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 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.)

James Joyce's Ulysses: A Personal Odyssey

I read Ulysses for the first time in my last year of high school. I had already decided by then that I wouldn’t go on to study literature, although it was my oldest love. Somehow this made reading Ulysses a “now or never” affair. I wasn’t going to stop reading fiction just because I’d study something else in school, but, to my 18-year-old self, Ulysses seemed like the kind of book I might never check out without the incentive of a required reading list. I was prone to bouts of self-pity at the time, so this quickly became the symbol of all those intellectual landmarks I was going to miss by not becoming a lit major. So it was decided: I had to read Ulysses. There was just one small problem...

So, like many conscientious readers before me, I embarked on The Reading Ulysses Training Camp™. Mine was the abbreviated version. I figured I needed to be familiar with three things before tackling Ulysses: The Odyssey, modernism and Joyce’s previous writing. I was on reasonably good terms with the first two, so I moved straight to Joyce. (In retrospect, I really wish I had added some remedial Irish History to the list.) I read Dubliners and liked it. I moved on to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and there the problems started.

Review: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Death in Venice is a story about Plato and Nietzsche and how wonderful and terrifying the world is through their eyes. I'm only half kidding. Consider our hero, Gustav von Aschenbach. He's a writer that made it to fame and greatness by exercising self-restraint and discipline, by fighting against his body's limitations and suppressing his baser impulses. He is a martyr for his art (and this is not just my metaphor, his brand of "active enduring" is compared to St. Sebastian's):

Once, in a less than conspicuous passage, Aschenbach stated outright that nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles. But it was more than an observation; it was his experience, the very formula of his life and fame, the key to his work.

If we follow Nietzsche's much-quoted dichotomy, what Aschenbach aspires to be is an Apollonian hero. And this works well with the classicism he seems to belong to as a writer, because the Apollonian is the element of form, rigor, rationality, distance from feelings, restraint (after the god Apollo, the god of sun and light). But, according to Nietzsche, throughout the history of humanity, this element of order battled an element of chaos, the Dionysian (after the god Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy and all sorts of good times). In the beginning of the novella, Aschenbach, who embraced the Apollonian both in his life and in his works, sees a red-haired man in front of a mortuary chapel one day, has a vision of a jungle, and is seized by a sudden desire to travel. Nothing good can come out of this and nothing good does.

A Review to Remember

It's September, which means The Classics Club has another meme question for us to answer. And we have this one in the bag. Here's what we're supposed to do:

Pick a classic someone else in the club has read from our big review list. Link to their review and offer a quote from their post describing their reaction to the book. What about their post makes you excited to read that classic in particular?

As soon as we saw this, we knew exactly which review to choose. It's a review that really stood out the first time we read it, for both its enthusiasm and the wide range of details it managed to cover without losing steam or becoming boring. It's a review that made us really look forward to reading the book it discussed, no small feat considering this is a book we're more than slightly intimidated by. It's Emily's review of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf over at Reading While Female.

So what do we like about this review and why does it make us want to read Woolf? We like how it is specific, but not too specific. There is thread of enthusiasm and love for the book running through it and Emily offers just the right amount of details to support it. We understand why she loved the book: she offers enough examples and explanations for it to make sense. She talks about the characterization, the style, the themes and it's never just a vague pronouncement - 'These elements were good." - but always an explanation of why these elements worked, how they complemented each other, and what effects they produced on the reader. At the same time, it's not too detailed or spoiler-y. You don't feel like now you know everything about the book and there's no point in reading it. You feel like you were given a taste of the book and now you want more, which is very impressive considering the fact that the review doesn't contain a single sentence from Mrs. Dalloway. (Confession: a lot of reviews sell us on the books they discuss mostly through their Favorite Quotes section.)

Another thing that runs through this review and makes us trust the recommendation is the impression that the reviewer knows stuff, that their opinions are not only personal, but also well informed. (And this is something more Classic Club members share.) For example, we like the way Emily discusses some of the problematic aspects of this book as well (like the depiction of working-class characters). She does it by mentioning the general background (the problems modernism and early feminism have re: minorities and class), but also giving her own opinion on this particular book. It's a valuable insight we got from reading that post.

