Goodbye, October

October was a really good month for us and most of it was due to Adam's LGBT reading event, The Literary Others. It was the best introduction to LGBT literature we could have hoped for. We got a list of books we can't wait to read. (Who doesn't love a good list?) We revisited some old favorites (Death in Venice and Angels in America). We discovered two excellent writers (Isherwood and Baldwin) and organized our first giveaway. We met great people and found some awesome new-to-us blogs. Oh yes, and we read and reviewed these books:

• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson 
• A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood 
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf 
• Death in Venice by Thomas Mann 
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin 
• Angels in America by Tony Kushner 
• The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault

We'd like to thank Adam for organizing this event. We knew it was going to be great, but it really exceeded all our expectations. Towards the middle of this month, this event also took on a personal significance for one of us. So, Adam, thank you!

In different news, our tumblr project, Reader Shaming, took off nicely, thanks to Book Riot. Make sure to visit it and see all the new submissions and send your own. It warms our hearts to see how much we have in common with other readers. (We also may or may not have a happy dance routine for every submission, but the less said about that the better.)

Sample from Reader Shaming

So do we, and that's pretty much what we plan to do this November.

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: 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.

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.

The Woolf-Forster-Mann Giveaway

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first ever giveaway. As you know, this month is LGBT History Month in the USA and we're participating in Adam's LGBT Reading Event: The Literary Others. In honor of this event and since we mainly read and review the classics here at Lit. Hitchhiker, we've decided to give away three classic titles that have an LGBT theme/component. These titles are Virginia Woolf's Orlando, E.M. Forster's Maurice and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (in a volume that also includes other stories). We'll be giving away one copy of each, preferably in the editions featured below.

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

E.M Forster, Maurice

So what do you have to do in order to enter this giveaway? First of all, you have to be a registered participant in Adam's event (i.e. you must have left a comment on this post). Secondly, you need to live in a country that Book Depository ships to. And then you just have to leave a comment on this post, saying which of the books above you'd like to win and where we can contact you if you do win (in case this information isn't easily available on your profile). We'd love it if you also suggested an LGBT title we might enjoy, but that's not mandatory.

You can also win additional entries by a. following us on twitter or b. spreading the word about this giveaway on twitter or elsewhere. If you choose b, please let us know either by tagging us on twitter or by commenting here, so that we don't miss your extra entry.

This giveaway will end on October 20. The winners will have 48 hours to respond to our e-mails or we'll pick someone else.

That's about it, rules-wise. We're very excited to be sharing these books with you, as we know and love two of them - Orlando and Death in Venice (expect some reviews this week) - and have heard good things about the third. We hope you'll love them as well. Good luck!

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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 interested in signing up, you can do it here. If you want to check out 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.

Race in A Single Man: A Passage That Made Me Very Uncomfortable

What's a footnote?

I have mixed feelings about the way race is portrayed in A Single Man. On one hand, it is clear that Isherwood is trying to present sexual orientation as something that turns you into a minority much the same way race does. George, privileged on numerous axes (class, race, gender), is nonetheless a minority because of his sexual orientation. I'm not sure how groundbreaking this was at the time this novel was published, but I'm inclined to think it must have been, because thinking of sexual orientation in these terms dismantles narratives that present it as a sin or a crime. And this is very obvious when George has his terrorist fantasies about the oppressing majority, including people who want to tighten the laws against "sexual deviates." He's quick to think that Mexican and black people never figure into these violent scenarios, because they're not The Enemy:

Mexicans live here, so there are lots of flowers. Negroes live here, so it is cheerful. George would not care to live here, because they all blast all day long with their radios and television sets. But he would never find himself yelling at their children, because these people are not The Enemy. If they would ever accept George, they might even be allies.

On the other hand, George is not entirely at ease among people you'd classify as minorities. (And we won't include women here.) It's fair to say that every time someone who is not white appears, George thinks of them primarily in terms of their race. Asian people are enigmatic, but "by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort." And they continue to be enigmatic and plantlike every single time they make an appearance. The brightest black student in his class intimidates him because he "suspects her of suspecting him of all kinds of subtle discrimination."

I can accept this hyper-awareness. It's believable. I can accept the rambling discourse about minorities he delivers to his students when they ask him if Huxley was anti-Semitic. It makes a couple of good points: how minorities are not automatically angels just by virtue of having been oppressed or persecuted, how color-blindness is bullshit etc. But it also gets into very muddy waters (we'll call these muddy waters Godwin's Creek, colloquially known as "Ah, if only the Nazis were more frank about their feelings"):

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.