May 23, 2016 by Kat

Why Read SF Classics? George R. R. Martin, The Critics, & Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice

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Genre fiction is popular, but it is still not quite the thing among the literati. In order of acceptability, we have (a) mysteries, (b) historical fiction, (c) SF, and (d) romance.

SF is the most daring of the genres, but has long been considered a bastard child of literature, perhaps because it depends on “world-building” rather than corpses, Henry VIII, or flirting with guys with waxed chests. It’s fairy tales, it’s epic, it’s tragedy, it’s fantastic voyages, and it’s medieval romance, but with robots and dragons, which doesn’t always go over well. Critics praise SF founders Jules Verne and H. G. Wells but have skipped over many stunning later SF classics.

In recent years, however, I have noticed that science fiction and fantasy have become more visible in literary publications. It may be solely because of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. Why? Male critics John Mullan (The Guardian), John Lanchester (The London Review of Books), Daniel Mendelsohn (The New York Review of Books), and Tim Martin (The Telegraph) have compared the series to Shakespeare’s history plays and Lord of the Rings. Fans, especially men, have gone mad for it.

Jo Walton's My Real Children I very much enjoyed the first volume of Martin’s series, Game of Thrones, and if it brings people to SF/fantasy, I’m all for it. What the critics don’t seem to realize is that other SF writers are equally well-acquainted with Shakespeare, history, and classics. For instance, the award-winning Jo Walton and C. J. Cherryh both have classics degrees. Pamela Dean, author of the masterpiece, Tam Lin, has a master’s in English. The genre-bending David Mitchell, twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, has a master’s in comparative literature.

Sure, some SF writers write formula fiction, but the best SF writers take big chances. Not only do they create a viable future or fascinating alternate history, but some criticize the consequences of political and sociological trends. In Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner describes the fragmentation of society in a postmodern narrative broken up by quotations from radical sociologist Chad Mulligan (who is rather like Marshall McLuhan), news blurbs, and rumors on something called “Scanalyzer.” (There is even, bizarrely, an African president named Obami: pretty close to reality, right?) Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, another post-modern classic, is an SF lyrical Ulysses set in a city that has survived an unspecified disaster. Philip K. Dick’s alternate history, The Man in the High Castle, explores what might have happened in the U.S. if the Nazis had won. All of them are brilliant writers.

But what about new SF? I recently discovered Ann Leckie’s fascinating novel, Ancillary Justice, which in 2014 won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the BSFA Award. That’s quite a sweep. And it’s the first of a trilogy.

Is it an SF classic? Yes. It is a beautifully-written first novel, a very fast read, and parts are brilliant. I loved it from the opening pages. The narrator, Breq, a soldier who has trouble identifying gender, is in search of a very specialized antique on a dangerous trip to a cold, isolated wintry planet. (A nod to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.)

The book opens like a noir western (if there is such a thing). Breq finds a body in the snow. Somehow it looks familiar.

Sometimes I don’t know why I do the things I do. Even after all this time it’s still a new thing for me not to know, not to have orders to follow from one moment to the next. So I can’t explain to you why I stopped and with one foot lifted the naked shoulder so I could see the person’s face.

Frozen, bruised, and bloody as she was, I knew her. Her name was Seivarden Vendaai, and a long time ago she had been one of my officers, a young lieutenant, eventually promoted to her own command, another ship. I had thought her a thousand years dead, but she was, undeniably, here. I crouched down and felt for a pulse, for the faintest stir of breath.

And so Breq rescues Seivarden, whose body was frozen for 1,000 years after a disaster and recently rediscovered and thawed. Seivarden is now a drug addict who will sell anything she can find for drugs. But Breq understands the tragic history of the unlikable Seivarden only too well: she refused “re-eduaction” and turned to drugs after she was suddenly awakened and found herself in a world she didn’t understand. Breq never liked Seivarden, and yet she can’t let this victim of the past go. It is a thankless job. And yet they form a strange alliance.