Okay, so this obviously turned into us reviewing a review and fangirling over it at that. Perhaps this was not entirely the point of the question, but this is what made us want to read this book. We will now end with a favorite quote and hope it will convince you to read the review and read Mrs. Dalloway:

Mrs. Dalloway is often hailed as one of the modern classics, and after reading it I can absolutely understand why. Woolf's use of style and structure serve to paint a picture of a woman, a truly human woman, complete with flaws and strengths, full of new hopes and failed dreams, and to show the people who come into contact with her throughout the course of a day. Despite the high literary style, it feels honest and uncontrived. The characters feel familiar, like the people you meet every day, and the feelings and thoughts they have could very well be your own. It is a beautiful, luminous, haunting book that will only improve upon rereading. I had a lot of expectations going in to this reading, and I am happy to say that Mrs. Dalloway exceeded them all.

Go read the rest here.

Our Favorite Classic Book

The Classics Club asked a question and we were not sure we'd be able to answer. The question should have been an easy one - What is your favorite classic book and why? - but then there's two of us and we both have a pile of favorite classic books (that you can admire in the sidebar of our pages). Narrowing down our lists of favorites looked close to impossible, so we figured we'd skip this meme. But then we remembered that there is one classic that we both love and that is a fairly good representation of what unites us at this point. That book is The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.

As readers we are not very similar. Not only that we have very different reading styles (Alexis - slow and thorough, Claudia - fast and... less than thorough), but, beyond the loose label of "classics," we tend to appreciate different books. And yet we rank The House of Mirth the same. We love it for its elegant writing. We love it for its heroine, poor tragic Lily Bart. We love it for its depiction of 19th century society. And we love it for the memory of that time when Claudia unwittingly spoiled it for Alexis by saying, "Oh, you're reading The House of Mirth? I cried at the end."

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: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

So who could have predicted that after expressing what bugged me the most about this book I'd lose interest in it and never finish the proper review? But well, after a solid week or two of procrastination, here I am, returned to both Wilkie Collins and this poor neglected blog. And I've come back to tell you that I really didn't like The Woman in White that much. 

Now, I am not a fan of mystery novels in general. When I read mystery, I have one of two reactions to it. The first is boredom. I wish I could say I am one of those astute readers that figure everything out from page two and then spend the rest of the book yelling at the characters to smarten up. I am not. I never figure anything out, but I just don't care. I just wish the mystery plot would go away and the characters would do something interesting for a change. (Which is precisely why four-year-old me was bored to tears by the whole catching-villains part of Scooby-Doo, but got reasonably invested in the idea Fred and Daphne were meant for each other. And by "reasonably invested" I mean I would have written fan fiction of it, had I known fan fiction existed.)  

But sometimes, with some books, I get a totally different reaction and I am afraid that reaction is best described as complete mental unraveling. I am not made for suspense. If I'm really invested in a book, don't know where it is going, but do know that it might end badly, I won't enjoy it. I will just get sick to my stomach. (Which, by the way, is why spoilers are good.) This is usually the case with books that feature some great injustice done to the characters. No amount of happy resolutions can make up for the agony of my reading experience. So you see, between "Meh." and "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, J. McAuthor?",  I really don't have a lot of things to look forward to from mystery novels and I usually avoid them.

Mistaken First Impressions? 

The reason I told you all this was not, contrary to all appearances, because I wanted to confess to shipping Scooby-Doo characters. It was because I wanted my bias to be clear when it came to this book. The Woman in White did not start with the best chances. I am afraid its first section did nothing to improve those chances either. It had some bad, bad writing. Until I got to the second section and realized that the clichéd writing had been a feature, not a bug; that it had reflected the writing skills of the character narrating that part of the story and not Collins' own abilities, I doubted my wisdom in choosing this book. But then things started to look up. 

