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The Balzac Problem: A Quick Look at The Black Sheep and A Daughter of Eve

Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman In "Julia"

Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman in “Julia” can write anywhere, but this beach house looks nice….  And I think I need a cigarette.

Blogging can be boring. Same-o, same-o. Like a journalist, I can bang out a 700-word post anywhere:  at Starbucks, in a bubble bath, or the wilds of the Wisconsin woods.

I often do.

There was the daily diary. Deleted it. There was Frisbee: A Book Journal (still twirling in cyberspace) and  Mirabile Dictu since the end of 2012.

Does anyone really want to read about my daily reading?

More important, do I want to write about it?

Is blogging performance art?

And where are the new book blogs? I swear, every blogroll features the same blogs.  Are we all in some eerie network? Trapped in cyberspace?  And, if so, how did that happen?

And, as a break from these difficult questions,  I am banging out a “postette” on The Balzac Problem instead of a longish book post.

Balzac

Balzac

It was going to be the Year of Balzac.  Actually, I said it might be.  His entertaining novels center on the mesmerizing schemes and unpredictable exploits of misers, courtesans, politicians, journalists, spinsters, coquettes, and con men.  His psychological analyses are penetrating and incisive.

In his 95-volume magnum opus, La Comédie humaine, he manically attempted to portray every type of human being  and chart every niche of society.

I love Balzac. My favorites are Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions, Pere Goriot, Modeste Mignon, and A Harlot High and Low.

But now I’m leaving behind the Penguin classics and have reached the no-man’s-land of what I call DEEP Balzac.  (It’s a little like Deep Throat in All the President’s Men.)   I am perusing the lesser-known books, the ones translated by Clara Bell and Ellen Marriage in the late nineteenth-century.

And when a Victorian translator scribbles too fast and clumsily for quick money (they were paid little), you get to know Balzac’s formulas and tricks almost too well.  There’s the phrenology and physiology,  which so many 19th-century writers took so seriously; the endless exposition (When WILL he start the story?);  then the frenetic unrolling of the plot to make up for lost time; and the blunt narration when he tires of constructing the story.

It’s Balzac’s world.

black-sheep-balzacAnd. much as I wanted to read all 95 novels and stories, I have no desire to write about the entire Human Comedy.  I am behind:  In December I read  The Black Sheep (available in Penguin) and A Daughter of Eve (free at Project Gutenberg), and though both novels are thoroughly enjoyable, they are uneven, with abrupt transitions.    I suggest you read and enjoy these two without thinking too hard.

QUICK SYNOPSES

In The Black Sheep, Balzac creates an Oedipal triangle consisting of a mother and two sons. At the apex is Philippe, a gambler/thief/murderer/spendthrift,  the favorite son of his widowed mother, Agathe.  Her less beloved son, Joseph, is a successful artist who financially supports his mother when, on so many occasions, she is bankrupted by Phillippe.  She underrates his success.

But how can Joseph protect her from Phillipe?

Early on, we learn that the generous aunt who shares their flat gambles on a small scale:  she  buys a lottery ticket with the same number every day for years and years.  So perhaps the gambling is in the family.  Phillippe, too, is addicted to gambling.  He steals from his aunt and horrifyingly deprives her of the winnings when her lottery number finally comes up. The family’s rented rooms shrink with their new poverty,, and Agathe, ironically,  takes a job managing a lottery office.  And finally Philippe robs the till at work, gets involved in a political mess, and goes to prison.

Agathe and Joseph enter a new chapter of their lives then:  they travel to the provinces to try to save a pecarious legacy her brother should have saved for her from their father. Well, it is a struggle, and they fail.   The last part of the novel weirdly veers away from Agathe and Joseph, while  Philippe  attempts to win the  inheritance for himself.  And lets’ just say, there is violence and the usual theft and ruining of live.

countess-illustration-the-daughter-of-eve-013A Daughter of Eve is simple and slight, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It starts out like a fairy tale.  Two virtuous sisters grow up in total innocence and are shocked when it comes time to marry.