Breq has business with a doctor/antique dealer, who can’t cure addiction but gives medical treatment to Seivarden. It turns out Seivarden is a man (which we promptly forget, since Breq refers to everyone as “she, but it is a revelation: I am surprised by how differently I regard her when I learn she is a man..). Breq’s purpose on this planet is to buy the doctor’s special gun, made by aliens. At first the doctor pretends she doesn’t have it, but Breq has done her homework: 24 of the 25 guns have been recovered, and the doctor is the collector who vanished.

Why does Breq need the gun? Gradually, through a beautifully-written unfolding of the story that is at first bewildering, we learn that she is not human but AI, with a revenge mission. She used to be the central intelligence of a ship, Justice of Toren, or rather one of the ship’s hundreds of ancillary soldiers. Ancillaries are human corpses, surgically rebuilt with implants and made into obedient soldiers to the ships and their human officers. Their brains are connected to each other’s and the ship’s, until a catastrophe tears Breq from the others and she is forced to act as an individual.

Sound complicated? It is. But it is the quality of Leckie’s writing and the vivid characterization that keeps us reading as much as the storytelling. Breq is an incredibly sympathetic character. And she wins the loyalty of Seivarden. After killing for 1,000 years or more, it turns out she can’t stop saving lives.

What a fantastic novel! And I hear the next in the series is even better. This is SF, in the tradition of the great C. J. Cherryh.

May 20, 2016 by Kat

Even in Light Novels, the Characters Read the Classics

My light reading lately has included some charming novels by D. E. Stevenson, best known for Mrs. Tim of the Regiment (Bloomsbury Reads) and Miss Buncle’s Book and Miss Buncle Married (Sourcebooks and Persephone).

I have been chuckling over The Four Graces, the delightful story of the four daughters of Mr. Grace, the absent-minded vicar of a church in the charming village Chevis Green. Published in 1946 and set during World War II, the Graces enjoy themselves, despite the inconveniences of rationing, blackouts, and clothing coupons. My favorite character, Sal, the homemaker of the family, is constantly standing in line for fish, stretching meals to feed her father’s pet young men and a middle-aged archaeologist, and smoothing the feathers of local characters like Miss Bodkin, upset over a misunderstanding about doing the flowers at church. The other sisters are also agreeable: vivacious Liz works on a farm, quiet Tilly is the church organist, and clothes-conscious Addie, who is in London doing war work, is obsessed with finding something to wear besides her uniform.

But everything is thrown off course when Aunt Rona, surely one of the most obnoxious characters in literary history, moves in with them after the windows of her London flat are shattered by a bomb. She criticizes the sisters, insults the servant, and sets her cap at the vicar. The evenings are hell, because she talks non-stop and they can’t read or talk nonsense to each other.

Tilly, especially upset by overbearing Aunt Rona, goes to bed early to read.

Sal knew that she would not sleep so she took Emma to bed with her, hoping that the well-known story would soothe her troubled spirit and dissipate her worried thoughts, but it was no use at all; the worries kept flooding in and she found herself reading whole pages without taking in the sense. She put down the book in despair and allowed her thoughts full rein.

Emma is one of my favorite comfort reads, too! Although some disapprove of willful Emma, I find the book very funny and have read it so many times I’ve had to find new comfort reads.

Don’t you love it when fictional characters read your favorite books?

What are your favorite comfort reads? And can you think of any fictional characters who read the classics?

May 19, 2016 by Kat

Book Cat Speaks! & Three Literary Links

Salve! (pronounced Sal-way!) That’s “Hi” in Latin.

Yup. I’m a Book Cat. I’ve picked up a LOT from reading over my bookish PERSON’S shoulder since I left the pound. I usually enjoy books, except when she’s crying over every other page of The Dollmaker. I did sit on the book for a while to discourage her from reading on. My colleague cats are so strung out by the emotional roller coaster of Appalchian fiction that one took a little bite out of the corner of a page. When will they learn? I REVERE books, even when they made me sad. If they allowed domestic shorthairs like me to compete at cat shows, I’d do tricks with books proving I’m way brainier than those Persians and Hairless Cats who win Best in Show! But I’m frankly too unsedated to sit in a cage and let the judges handle me. I’m more interested in feline classics than displaying my coat: my favorites books are Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, The Dover Anthology of Cat Stories, Paul Gallico’s The Three Lives of Thomasina, and T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

I have a lot of book-related jobs.