The multiple narrators are this book's best feature. The fact that Collins can play with Walter's romantic and affected prose, with Marian's direct and compelling style and with the distinct voices of so many secondary characters is, hands down, an achievement. The high point of the entire book for me was Mr. Fairlie's section. His self-absorbed, whiny tone managed to be entertaining, even though I knew that his comical selfishness was actually putting his nieces' lives in danger.

Not only that Collins created an unique voice and background for each character, but, in the first part, he managed to do so without any costs to the plot or the pacing of the story. There were no elements extraneous to the plot and little overlapping between the sections narrated by each character. So it moved briskly along, and I was charmed. I was even briefly sucked into the story and started the dreaded complete mental unraveling spiral. I suffered along with Marian and wished the villains punished. If things had continued this way, I would have loved this book (and probably gotten sick to my stomach from the suspense too). But they didn't.

The Disappointing Second Half

Everything that was good in the first half was undone in the second. The problems all stemmed from the fact that once Walter returned and saved the two sisters, there was basically nothing at stake anymore. We knew what happened. We knew the villains' plan and its outcome. All that was left was to a. figure out all the details of the villains' motivations and b. force society to acknowledge a story that we, as readers, already knew. Neither objective is too fascinating to watch unfold. As a result, there is hardly any tension to the second part, especially once it becomes clear that the story is rapidly moving toward a happy ending.

Unfortunately, this also means that the perfect synchrony between the narrating voices and the plot breaks down. You get characters repeating parts of the story we already heard and it's dragging the pace down. Fosco's confession is close to useless in the story's economy. There is no reason to have it in full, because at this point in the story the readers either knew or guessed most of the things in it. The character himself is on his way out and has been absent for hundreds of pages, so a focus on his characterization is also a little misplaced. The whole thing is just anti-climactic, the way the villains' punishments were anti-climactic too. 

The Bottom Line

I wouldn't call this a bad book, but I can't in all honesty say it was a particularly good book either. Even working past my dislike for the genre, The Woman in White disappointed me. I would normally give it 2 out of 5 stars, but since it provided me with a good chance to rant about gender roles and some things to ponder in the future, I will give it 3 stars.

Gender Roles in The Woman in White

What's a footnote?

I haven't finished the review for The Woman in White yet, but this rant forced its way out of me as I was trying to write the said review. Since the order in which I post won't make much of a difference, I thought I'd post a footnote about the book before posting a proper review. (I know, I know, some (wo)men just want to watch the world burn.) Here it is then.

When a book starts with a sentence such as "This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure and what a Man's resolution can achieve," you might be tempted to think that there's nothing left to discuss. Case closed from the very first words: this book will be based on the most traditional of traditional gender roles. Women are passive and patient; men are active and determined. Women endure; men achieve. And one shouldn't blame Wilkie Collins for that, because he lived in the 19th century and was not as bright as John Stuart Mill (few people were, so that's not necessarily an insult either).

But then it looks as if the book doesn't exactly align to the roles prescribed in its very first sentence. You have male characters that are feeble, like the comically selfish Mr. Fairlie, and male characters that have a more emotional and artistic personality, like our hero, Walter Hartright. And, on the other side of the Great Gender Divide, you have Miss Marian Halcombe, who can walk on roofs, is as brave and resolute as any man, and seems to be a generally kickass Victorian heroine. So perhaps this book is pretty enlightened after all? The answer, alas, is no.

Circumcision and the Deronda

What's a footnote?

So this is a thing and it cracked me up. I was peacefully googling for some information about Judaism in Daniel Deronda because I vaguely envisioned a comparison to Ulysses. (Why would I do that? Because my life contains too little pain and I must add to it.) And then I stumbled across this rather fascinating book chapter and nothing was the same again. 