Here’s an excerpt:

Marie-Angelique and Marie Eugenie de Granville reached the period of their marriage—the first at eighteen, the second at twenty years of age—without ever leaving the domestic zone where the rigid maternal eye controlled them. Up to that time they had never been to a play; the churches of Paris were their theatre. Their education in their mother’s house had been as rigorous as it would have been in a convent. From infancy they had slept in a room adjoining that of the Comtesse de Granville, the door of which stood always open. The time not occupied by the care of their persons, their religious duties and the studies considered necessary for well-bred young ladies, was spent in needlework done for the poor, or in walks like those an Englishwoman allows herself on Sunday, saying, apparently, “Not so fast, or we shall seem to be amusing ourselves.”

Marie Eugenie marries a rich banker, Mr. Nucinigen,  and Marie-Angelique marries a count. They thrive for a number of years–it’s better than living along– until one day, after years of virtuous marriage,  Countess Marie de Vandenesse  takes a lover, the journalist Raoul Nathan.  And this becomes a problem, because soon everybody, especially Nathan, will need money.

Fun to read!

And now I say Adieux for the weekend, so I can catch up with my TV-watching!

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Turgenev’s The Diary of a Superfluous Man

diar-of-a-superfluous-man-turgenev-7130fhs404l-_sx313_bo1204203200_

Turgenev is one of my favorite Russian writers.

But I wonder:  Who reads Turgenev now?  My guess is he is one of Russia’s best-kept secrets. Sure, he is dubbed one of the “giants” of nineteenth-century Russian literature, along with Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, but his name doesn’t resonate with the average reader.  Type the phrase “Turgenev reviews” on Google and you’ll find a paltry 206,000  results,  while “Chekhov reviews” garners 511,000, Tolstoy 453,000, and Dostoevsky 435,000.  Does this unscientific survey mean the other three are more than twice as popular!

Well, I read Turgenev’s short, luminous books over and over. No one writes better about love and politics. His characters include fiery nihilists, intellectual women, star-crossed lovers, and aristocrats who are nostalgic for a simpler time.  Their fervent discussions of love and politics not only reflect the concerns of 19th century Russia but of our own time.  They are as confused about politics as we were during the recent election.

Whatever the year, Turgenev is relevant. I have blogged about Fathers and Sons twice once here, and once at my old blog.  In 2012, the year of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I mused on the role of the nihilist anti-hero Bazarov in Fathers and Sons in a post (at my old blog, Frisbee:  A Book Journal) titled  “Would Turgenev’s Bazarov Occupy? And I wrote here again about Fathers and Sons in 2015.

borzoi-turgenev-12478287572If you are a fan of elegant prose and originality, you’ve got to read Turgenev.  I have read his  gorgeous novels innumerable times and am jsut discovering the stories.   I recently  read  and enjoyed his 1850  novella, The Diary of a Superfluous Man.  (I read Harry Stevens’ translation in The Borzoi Turgenev, a collection of four novels and three long stories.)

Chulkatirin, the cynical hero of The Diary of a Superfluous Man, considers himself an unimportant man who accomplished nothing in his life.  He calls himself “a superfluous man.”  Literary critics adopted Turgenev’s phrase to describe a popular character type in 19th-century Russian literature.  Two of Chulkatirin’s “superfluous man” predecessors are Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and Lermontov’s Pechorin in  A Hero of Our Time.  All three are courteous, attractive, and well-educated, but are too cynical, bored, and contemptuous of society to define a goal or prove their high opinion of themselves. And they cannot resist fighting pointless duels.  (By the way, both Pushkin and Lermontov died in duels.)

As The Diary of a Superfluous Man opens, the dying hero Chulkaturin decides to start a diary .  He wants to analyze his life.   He claims he accomplished nothing and was unloved and superfluous.  He coins the phrase “superfluous man.”