Sitting on bookcases. I call it Keeping on Top of Books.

Sniffing library books. They do have the oddest smell.

Culling the Persephone collecton. I like Isobel English’a Every Eye, which I’m sitting on. Sorry, the other has to go.

And now I’m also picking out today’s literary links, because my person is colossally bored.

THREE LITERARY LINKS.

1 Sarah Boxer writes at the Atlantic about reading Proust on a cellphone after her silver paperback fell apart and she experienced reader’s block.

A long time ago I was hopelessly hung up, and not in a good way, on a certain passage in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The offending passage, obstructing all the rest of Proust for me, lay in the very middle volume, the fourth of seven, which was then called Cities of the Plain (and has since been retranslated, with more accuracy and more filth, as Sodom and Gomorrah)

And she says she finally got past it and finished up on a cell phone. She claims it was a Proustian experience. I don’t buy it., but it’s amusing.

2 The Atlantic also published Juliet Shulevitz’s article,“The Brontës’ Secret: The sisters turned domestic constraints into grist for brilliant books.”

She begins,

No body of writing has engendered more other bodies of writing than the Bible, but the Brontë corpus comes alarmingly close. “Since 1857, when Elizabeth Gaskell published her famous Life of Charlotte Brontë, hardly a year has gone by without some form of biographical material on the Brontës appearing—from articles in newspapers to full-length lives, from images on tea towels to plays, films, and novelizations,” wrote Lucasta Miller in The Brontë Myth, her 2001 history of Brontëmania. This year the Brontë literary-industrial complex celebrates the bicentennial of Charlotte’s birth, and British and American publishers have been especially busy. In the U.S., there is a new Charlotte Brontë biography by Claire Harman; a Brontë-themed literary detective novel; a novelistic riff on Jane Eyre whose heroine is a serial killer; a collection of short stories inspired by that novel’s famous last line, “Reader, I married him”; and a fan-fiction-style “autobiography” of Nelly Dean, the servant-narrator of Wuthering Heights. Last year’s highlights included a young-adult novelization of Emily’s adolescence and a book of insightful essays called The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, which uses items belonging to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne …

3 And the blogger Catherine Pope-Victorian Geek wrote a piece on “Miss Maryat vs. Charles Dickens.”She begins,

It’s not often that Florence Marryat makes the national press, so this has been an exciting week. An unpublished letter from 1860 has emerged in which Charles Dickens berates Marryat for requesting advice from him. She offered a short story for inclusion in his journal All the Year Round, hoping that he would also give her a critique. Of course, it’s perfectly usual for authors to solicit feedback from editors, and Dickens was actually a close friend of her father, fellow novelist Captain Frederick Marryat. Poor Florence must’ve been rather miffed to receive a three-page snotgram in response.

Enjoy!

May 18, 2016 by Kat

Quotation of the Week: Elizabeth Evans on Oakland Cemetery in “As Good As Dead”

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Charlotte, the engaging narrator of Elizabeth Evans’s graceful novel, As Good As Dead, is one of my new favorite heroines of contemporary fiction.

A novelist who teaches creative writing at a university in Tuscon, Charlotte is quietly charming, respected by her colleagues, and meticulous in her criticism of students’ work. She is (reluctantly) chairing a literary prize panel: reading the manuscripts is onerous, in addition to reading her students’ manuscripts.

But life was not always so tranquil. She has come a long way from her working-class Iowa roots and her alcohol problems. She has always been a star academically, but almost died in an alcohol-related accident in college (her fault), had sex with her grad school roommate’s boyfriend, and developed a dangerous infection after an abortion she never told her husband about. Alcohol and drugs were at the root of the problems, but she also was the only student from Iowa in the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City 20 years ago. She found it stressful to socialize with sophisticated workshop students who had graduated from Ivy League schools, traveled in Europe, and never worried about money.