Someone, somewhere, at some point in 1975, noticed something weird about Daniel Deronda's life story. Supposedly, his mother had given him away when he was two years old, because she didn't want him to be raised in the Jewish tradition. But if he was two, that meant he had already been circumcised. Circumcision was not widespread in Britain outside of Jewish circles. So the question arises: did Daniel never look down? Not to minimize people's ignorance of their own bodies and especially their genitals (if in doubt, read (almost) any romance novel and try to reconstruct female anatomy from it), but surely at some point he would have noticed. If not on his own, when reading up on Jewish traditions or when people started insisting that he might be of Jewish descent. 

So what gives? Literary criticism being the serious enterprise that it is, this did not devolve into a series of jokes about Deronda's dick. (Which is why I'm not an English major. I'll basically always go for the joke.) Instead it turned to a discussion about the problem of realism in the Victorian period. Did George Eliot realize this could be a potential problem for her plot? Given the care she put into researching this book, it is very likely that she did. And if so, did she try to give subtle hints of this? Like when she talks about Deronda sympathizing with Byron because of Byron's deformed foot, is she inviting us to make use of well-known urban legends about men with big feet and see Daniel as being ashamed of his own unusual penis? Why does she never talk of Deronda's nose? Henry James mentions Deronda's nose. Does he use it as an euphemism for penis or not? (Yes, someone wrote an academic article about this. Maybe there is hope for literary criticism after all.)

But suppose that feet are feet and noses are noses for a second. That would mean that George Eliot did not talk about Deronda's penis because she either did not realize it was a problem, or she thought no one would care. (And, to be fair, it did take 99 years before anyone did care.) The latter would imply that realism is a convention and one can ignore certain details even when they point to phallic-shaped plot holes.

I obviously think finding subtle hints in the novel is going too far and that one of the other options (Eliot didn't know or didn't care) is far more likely. It also never crossed my mind when reading to think of the state of Deronda's genitals, so I guess it's not just Victorians who are oblivious to such things. In any case, you should check out this chapter that talks at length about the whole debate. It's interesting.

Henry James Reviews Daniel Deronda

What's a footnote?

Here's a snippet I very much enjoyed. If you love Henry James or George Eliot, or both, you will probably enjoy it too. It's about Henry James' very unconventional review of Daniel Deronda. First some background details: Daniel Deronda was published in monthly installments between February and September of 1876, and Henry James' first reaction to it appeared in The Nation at the end of February. It was an unsigned note and largely positive, saying among other things this:

The "sense of the universal" is constant, omnipresent. It strikes us sometimes as rather conscious and over-cultivated; but it gives us the feeling that the threads of the narrative, as we gather them into our hands, are not the usual commercial measurement, but long electric wires capable of transmitting messages from mysterious regions.

Isn't the metaphor of the electric wires so suitable for Eliot and the way she incorporates universal messages into her narrative? Anyway, as more installments were published, Henry James' opinion changed. By June, we know from his correspondence with his brother, William, that his feelings about the novel were mostly negative, William too had a bad opinion of Daniel Deronda and its moralistic tone, an opinion sprinkled with a good dose of sexism. (Because we all know the world's greatest moralists were women?) Here's what Henry wrote to William in 1876:

Daniel Deronda strikes me (in proportion to its elaborate ability) a great failure compared with her other books. Gwendolen to me lives a little; but not the others: D.D. least of all. But the episode with Mordecai is fine.

But the interesting part came in December, when James published Daniel Deronda: A Conversation. It was a very unusual review, written as a dialogue between three characters. I was charmed by the idea, because all those contradictory feelings I had about the book could be expressed and discussed in one place and every character had something of value to add, in the end. I think it's the best way to convey the impression this book gives: a book complex enough to be discussed at length, but with a number of weak points that make one hesitate to declare it great.

So, what I am going to do now is give you a taste of each of the characters with a short description and an emblematic quote and then, at the end, a link to this piece that can be read online.

Theodora is portrayed as a romantic and somewhat silly girl. She is in love with Daniel Deronda and completely in awe of the book that contains him. She is George Eliot's groupie.