Superfluous, superfluous…  I have thought of an excellent word.  The farther I penetrate into myself, the more closely I examine all my past life, the more convinced I am of the stern truth of that expression.  Superfluous–precisely.  To other people that word is not applicable.  People are bad, good, intelligent, stupid, pleasant, and unpleasant; but superfluous…no.  Yet understand me:  even without these people the universe could manage quite well–of course; but uselessness is not their main quality, not their distinctive characteristic, and when you speak of them the word ‘superfluous’ is not the first to come to the tongue.  But I–about me it is not possible to say anything else:  I am superfluous, and that is all there is to it.

diary-of-a-superfluous-man-turgenev-9780486287751Chulkatirin sketches his early life, but then zeroes in on the events of the few short vivid months he spent in the district town O—-.  During his stay, he  fell  in love with Liza,  the pretty daughter of  Kirila Matveevich Ozhogin, a wealthy county official.  Though he had difficulty expressing himself and was not socially astute, Chulkatirin believed that her politeness indicated she returned his feelings.   Then Prince N. arrived, and Liza is radiant when he is in the room.  Chulkatirin assumes  her vivacity is aimed at him, not the prince.  Finally, at a ball, Chulkatirin cannot ignore her radiance as she dances the mazurka with Prince N. and realizes the two are in love.  He insults Prince N. and they fight a duel which proves to be ridiculous:  the superfluous man’s life is a comedy.  What does Chulkatirin gain by his passion?  Nothing.

Russian novels are chock-full of superfluous men, including the famous Bazarov in Fathers and Sons.  Finally I know the source of the phrase.

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Searching for Tacitus

edward-gorey-cats-books-a50cb5178866eb4a8d584a8358452d49We were at a tiny bookstore in a small town.  I was crawling on the floor, searching for Tacitus.  The foreign language section has been dismantled and banished to two bottom shelves in the philosophy section.   I had to adopt a yoga pose with head lowered to read the titles.

A couple of years ago I saw an old battered Latin edition of Tacitus here.  It was overpriced and in barely acceptable condition.  I wanted to look at it again.

It is gone!

Darn!  Who would have bought it?

Oh well, I have another Tacitus at home.  True, I’ve already read it.  I COULD buy a nicer  (and cheaper) paperback copy online, except I cannot:   I have resolved this year to shop at bricks-and-mortar stores.

Shopping at indies will make me a better person.  Well, I’m already a good person.

Anyway, I am weeding books to find shelf room for books in boxes (including my London books).

Supporting the brick-and-mortar culture is part of my resolution to be more “present.”  The experience of browsing among physical books is electronically inimitable.  I miss it.

Although I hear that independent bookstores are having a comeback, I don’t see that here. As I’ve often explained, we have to travel 100 miles to find a good independent  bookstore.

Anyway, here is a list of the excellent brick-and-mortar indies and chains I visited last year.

IN LONDON (THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY!):  Skoob, London Review Bookshop, Oxfam, Foyles, Waterstones, and several used bookstores on Charing Cross Road.

IN IOWA CITY:  The Haunted Bookshop, Iowa Book, Prairie Lights

IN OMAHA, NE:  Jackson Street Booksellers, The Bookworm

IN OSKALOOSA, IA:  The Book Vault

IN NORTHFIELD, MN:  Content

IN DES MOINES, IA:  Barnes and Noble, Half Price Books

IN ANKENY, IA:  The Plot Twist

Very sadly, the last independent bookstore in Ames, Firehouse Books, closed last year.

I expect this to be a more leisurely year, with less shopping and more rereading.

Let me know your favorite brick-and-mortars.  I’ll support them if I’m there!

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The “Gap Year” Canon: How I Dropped Out, Tuned in, & Read the Classics

I dropped out after the first year of college.  I didn’t know what the hell I was doing or wanted to do. I was majoring in “boyfriend,” with a minor in cutting classes. Although I tolerated my literature classes, I preferred reading Virginia Woolf –she was not on any syllabus then–to skimming the Psychology textbook, which focused on rats, not psychoanalysis or the The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) .  While reading Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, I imagined myself one day living in Bloomsbury and mysteriously learning to write as beautifully as Woolf. It would indeed have been mysterious, as I wrote very little and preferred reading.

Anyway, the “gap year,” i.e., dropout year, was wonderful. I had an undemanding job, with a good salary and benefits.  I completed my work in two hours and spent the rest of the day discreetly reading.  No one minded, so long as I didn’t flaunt it.

The year was remarkable,  because I had time to read what I wanted, and knew other people who had time to read. I hung out with college graduates who couldn’t find an appropriate professional job because they chose to stay in a  university town. And for some reason, maybe because it was a university town and the bookstores carried so many classics, we did not read many new books. Well, we did read some by Writers’ Workshop grads and professors: Gail Godwin, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, and Marvin Bell are a few I remember.  But in general we were reading the dead.

