detracts from the book. But that's really splitting hairs on an awesome read. It's a perfect one for the last month of summer, hint, hint...

Review: An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

Claudia isn't the only one who's been an awful slacker lately. I clearly fall into that category as well, but like her I'm determined to ramp up my posting in our last month of A Victorian Celebration. I'm hoping to finish both Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Edith Wharton's Buccaneers (set, though not written, in the Victorian Period) in the next month. But first I need to wrap up some unfinished business: namely, reviewing An Ideal Husband, my first read for A Victorian Celebration and one that I quite enjoyed.

The Central Themes

Set in late 19th century London, An Ideal Husband centers around the dilemma of Sir Robert Chiltern, an esteemed member of the House of Commons who is forced to confront the unsavory details about the true origin of his fortune and his raise to political prominence. Chiltern, who is adored by his wife, Lady Chiltern, as--you guessed it!--an ideal husband and man of impeachable moral character, is blackmailed by the scheming Mrs. Cheveley, a social climber newly arrived in London.

As the play's action  unfolds, Chiltern turns to his close friend, the dandified (and utterly hilarious) Lord Goring, for guidance. Rounding out the cast are a number of genteel supporting characters, including Chiltern's archly witty sister, Mabel. At its heart, An Ideal Husband is a play centered on the themes of honor, the nature of love, forgiveness, and role of past transgressions in shaping a person's destiny. 

First (And Second) Impressions

An Ideal Husband is the first piece I've read by Oscar Wilde. I was especially excited to read Wilde, since his writing checks a lot of boxes of things I tend to adore in literature: Aristocratic Victorians! High-society intrigue! Sparkling dialogue! So imagine my disappointment when I started reading...and was initially very underwhelmed. In the first scene or two, the dialogue felt artificially forced and terribly grating, as if Wilde was more focused on cramming in as many flamboyantly clever comments as possible instead of developing, you know, an actual play. "This is Oscar Wilde?!?" I thought with a sinking heart. "This is so not what I expected!"

Turns out first impressions aren't always right, and that was definitely the case here. For as the plot unfolded in earnest, I began to utterly adore An Ideal Husband and found myself whipping through the pages, wildly curious about what would happen next and savoring every bit of dialogue. Wilde does an excellent job of exploring a number of serious themes throughout the play, while balancing it with a delightfully comic plot, full of hilarious misunderstandings and well-drawn characters. In particular, Lord Goring is a complete treasure--a thoughtful and loyal soul hides behind his foppish front as the "idlest man in London." Beyond his key role in negotiating the Chilterns' domestic drama, his flirtatious banter with Mabel is to die for. He's the heart and moral force of the play and he (and the play!) don't disappoint.   

A Taste of the Play

Oscar Wilde's legendary wit means there are no shortage of great quotes in An Ideal Husband. Here are a few of my favorites:  

All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.

I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

The Bottom Line

I give An Ideal Husband 4 out of 5 stars. It was a breeze of a read--not just in terms of length but overall reading pleasure as well. Without giving too much away, the play's conclusion left a slightly sour taste in my mouth--let's say it definitely shows its age and its Victorian gender representations leave a few things to be desired. But, overall, it was a charming read, one I would absolutely recommend to anyone looking for a fun Victorian classic.

Review: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

I've been an awful slacker lately. But no more. There's only one month left of A Victorian Celebration, so I've started on Collins and Darwin. But before I get to them, I need to get Daniel Deronda out of the way first, so this week is dedicated to it. I read this book twice and reread large parts of it in order to write this review. All things considered, I've spent a lot of time in the company of this narrator and these characters. But the more I reread, the more conflicted my feelings about this novel are.

Daniel Deronda presents two loosely interwoven stories. On one hand, we get the individual plight of Gwendolen Harleth. Gwendolen is a female character that I have the distinct impression of having met before, though I can't figure out where. She's young and beautiful, very sure of herself and of her place as the unofficial center of the universe. She's arrogant, high spirited and unsentimental. And she's punished for it. In order to escape poverty, she makes an unethical decision and marries a man who she knows ought to have married another. Her remorse and her efforts to find a moral way of living are connected with Daniel Deronda. He and Gwendolen meet accidentally at the beginning of the novel and he disapproves of her activities at the time (gambling). As a result of this first meeting and of his moral censure, Gwendolen casts him as her outer conscience. She relies on his advice to learn how to be good.

And she couldn't have chosen a better mentor, because Daniel Deronda? He's a man without faults. He is good, smart, handsome and modest on top of it. Not just Gwendolen, but everyone relies on him. He walks around saving kittens and Disney heroines from drowning. And though Eliot very nicely says that "Those who trust us educate us," you don't get to see much of that in Daniel's case, because good behavior seems to come naturally to him. But there is one thing amiss in the life of young Deronda: he doesn't know who his parents are. His getting involved with the Jewish community through Mirah, the young Disney heroine woman he saved, and Mordecai, a visionary Zionist, make up the universal, intellectually-elevated side of the novel (as opposed to Gwendolen's story, I guess). Daniel gradually warms up to the idea that he might be of Jewish descent. Which, as it turns out, he is.

There is enough in this novel to keep you returning to it, to make you want to examine it further. But there are also some weak points that interfered with my ability to fully enjoy it, especially at the second reading. So I will just quickly list what I liked and what I didn't like below.