A book like Daniel Deronda becomes part of one's life; one lives in it or alongside of it. I don't hesitate to say that I have been living in this one for the last eight months. It is such a complete world George Eliot builds up; it is so vast, so much−embracing! It has such a firm earth and such an ethereal sky. You can turn into it and lose yourself in it.

Pulcheria, the other female character in the review, dislikes the book. Part of her dislike clearly stems out of anti-Semitism. (And there is more than a hint of her disliking Deronda because he's not masculine enough. He is a prig, but also too emotive, too womanly.) She attacks Eliot at every level imaginable, but she also scores some valid points along the way.

I never read a story with less current. It is not a river; it is a series of lakes. I once read of a group of little uneven ponds resembling, from a birds−eye view, a looking−glass which had fallen upon the floor and broken, and was lying in fragments. That is what Daniel Deronda would look like, on a birds−eye view.

Constantius is the level-headed man who brings nuance to the table. He admires George Eliot and understands what she tried to achieve in her book, but he calls Daniel Deronda the weakest of her books. Constantius' opinions are the most interesting and detailed, and he seems to be the one channeling James. To me, the following quote stood out, because I can't decide a. if it's true for Eliot and b. how much of it was informed by sexism (a woman who wants to philosophize rather than Feel is just denying her own nature and squandering her talent).

But it comes back to what I said just now about one's sense of the author writing under a sort of external pressure. I began to notice it in Felix Holt; I don't think I had before. She strikes me as a person who certainly has naturally a taste for general considerations, but who has fallen upon an age and a circle which have compelled her to give them an exaggerated attention. She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still as naturally a sceptic; her spontaneous part is to observe life and to feel it, to feel it with admirable depth.

Intrigued by this? Go read the rest here, courtesy of the California Digital Library. And if you have an opinion about this problem of sense vs. sensibility in George Eliot's writing, please share. It's bugging me.

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.

Bloomsday, Spanish Lovers and Christopher Hitchens

In honor of Bloomsday, I will share a funny story about Ulysses. This is something that happened to me in real life. Some time ago I happened to take an English Literature course. I was an exchange student in a non-English-speaking country, needed some extra credit and this was one of the few English-taught courses available. So I took it and had the time of my life rediscovering my love for literature. Truth be told, I would have been thrilled just to discuss my favorite writers with someone, anyone (Bueller?), but the fact that the professor was adorable didn't hurt at all. He was this old feminist guy with the loveliest of British accents (he wasn't British) and I was in awe of him up to the very end of that course. 

One of the last classes was on Ulysses. The Adorable Prof™ started by reading aloud the first chapter and singing "Introibo ad altare Dei" (as an aside, I can't read that phrase anymore without singing it to myself). He ended the class by reading from the last chapter. Considering his feminism, I suspect he didn't want to shy away from giving us the female perspective after he had interpreted Stephen and Mulligan, so he went all out with Molly's soliloquy. Which meant that (a) he tried to change his voice to sound like a woman and (b) he mimicked that orgasm right along with Molly. (a) was a cringe-worthy failure, (b) was a hilarious cringe-worthy failure. Our class ended with Adorable Prof™ shouting "YES, I WILL, YESSS!!". If you think you've never experienced mocking so far in your life, try being an old man faking a female orgasm in front of a class of undergrads. It was not pretty.

He could just show us this. Molly's soliloquy as a stichgasm. Source..

But then something else happened, which added to both the failure and the hilarity of the entire situation. The Adorable Prof™ explained what he thought was reading. He said that the book ends with Molly, the unfaithful wife, fantasizing about her Spanish lover. (He even extolled the talents of Spanish men in this respect, but the less said about that, the better.) Now, as far as I remembered, the whole point of it was that Molly, unfaithful though she is, thinks back at the moment her (future) husband proposed to her and they had sex for the first time. (A moment Leopold himself remembers earlier in the book.) 