It was not a wasted year: it prepared me to appreciate a university education.

I joined The Literary Guild Book Club, at the pressing of a friend. The books were not as nice as the editions printed by the publishers, but I enjoyed the company of this smart bibliophile, and she and I became addicted to the book club’s cheap hardcover sets of the classics.

The sets were not particularly nice, but they were adequate.  I wryly refer to this period as my “personal prep school.”  When I taught at a prep school a few years later,  I observed that the students received the equivalent of an  undergraduate education at an age when few were mature enough to understand it .   But it gave them the advantage as an undergrad, because it was their second time through the material.   And thus the well-educated rich have an advantage over the public-school-educated middle class and poor.

I returned to the university after my “gap”/dropout year more confident than when I had left.   Like Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted, I intended to build a life on literature and boyfriends.  I earned a degree in School of Letters, which required proficiency in two foreign languages and a slew of classes in English and literature in translation.  Essentially I did classics and English.

Tonight I surfed the internet and lo and behold!  found  images of some the Literary Guild sets I used to own.  They’re for sale at eBay and other sites for ridiculous prices.  But what a good reading list!  I loved my sets.

I plan to return to some of these books later this year.

HERE ARE SOME OF THE LITERARY GUILD SETS THAT SHAPED MY GAP YEAR READING.

lot-of-3-henry-james-portrait-of-a-lady-golden-bowl-spoils-nelson-doubleday-1971-491ef6bc83528a8fcce4ddadccac759d1 The Henry James set:  The Portrait of a Lady The Golden Bowl, and The Spoils of Poynton.  I fell in love with James and have never understood why he is considered difficult.

dickens-set-literary-guild-il_570xn-614156782_mndr2. The Dickens set.  David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of two Cities, and Oliver Twist.  The only one of these I’ve not gone back to is Tale.  David Copperfield is one of my favorite books.

f-scott-fitzgerald-set-literary-guild-il_570xn-1029373479_nso03.  The F. Scott Fitzgerald set.:   The Last Tycoon, The Great Gatsby, This Side of Pardise, Tender Is the Night.  I’ve gone back to Gatsby many times, and even read the original manuscript, Trimalchio.

d-h-lawrence-set-literary-guild-41fsko1zh3l-_sx285_bo1204203200_4. The D. H. Lawrence set:  Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Women in Love, and Sons and Lovers.  Lawrence is one of my favorite writers.  Lady Chatterley and the gardener can be ridiculous at times, but I love Women in Love and Sons and Lovers.
forsyte-saga-galsworthy-literary-guild-il_340x270-828452278_7jgk5. The Galsworthy set:  The Forsyte Saga, A Modern Comedy, and End of the Chapter.   I watched the TV series and naturally had to read the books.

camille-madame-bovary-anna-karenina-s-l5006.  What I call The Love Affair and Adultery set:  Dumas’ Camille, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.  I love Anna and Bovary and have read both multiple time.  Is it time to return to Camille, which I barely remember?

What were your gap year, or dropout, reading experiences like?  They are intense, no?

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Winner of the Giveaway of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time

I threw the names in the hopper and the winner is Nancy!

Thank you all for commenting.

Gubbinal:  Your Russian literature challenge sounds wonderful.

Jen:  Better luck next time!

Ellen:  You’d love Pushkin.  Eugene Onegin is brilliant and I know how much you love poetry.  I very much enjoyed Lermontov, partly because of the way he makes Eugene Onegin his own in the first important Russian prose novel.

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The Last Giveaway of 2016: Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time”

lermontov-book-cover-hero-of-our-time

I freed up one bookcase this year by weeding books, and  hope to free up another in the new year.   My resolution is to get all books out of boxes on to shelves.  And for every book that comes into the house, one must go out.

The last giveaway of the year is of a lovely Penguin edition of Mikhail Lermontov’s charming  short novel, A Hero of Our Time  (1840). (We have three copies:  two were recently found in a box.)