Elizabeth Evans

Despite her success, she is lonely in Tuscon, even though she is married to Will, an art historian she began dating in college. He is loyal, but rigid and controlling, and doesn’t look for social life outside the marriage. He orders her not to feed “Bad Cat,”as she humorously refers to the mangy black cat that prowls the neighborhood, and he does not like her wasting water on the 15-foot hedge of oleanders she planted from pots 11 years ago. (She does both on the sly.)

When her old roommate, Esme, who has ignored her letters and phone calls for twenty years, shows up on her doorstep and invites her to dinner, Charlotte asks no questions. She loved Esme, a Writers’ Workshop student with whom she’d shared an apartment in Iowa City. Unfortunately, Esme dropped out to marry Jeremy, a Southerner and fellow student with an inflated estimate of his talent, who decides they don’t need the Workshop to write.

Charlotte is anxious: should she ask them if they published? Will, who considers Esme a bad friend, is furious that they are going to dinner. He wonders what Esme wants. And, yes, she does want something.

This deceptively simple novel goes back and forth in time, as Charlotte tries to piece together the puzzle of her history in Iowa and Arizona At one point, Evans inserts an autobiographical short story Charlotte wrote for the workshop. (By the way, Evans, too, is an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.) Her descriptions of the cutthroat competition among the writers, their hard drinking at parties, and and obsequiousness with visiting writers seem very realistic. And I especially enjoyed reading about places in Iowa City, my hometown, in the 1980s: the Hamburg Inn, the River Room, the English-Philosophy Building, the Mill.. all still there.

Here are a couple of paragraphs about Oakland Cemetery.

I went to Oakland Cemetery for my run. Oakland Cemetery sat on the eastern skirt of Iowa City. Its roads ran between bare oak trees and evergreens, and I liked the way that I could leave the asphalt for dirt paths or old roads of red bricks that were rounded by wear, broken up, or disappearing altogether. Still, in a hooded sweatshirt of Will’s, I felt a little lonely and anonymous….

Heart full of missing what I sensed was not entirely Will–a feeling that had been with me at least since I was old enough to understand the lyrics of love songs on the radio and my mother’s Johnny Mathis records–I started around the cemetery’s largest and most famous grave, a monument topped by a giant figure that some called the Black Angel and invested with both terrors and benedictions…. and ahead of me, like an object in the can-you-find-it pictures I had loved as a kid, the perfectly still figure of a buff-colored deer magically detached itself from the cemetery’s early winter background of dun grass and leafless hedges and headstones…. A deer, two deer, three. They blinked their big, long-lashed eyes at me, it felt like. Then so very delicately they shifted and turned, cantered off elegantly on their neat black hooves in the direction of a wire fence that divided the cemetery from the woods of Hickory Hill Park…

May 17, 2016 by Kat

What Could Be More Predictable Than Too Frothy Summer Reading? The Virgin & the Gipsy, A Too-Cozy Cozy Mystery, and a Very Simenon-y Simenon

I’ve already done my summer reading: three silly books that would have been better saved for that horsefly-haunted fishing lodge I will find myself in soon.

But they are no less frothy than most of what will be promoted this summer!

FIRST, THE ROMANCE NOVELLA.

D. H. Lawrence is one of my favorite English writers. I love his poetry, novels, and travel writing. His style can be intense, but I appreciate intensity. Why, why, why did I not get on a train to Nottingham, his birthplace, when I was in England? Well, he didn’t like Nottingham much. And he wasn’t that keen on England.

Is he still in fashion? I have no idea. My obsession began when I saw the movie Women in Love, starring Glenda Jackson, who won the Oscar for Best Actress, Oliver Reed, Alan Bates, and Jennie Linden. And then I was enraptured by the novel Women in Love, though I tried to be cool about it, because my best friend thought it was very funny. It is one of the strangest, loveliest, most seductive books I’ve ever read. The Rainbow, its prequel, is even more stunning. I also like Sons and Lovers, his beautiful coming-of-age novel.

And then there’s The Virgin and the Gipsy.

Mind you, I enjoyed The Virgin and the Gipsy, but Lawrence’s sexual philosophy can seem ridiculous when concentrated in a novella. He needs a short story or a novel.