I fretted a lot whether to tell the Adorable Prof™ that he was wrong, that Molly was thinking of Leopold at the end, not of a Latino lover. But how can you tell your prof, as an undergrad, "I read Ulysses and you are wrong!" without sounding über-snotty? Hint: you can't. (I suspect I sound snotty even writing this. Don't tell me if I'm right, illusions are all I have.) So I just kept quiet and wondered how this awesome person missed something I thought was very important in the book. It was a weird mistake.

I was reminded of this mistake recently, by reading an article of Christopher Hitchens': Joyce in Bloom. It is a nice and definitely entertaining piece. But, throughout it, Hitchens stresses Joyce's "infantilism and arrested development," as exhibited in the dirty jokes that abound in Ulysses. As exhibited in the reason Joyce chose June 16, 1904 to set his book. You see, we think it was Joyce's first proper date with Nora, his future wife. But in thinking that we ignore Joyce's dirty mind. Hitch does not and highlights the 'real' reason for Joyce's choice: "A century later, the literary world will celebrate the hundredth 'Bloomsday,' in honor of the very first time the great James Joyce received a handjob from a woman who was not a prostitute." [i.e. from Nora]

Joyce in his university days. Yeah, I can see the dirty mind vibe. Source: My Daguerreotype Boyfriend

Why did this catch my attention and what does it have to do with the Adorable Prof™ and his gaffe? I think Hitchens' idea about Bloomsday and the prof's idea about the last part of Molly's soliloquy come from the same place. And that place is called "ignoring that sex and mush sentimental value can co-exist and that they in fact do for Joyce." See, we are not celebrating a handjob on Bloomsday any more than we are celebrating Joyce's first date with a woman he loved. And Molly's soliloquy is an exploration of feelings just as much as it is an exploration of female sexuality. Which is why she doesn't need to think of a Spanish lover at the very end. Which is why the ending is bittersweet, if we consider Leopold and Molly's relationship as depicted in the rest of the book. 

And to me that is why Joyce rocks. Because he showed us that deep feelings and ideas can, and do, co-exist with sex and sexual images (and with other normal functions of the human body too). What's striking about Ulysses is that it shows how putting these things together doesn't take away from their value and function on their own. Dirty jokes can still be dirty. Touching feelings can still touch us. 

And with this bit of pontification, I'm off to read the book. If you want, you can keep up with my progress here :)

Reading for Bloomsday

Bloomsday is here and I'm up at an ungodly hour to start reading. (YMMV as to what "ungodly" means.) I will be reading Ulysses throughout the day, tweeting lines of the book as I go for the Tweeting Ulysses event and checking in with the people in the Bloomsday Readalong hosted by o from Délaissé.

This post will be updated with my progress as I go. I haven't decided yet if I'm aiming to finish the whole book today. I've already read Ulysses once, so, on one hand, I could push myself to reread it in its entirety in one day. On the other hand, I also feel like taking a detour to explore some of Joyce's references, particularly the literary ones. So I might stop to read some Yeats along the way, or I could just make a list of all the references and keep it as reading material for next week. We'll see.

Check back here for my progress in a couple of hours. And now... here we go.  Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead....

Episode I: Telemachus

This flew by easier than I expected. I remember the effort it took me to follow the dialogue the first time around. It's like you're dropped in the middle of a real life conversation that you have to do your best to follow. Even though I had read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and was familiar with some of the historical background, my best was not good enough and I spent a lot of time going "Huh? WHAT are they talking about now?" I also remember reading the word "Chrysostomos," looking it up and thinking that if I'm supposed to get all that just from a character opening his mouth, then I'm screwed. This time, though, I felt I was on top of it and that I could actually follow what everyone was saying and why they were saying it. I said hello to Chrysostomos, my old buddy. It was a good start and it's making me feel hopeful about the rest. :)

Favorite quote: 

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

I love how the undercurrent of Stephen's grief and guilt over his mother's death comes to the surface here. Joyce has this way of succinctly describing emotions that gives me the shivers. "Pain, that was not yet the pain of love" might be the best description of the mix of feelings after someone one's death I've ever read.