I was utterly absorbed in the story of Pechorin, a  Byronic anti-hero described from three points of view:  that of a narrator/writer who takes travel notes, that of an officer who tells spellbinding stories that reveal Pechorin’s character, and finally from Pechorin’s own journal.

In the introduction, the translator Paul Foote writes,

“A Hero of Our Time” is, as the title indicates, an account of the life and character of a man who is typical of our age. In this it continues the tradition of personal studies, initiated in Russia by Pushkin’s ‘novel in verse,’ Eugene Onegin (1823-30), but with antecedents in Western European literature, in which the contemporary young man with his problems and faults is exposed.  The link between Lermontov’s work and Pushkin’s work is evident from a number of similarities…

Onegin and Pechorin are the first in a line of literary heroes characterized in nineteenth-century criticism as ‘superfluous men’ and found in the novels of Turgenev, Herzen and Goncharov that followed in the 1840s-50s.  Their common feature is that they are misfits, men who are aware that they are above the mediocrity of their society and aspire to something better.  They fail–the ‘something’ to which they aspire is too vague to become a practical goal…

If  you would like the Penguin, leave a comment.  I can send it anywhere in the U.S. or Canada.  Only postage costs keep me from sending it overseas!

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My Favorite Books of 2016

My favorite new book of the year.

Some favorite books of the year (and more below)

My husband and I started making  “Best of the year” lists in the ’90s.  We typed them up in an amateurish newsletter and mailed them to friends.  Our friends laughed at our lists and made counter-lists.   Did we really think the best book was X, the best movie Y, the best restaurant Z?  What you do then is look them in the eye and say, “WOULD WE LIE TO YOU?”  Then there is much good-humored bickering. The one thing we agreed on in 1997 was that  Ulee’s Gold was the best movie of the year.

I miss pre-internet days.  In the ’90s we had AOL and dial-up and the server was unable to reach the internet.  We read fewer publications and probably read more deeply.  Things were more personal.  We knew the people we exchanged lists with.  Now I have access to lists in book pages of newspapers around the world, online magazines, blogs, Goodreads, list-and-podcast oriented sites like Book Riot, public library websites, and more.

I must have  read at least 20 lists so far.  But the one I most look forward every year is complied by the daily New York Times critics, Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner, Janet Maslin (now freelance), and Jennifer Senior.  I requested and received three books from this list for Christmas : Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (recommended by Kakutani)  and Jennifer Haigh’s Heat and  Light and Paulette Giles’ News of the World (recommended by Maslin).  This is the only list that translates into sales at my house.  Again, it’s because it doesn’t look like a shopping list.  It is published a couple of weeks after Black Friday

Well, WE DON’T NEED ANOTHERNARCISSISTIC BLOGGER’S “BEST OF” LIST.  But I’m not going to deny myself the fun of it!    So here it is.

MY FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2016.  (Click on the titles to read my posts.)

FAVORITE NEW NOVEL.  Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool

FAVORITE DEBUT NOVEL.  Emma Cline’s The Girls

FAVORITE SHORT STORY COLLECTION.  Tess Slesinger’s On Learning That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover and Other Stories.

FAVORITE NOVEL IN TRANSLATION. Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s La Femme de Gilles

FAVORITE SHORT STORY COLLECTION IN TRANSLATION.  The Collected Stories of Pushkin

FAVORITE CLASSIC.  Balzac’s Pere Goriot

FAVORITE “REDISCOVERED” CLASSIC.  Barbara Comyns’ Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

FAVORITE OUT-OF-PRINT “REDISCOVERED” CLASSIC. Conrad Richter’s The Trees

FAVORITE REDISCOVERED WORKING-CLASS CLASSIC.  Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker

FAVORITE ENVIRONMENTAL CLASSIC.  Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons

FAVORITE HORROR NOVEL.  E. Nesbit’s Dormant 

FAVORITE SCIENCE FICTION.  Frank Herbert’s Dune

FAVORITE FANTASY.  Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place

FAVORITE MYSTERY. Janwillem van de Wetering’s Outsider in Amsterdam

FAVORITE MEMOIR.  Peter Stothard’s The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher

FAVORITE ESSAYS.  MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me

FAVORITE POEMS. Ovid’s Amores

FAVORITE LITERARY CRITICISM.  D. J. Taylor’s The Prose Factory

FAVORITE HUMOR PIECES.  Jean Kerr’s How I Got to Be Perfect

P.S. Do tell me your favorite books of the year.  I will add them to the list.  And if you give me enough titles , I’ll list them in another post.