It is actually a typical Lawrence story of forbidden sexual attraction between a middle-class woman and a lower-class man. Think Lady Chatterley’s Lover, only sillier. It begins almost like a fairy tale. The rebellious Yvette and her older sister, Lucille, are trapped in the rigid life of a rectory dominated by a grim granny referred to as the Mater. We learn that their mother, Cynthia, left the rector for a penniless man when the girls were children. And their Aunt Cissie sizzles furiously about the house hating both girls, but especially Yvette.

So, naturally, the girls like to get out. One day the wild Yvette is out in a car with Lucille and some other young people, and they almost run down a gipsy cart. The cart finally gets over to the side of the road, but the driver is furious.

Yvette’s heart gave a jump. The man on the cart was a gipsy, one of the black, loose-bodied, handsome sort.

He asks if they would like their fortunes told.

She met his dark eyes for a second, their level search, their insolence, their complete indifference to people like Bob and Leo, and something took fire in her breast. She thought: “he is stronger than I am! He doesn’t care!”

Yvette experiences pure sexual attraction. This is a little overwritten, though.

Yvette has clandestine meetings with the gipsy. Sometimes he drives his cart past their house and she runs out, other times Yvette resists. She is also scandalizes her granny by befriending a couple who are living in sin while they wait for the woman’s divorce.

It’s a little silly. Still, it seemed pure sex when I was an adolescent.

So maybe it’s a Y.A. book?

SECOND, THE COZY MYSTERY THAT’S TOO COZY.

I picked up a couple of mysteries by Patricia Moyes, because they were very nice paperback editions with crisp pages. I THINK I read about them at a blog.

Well, damn, Down Among the Dead Men is just not that good.

Chief Inspector Henry Tibbetts and his wife Emmy go on vacation with friends, Rosemary and Alastair, who have a sailboat. And then they (and we) have to learn everything about sailing.

Alastair looked at him pityingly. “If the jib didn’t have a port and a starboard sheet, how could you come about?” Henry said he had no idea, and watched humbly as Alastair picked up another rope from the deck.

If the jib didn’t…? It’s a lot like Nancy Drew. Everything has to be explained, and over-explained, until you’re ready actually to put your backs into it and heave ho!

Anyhow, they sail with a bunch of friends, including a saucy sexpot of a woman, Ann, whom the other women hate (including me).

And Henry figures out that a friend of theirs who died tragically was actually murdered.

And Ann puts her hands all over him and makes him promise to stop saying he was murdered.

And…

Okay, but not good enough. Maybe this isn’t Moyes’ best?

THIRD, THE SIMENON THAT’S VERY SIMENON-Y.

Of course Simenon is excellent, if you like that kind of thing. The Grand Banks Cafe is a police procedural, straight investigation with no real rounded characters, and lots of re-creation of the crime going on in Maigret’s mind.

Maigret, a French detective, and his wife go on vacation in a fishing port so he can help clear the name of a teacher friend’s student, Pierre, who was the wireless operator of a ship whose voyage was apparently doomed. (Lots of accidents.) Pierre is accused of murdering the captain after they came ashore. The investigation gets stranger and more bizarre as Maigret discovers that a femme fatale was involved with three of the men on the ship.

Very tight, short, and fast. One of the better Simenons.

And if you want it, it’s yours. I’m giving away the Simenon. Leave a comment if you’d like the book.

May 16, 2016 by Kat

The Tale of Genji, Sassy Reviewers, & Clickbait

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My Knopf paperback of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji arrived in the mail today. It has a lovely, delicate cover, the print is the perfect size for reading by a nearsighted woman with bifocals (me), and it is illustrated with exquisite woodcuts from a 1650 Japanese edition. It is also very hefty, about the size of War and Peace (1090 pages).

A woodcut from a 1650 edition.

I already am finding Edward G. Seidensticker’s lyrical translation (1976) of this 11th-century Japanese “novel” more elegant and readable than Dennis Washburn’s (Norton, 2015), which I began last summer. Both have their merits, but Washburn’s prose is often awkward and wordy, perhaps more literal: I’m sure each translator has a different philosophy. I’ve often thought twentieth-century translators wrote better than the new crew of writera (the Maudes’ translation of Anna Karenina is the best). Well, I’m a worshiper of the past. It’s not a nostalgia thing: it’s why I studied classics.