Favorite character: 

Buck Mulligan. I can't help it. I just sympathize with Mercutio-like characters. (And isn't Mulligan more Mercutio to Stephen's Romeo than he is a fake-Horatio to Stephen's Hamlet, as people describe him?) I know he's vulgar, I know he's irreverent and I know he treats Stephen badly. I get why he's in the story. But, at the same time, The Ballad of Joking Jesus is funny. And I like people that don't take themselves seriously. I wouldn't mind reading more of Buck Mulligan.

Stuff to follow up on:

I want to read some of the things that were referenced here. (I'm reading an annotated edition, and I try  to keep up with the notes as well, though I constantly forget to check them as I fool myself that I get what's happening I read ahead. Oh well.) Since making plans for what to read next is my favorite activity (much surpassing reading itself), here's my list:

• Swinburne, The Triumph of Time (I love how they constantly call him Algy.) 
• Yeats, Cathleen ni Houlihan
• Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism & Culture and Anarchy (I've decided I'm going to try to read these for A Victorian Celebration.)

Episode II: Nestor 

Stephen teaching a history class. Some images that I loved (A pier is a disappointed bridge? That's actually quite brilliant, no matter what Mulligan would say.) This wasn't particularly hard to follow, even though Stephen started musing about history and the possible and Aristotle and all that jazz. (I wish I could say that, as a Philosophy major, I knew what he was talking about. But...yeah.) Still feeling good about myself, though.

Favorite quote: 

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.

Another example of Joyce capturing emotions in a striking way. Stephen is tutoring an ugly boy and thinking of how someone (i.e. his mother) must love the boy even though he's so ugly. From there he starts thinking about his own childhood. Do you see a pattern here? Most of my favorite passages from Ulysses are like this - easy to understand and easy to relate to (bonus if they make me think of my childhood).

Favorite character: 

After confessing my appreciation for Buck Mulligan, you thought I'd say I liked the old anti-Semitic misogynistic teacher, didn't you? No, I like Stephen here. What was interesting was that all the people so far are immersed in culture in one way or another. They can spout endless quotes. Parts of their conversation are just citing Shakespeare/various Irish poets. But at the same time, it's clear that not all of them are the real thing. Mr. Deasy (the guy who hates Jews and women) quotes Iago to bolster his point, because it's Shakespeare, you know? It makes one like Stephen, who at least knows what he's talking/dreaming about.

Stuff to follow up on: 

• Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment & The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• Milton, Lycidas

Episode III: Proteus 

Ah, there it is. The feeling that the book moves faster than your mind. I actually have a theory about what's happening here, and in Modernism in general. (Yes, that's one snotty sentence.) In this chapter Stephen keeps repeating two German words: "Nacheinander" (one after another) and "Nebeneinander" (side by side). The ever-helpful notes told me that these terms were used by Lessing to distinguish between things you can present in writing and things you can present in the visual arts. The subject of poetry (and, generally, written stuff) is always a sequence of events, one after another, while the subject of a painting is a conglomerate of objects that are there at the same time, side by side, and you, as a viewer, can take your time in noticing them.

Reading this explanation, I thought it fit Joyce unexpectedly well. To me it looks like what Joyce is doing here is precisely putting things side by side. Instead of getting the normal sequence of events, you get an image of everything the characters remember about their lives and about history. Everything they ever learned or lived is there simultaneously, mixed with the present. This is not a narrative in the traditional sense, this is more like a painting. It's an effort to say everything at once. And that's also why one can't take it all in immediately.

Don't mind my rambling, it was something I was struggling to put into words about Faulkner and why his sentences are so long, so I'm happy that I found these terms to describe it :)

Favorite quote: 

Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. UN COCHE ENSABLE Louis Veuillot called Gautier’s prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. 

This section was so full of references and associations triggered by words. And then this, that works so well as a description for it. I have a huge soft spot for Modernism and for its troubled relationship with the cultural baggage it inherited.