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The Death of Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher

I was saddened by  Carrie Fisher’s death, but not because I thought of her as “iconic Princess Leia.”  All the obituaries say:  ” Carrie Fisher, ‘Star Wars’ Princess Leia, Dies at 60.”  Is that all they’ve got?

I was a fan of her books.

She wrote comic memoirs and light, witty novels.  The heroines of her fiction transcend dysfunctional personal lives with humor as well as rehab.   Her four novels,  Postcards from the Edge (made into a film with Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine), Surrender the Pink, Delusions of Grandma, and The Best Awful, a sequel to Postcards (and a bipolar classic), are hugely entertaining. Are theyschick lit?  No,  Suzanne in Postcards and The Best Awful has  addiction problems and bipolar disorder, as did Fisher.

But try to get a copy of her books now she’s dead.  They’re “temporarily out of stock” at Amazon, and there is a long, long waiting list at the library.

So is Fisher finally getting her dues as a writer?

Her new book, The Princess Diarist, capitalizes on her career as Princess Leia, but she has written before about her difficulties in coming to terms with fame at 19.  In her memoir Wishful Drinking, based on a one-woman show, she writes:  “Forty-three years ago, George Lucas ruined my life.  And I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

I’m not into fandom and have no desire to see Star Wars again, but I liked her snappy comebacks to critics who attacked her physical appearance at  58 as General Leia in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  A New York Post critic said, “No one would know the name Carrie Fisher if it weren’t for her ability to leverage her looks.” He disapproved of her complaints about being asked to lose weight for the role.

She tweeted back,

Ok, I quit acting. NOW,can I not like being judged for my looks?Tell me what to do & who to be, oh wise New York post columnist.u GENIUS

Carrie Fisher and Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally"

Carrie Fisher and Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally”

I liked her as Meg Ryan’s friend in When Harry Met Sally.  Last time I watched it, I wondered what it would have been like  if smart, less pretty Fisher had played Sally instead of blond, cute Meg Ryan.  I enjoy rom/coms, but I just can’t relate to Meg.

And I have just read that Carrie Fisher’s mother Debbie Reynolds died today.  Tragic.

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Miss Beryl in Richard Russo’s “Everybody’s Fool”

everybodys-fool-russo-fool_cover“Who is your audience?”

In Richard Russo’s brilliant novel, Everybody’s Fool, he charms his audience. And he is not the only one to consider audience.  His characters consider the relation of storytelling to audience:  the loquacious Sully changes the stories he tells according to his barfly friends’ reactions.

My favorite character, Raymer, the  inarticulate chief of police, also muses on audience.  He is so bored by a narcissistic minister’s rambling eulogy at a funeral that he flashes on a question often posed by the late Beryl Peoples, his eighth-grade teacher: Who does the minister imagine the audience to be?  (I LOVE MISS BERYL!)

If you haven’t read Russo, Everybody’s Fool is the perfect place to start. It is quite simply my favorite book of the year. Sure, it’s a sequel to Nobody’s Fool, but it can be read as a standalone.   Russo’s sharp style, shrewd observations, and witty dialogue made me remember why I used to love modern fiction:  GOOD WRITING.

Russo chronicles the exploits of the down-and-out inhabitants of  a run-down small town in upstate New York, North Bath.  The town literally stinks:  a sewage-like fug has settled over North Bath, and no one has figured out its source.

The multi-character saga centers on Raymer, a depressed, blundering widower who was elected chief of police despite his bungled campaign slogan:  “We’re not happy till you’re not happy.” This slogan pretty much sums up Raymer’s problems:  he can’t communicate and thus is horrified at the prospect of making a speech about Beryl Peoples at the town’s  celebration of her life:  they are renaming the middle school after Miss Beryl.