The Good

The morally-flawed characters seem to be this novel's greatest achievement. Gwendolen is quite captivating, especially in the first part of the novel. She is an example of how to create a  multifaceted character starting from just a couple of defining features. Another example is her husband, who is an interesting study in cruelty. You get to understand how their minds work, but you still wait for their actions with interest. They are not boringly predictable (which, sadly, some of the positive characters, including Deronda himself, are).

My second-favorite thing about this novel is the way its themes and motifs work together like in a symphony. I don't think its construction overall is sound (see below), but I really appreciated the attempt. The problem of parentage, of having absent or bad parents, emerges for Daniel, for Gwendolen, for Mirah, and even for the Meyrick family. The problem of inheritance, both material and spiritual, is present for Sir Hugo, for Grandcourt and his son outside of marriage, for Mordecai, for Daniel in relation with his lost family. Art and the difference between geniuses and amateurs concern Klesmer, the music master, and his employers; Hans, Daniel's friend, who's a painter; Mirah and her father, who used to work in the theater; Daniel's mother, who was a singer; Daniel and Gwendolen, who are both amateurs, but understand the purpose of art very differently. Even the character of Sir Hugo, the well-meaning but down-to-earth gentleman who raised Daniel, is mirrored in Gwendolen's world by Mr. Gascoigne.

The Bad

Can you spell "saccharine"? Because you are going to get a fair amount of that when it comes to the positive characters. Mirah is a character who lives to embody virtue and cross her feet and hands daintily (I lost count of how many times she does that over the course of the book). The Meyrick family is cute in a very Little Women style, but then I was alternatively bored and annoyed by Little Women, so I didn't really appreciate its charm. And presiding over this cast of goody-goodies, Daniel Deronda, the good man par excellence.

But beside the fact that half of the characters were just too good to be true, my problem was that they seemed to dominate the book. After a very strong start on Gwendolen's story, the shift to Daniel's perspective was welcome, but the space his story received seemed disproportionate. In the middle of the book, Gwendolen is simply absent. The way their stories entwine again was a little artificial (especially since it relies in the end on a huge coincidence). Another problem was that plotlines are started and then completely dropped, like in the case of Klesmer's romance with Miss Arrowpoint. It was a cute romance, predicated on their shared intellectual interests, and Miss Arrowpoint was a refreshingly determined female character. But their story simply disappears from the novel's map, until someone reports on it indirectly in the second half, like an afterthought.

The Really, Really Preachy 

Jewish identity and Zionism. I wish I didn't have this problem with the novel, because I really appreciate what Eliot tried to do here. I think she succeeded in revealing the way prejudice against a minority works. Even the good characters (Deronda, the Meyricks) are not unbiased towards Jewish people. They embrace Mirah, but at the same time they wish she'd give up her faith. The saintly Daniel looks unkindly at a Jewish family and judges their every gesture in a way he wouldn't with a Christian family. (He reforms his ways. See: saintly.) This is all wonderfully done, and I love Eliot for it. It is relevant even today. At the same time, I don't identify with all the talk about identity, national or otherwise, and didn't feel that Daniel's conversations with Mordecai came to life the way Gwendolen's problems did.

Bottom Line

I know I spent 2/3 of the review complaining about various details, but I'm going to give this book 4 out of 5 stars. Because I admire what Eliot set out to do, love the parts of that project she did accomplish, and think there are enough good things in this book to keep one engrossed for a long time. Which is why I'm going to return to it in a series of footnotes.

Review: Persuasion by Jane Austen

I'm quite thrilled today to not only pen my first proper book review here on the blog, but to also cross off my very first book completed for The Classics Club: Persuasion by Jane Austen. 

Persuasion is the third Austen novel I've read, the other two being Pride and Prejudice and Emma. Quite unlike my other previous encounters with Jane Austen novels, Persuasion represented a totally new experience for me because I knew absolutely nothing about the book before reading it.

With Austen's more famous works, it's so easy to be aware of their basic plot lines through cultural osmosis (chances are if you haven't read Pride and Prejudice, for instance, you already have a pretty good sense of what it's about... and maybe a healthy admiration for Mr. Darcy). But, for me at least, that wasn't the case with Persuasion. It was a completely blank slate. I knew nothing of the characters or the plot--in fact, all I knew about the book was the title.

That intrigued me and, since I like Austen quite a bit, I picked up the book with great interest. Here's what I discovered along the way.

The Central Theme

(Warning, gentle readers: a few mild spoilers lay ahead. Not into that? Why, just jump on down to The Bottom Line for my overview review.)

Austen's final finished work, Persuasion is the story of twenty-seven Anne Elliot, a baronet's daughter, who eight years before the novel opens is briefly engaged to dashing naval officer Frederick Wentworth. Under the influence of her pompous father Sir Walter (rendered in satirical perfection by Austen) and her well-meaning mentor Lady Russell, Anne was persuaded to end her engagement to Wentworth, deemed an inferior match for a woman of Anne's position.

We meet Anne close to a decade after this fateful event, living a quiet, if by turns unhappy, life with her father and elder sister Elizabeth, who is Sir Walter's protege in manners and temperament. Rounding out the family is the youngest (married) sister Mary Musgrove, another brilliant Austen caricature of self-absorption.