Stuff to follow up on:

• okay, this might be insanity, but I want to read Lessing's Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. It might not say what I thought it said, and my off-the-cuff theory about Modernism might not stand, but it's worth a shot. 
• Ibsen, Brand

Episode IV: Calypso

We get to meet Leopold and Molly Bloom. They're normal people, so seeing the world through their eyes is not as challenging as seeing the world through the eyes of Stephen, who can't go two minutes without thinking of Aristotle. At my first reading, I actually had more trouble following Leopold's thoughts, though. The problem is that, unlike with Stephen's snobbish references, there is no way you can trace all the biographical elements here without reading the book to its end and piecing it all together. At least this time around I knew Molly was born in Gibraltar, so Leopold randomly thinking of that place didn't throw me off. Oh yes, and Joyce following Leopold to the toilet still amuses me.

Favorite quote:

Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of the bed. Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises. On the hands down. Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that? Valuation is only twenty-eight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.

I like this because of the last sentences, but I had to include it all because the last sentences didn't make sense without the rest. And what I like about those last sentences is how neatly they mirror the last sentences of the book, from Molly's soliloquy.

Favorite character: 

None. I feel a sort of pity and tenderness towards both Leopold and Molly, but I don't really like Molly so far, and seeing women through the eyes of Leopold got jarring pretty fast. He's a bit of a creep.

Episode V: Lotus-Eaters 

Not much to say about this one. I enjoyed it to a surprising degree and it flew by. I suppose I could talk about Leopold's pen mistress or about his funny comments about the church, but the truth is that I just want to keep reading and see how far this enthusiasm for the stream of consciousness technique carries me :)

Stuff to follow up on: 

I want to read something about Maud Gonne. I had no idea who she was before reading the notes, but she sounds like a pretty interesting person. She wrote an autobiography (The Autobiography of Maud Gonne: A Servant of the Queen), but I'm not sure I'd enjoy it.

Episode VI: Hades

I enjoyed this episode much like I did the one before it. I think this sort of technique, registering all the associations Bloom makes in a very succinct manner, is the one I like best. Bloom goes to a funeral, his way intersects with Stephen's for the first time and we get to meet the mysterious Man in the Macintosh! I confess I didn't give this guy a second thought the first time I read Ulysses. There was A LOT of mysterious stuff going on in this book, so I couldn't really tell which parts were really mysterious and which parts were just me being dumb. (The jury is still out on that one.)  Then I read Nabokov's lectures on Ulysses and he was all about the Man in the Macintosh and how this character appears throughout Ulysses and no one knows who he is. Nabokov's theory was that the Man in the Macintosh was Joyce himself pulling a cameo à la Hitchcock. I like the theory that Joyce just wanted to screw with us and our expectations :)

Favorite quote: 

Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you’ll soon follow him. For Hindu widows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who knows after. Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on a guncarriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of hearts. All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the substance. Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back, waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and lie no more in her warm bed.

Leopold musing about Queen Victoria. On one hand condemning her for her mourning, on the other condemning her for vanity. She can't win. It also amused me how terrible he is when he thinks of stuff with which to console Dingnam's widow. "I hope you’ll soon follow him. For Hindu widows only." (I sort of imagine this as a piece of dialogue in Seinfeld :)

Time for a break. I'm getting tired. Continued here.

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.

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

Two Neurotics Try to Join the Classics Club and What They Found There

It's time to know something about us: we're more than a little neurotic. We obsess endlessly over the tiniest details. The latest manifestation of this? A couple of days ago, we thought it would be a cool idea to join the Classics Club, hosted by the awesome Jillian of A Room of One's Own. Easier said than done, because once we discovered the Classics Club, we wanted to see what everyone was reading. And once we started visiting all of the blogs, we sort of started to count the books we were seeing. And then came a spreadsheet... you see where this is going, don't you? 

Long story short, we made an infographic of the most popular authors and books from Classics Club's lists. These were the authors and books that came up again and again on every blog we visited. It was very interesting to actually weigh them against each other and see the results. So if you're curious about what other people are reading, check out the picture after the jump. (Feel free to grab it if you find it useful/entertaining.)