“When you write,” she’d advised Raymer and his classmates, “imagine a rhetorical triangle.”  At the top of their essays she always drew two triangles, the first representing the essay the student had written and the second, a differently shaped one that would supposedly help improve it.  As if bringing in geometry–another subject that gave Raymer fits–would clarify things.  The sides of the old lady’s triangle were Subject, Audience, and Speaker, and most of the questions she scribbled in the margins of their papers had to do with the relationship between them. What are you writing ABOUT? she often wanted to know, drawing a squiggly line up the page to the S that marked the subject side.  Even when they were writing on a subject she herself had assigned, she’d insist that the subject was unclear.  Other times she’d query:  Just who do you imagine your AUDIENCE to be?  (Well, you, Raymer always wanted to remind her, though she steadfastly denied this was the case.)  What are your readers doing right now?  What leads you to believe they’d be interested in any of this?  (Well, if they weren’t, why had she assigned the subject to begin with?  Did she imagine he was interested?)

rhetorical-triangleI love this!

Who is my audience?

Uhhhhhh.  Bloggers, bots, and readers? Three bloggers and one reader left comments on yesterday’s post, as did  98sherri, who says my “blog can go viral” if only I click on her website.  98sherri is such a bot!  I deleted her comment.

Let me know who you are, readers!

(But I won’t try to crack your identity, I promise.)

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2017 Projects: The Year of Balzac & Absolutely No Promos

Balzac, a strange-looking gent, no?

Balzac, a strange-looking gent, no?

Bloggers have so many projects. There are the reviews (in my case, the “bookish” posts), the group reads, the photos of bookshelves, the Year of This and the Month of That. Bloggers frequently complain of exhaustion, and no wonder. We’re essentially writing our own book newsletters, and some of us write too much. I wrote one post a day in 2013: it really cut into my reading time.

I seldom participate in group reads, because I’m too old, too well-educated, and too well-read. Yup, and since I only have a decade or two left, I direct my own reading . But I very much enjoyed the posts on the year-long group reading of Dorothy Richardson, and even participated in Virago Month, Women in Translation Month, and the 1947 Club (I’m dyslexic with numbers and hope I got the year right. ) These group readings are the equivalent of Yahoo book groups, only more loosely organized.

This has been a bad year politically–I am not happy about the prospect of living in the United States of Exxon next year. So I am about to become a project blogger,

I need distractions.  And so I have made a list of projects for 2017 A very long list.  I’ll only do a few of them.  But here are a couple of my ideas.

Project # 1:  The Year of Reading Balzac

new-balzac-history-of-the-thirteen-to-selected-short-stories

Some of my Balzac books:  2 copies of Cesar B.

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More Balzac:  a second copy of History of Thirteen.Balzac was prolific.  He wrote all night, neglected his need for food and drink to churn out journalism and reviews as well as fiction, and died young.

Balzac was prolific.  He wrote all night, lived on coffee, and churned out journalism and reviews as well as fiction.  He neglected his health.  But he had a project.

The Human Comedy consisted of 94 novels and stories.  I will try to read all 95,  but plan to focus on my paperback collection.

The top picture shows History of the Thirteen, Cousin Pons,The Wild Ass’s Skin, Quest of the Absolute, two copies of Cesar Birotteau, Eugenie Grandet, Old Goriot, Cousin Bette, A Murky Business, a second copy of History of the Thirteen, and Selected Short Stories.  I’ve read six of these.

On the second shelf we have Seraphita, Lost Illusions, A Harlot High and Low, Droll Stories, A Murky Business, a Colonel Chabert, The Black Sheep, and At the Sign of the Cat and Racket.  Of these I have read four.

I also have a few 19th-century editions of Balzac in a box.  My husband has no idea that I am cutting brittle nasty acidic pages in old books and getting paper cuts. I can’t do much of that because I seem to be allergic!  Oh dear I love books but I may have to go the e-book route.

Project # 2:  No More Promos

It can’t be done.  I can’t promote free books anymore.  I hardly ever do it, but it’s a burden.  There’s just so much I want to read.  I’m finishing Alice HOffman’s Fidelity, which is a throwback to her earlier novels about dreamy rebellious women who live emotionally behind layers of fairy tale scrims.   The problem is I would have enjoyed it more had I bought the book and read it at leisure.  As it is I read it on my e-reader in line at Target. Not the best place to appreciate her delicate writing.

Any projects pending for you?

A new year, a new start!