Of course Washburn will be somebody else’s classic, too.

Here are the opening paragraphs of both translations.

First the stunning Seidensticker:

In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. Probably aware of what was happening, she felt seriously ill and came to spend more time at home than at court.

And here is Washburn’s more verbose version.

I N WHOSE reign was it that a woman of rather undistinguished lineage captured the heart of the Emperor and enjoyed his favor above all the other imperial wives and concubines? Certain consorts, whose high noble status gave them a sense of vain entitlement, despised and reviled her as an unworthy upstart from the very moment she began her service. Ladies of lower rank were even more vexed, for they knew His Majesty would never bestow the same degree of affection and attention on them. As a result, the mere presence of this woman at morning rites or evening ceremonies seemed to provoke hostile reactions among her rivals, and the anxiety she suffered as a consequence of these ever-increasing displays of jealousy was such a heavy burden that gradually her health began to fail/

Very different books, yes? It’s a matter of preference.

I’ll check in here occasionally to express my thoughts on this classic.

THE SASSINESS NEVER STOPS.

Reviewers can be nice, reviewers can be nasty. I have no doubt that a sassy review at a mainstream publication has the power to kill a book.

But sassiness is not only endemic at mainstream book review publications. It is also in many ways the main character at Goodreads. Mind you, there are Goodreads reviewers who write thoughtfully and analytically about the context of Lawrence Durrell’s modernist novels, but yesterday I was floored by a one-star review of The Tale of Genji by someone named “Smenkhare.”

“Smenkhare” doesn’t have an elegant way with words. He/she writes:

i hate this book only a little less than i hate ‘twilight’. the historical and literary significances are really impressive (it was the first novel written – and by a woman, for that matter), and it’s the source of pretty much everything we currently know about heian court life, but genji is the wimpiest, rapiest protagonist ever. he is literally so mind-crushingly whiny, childish and just plain unlikeable that in my opinion, he ruins what is otherwise a pretty compelling story.

“Smenkhare” deals in superlatives, you will notice.

N.B.: I should tell you: The Tale of Genji is NOT the first novel. The ancient Greeks and Romans wrote novels long before the 11th century . Seidensticker refers to The Tale of Genji as “a very long romance,”and Washburn “a long fictional narrative.”

THE SASSIEST REVIEWER OF ALL IS:

Jessica Crispin?

No, I’m joking. But she has gotten a lot of play at the Guardian lately. In a new essay at The Guardian, she says she stopped publishing her popular book blog/webzine Bookslut partly because advertisers have ruined the internet.

She writes:

I know that nostalgia is a stupid emotion, but still I regret the day money found the internet. Once advertisers showed up, offering to pay us to do the thing we were doing just for fun, it was very hard to say no. Or understand exactly what the trade-offs would be.

She discovered through her stats that readers were less interested in reviews of the small-press books she favored than in the same few books reviewed in every mainstream publication. She writes,

You have to indulge in clickbait. You have to narrow your conversation down to the one that is already happening elsewhere.

I’ve never heard that word “clickbait.”

Your_brain_on_clickbait-400x258 We’re pretty much under the radar at Mirabile Dictu. Clickbait wouldn’t work here: there aren’t enough readers. Heavens, I get complaints if I “disrespect” Jane Austen, which I don’t do, but which someone thought I did. I don’t sell ads–it’s too much trouble to be an Amazon associate and add book links to Amazon, on top of all the scribbling I do. Anyway I’m only a one-woman operation and “review”only a couple of books a week. The rest of the time I’m writing about vaguely bookish topics that don’t sell anything except whether I heart (or don’t heart )reveiwers/writers/ bloggers, depending on what I’m saying.

True, when I get sassy and critical the numbers of readers spike. After Jenny Diski’s recent death, I noticed dozens of people flocking to a post in which I defended Doris Lessing from Diski’s LRB columns complaining about Lessing’s opinions and behavior when Diski was kicked out of Peter Lessing’s school and invited to live with the Lessings.. I immediately hid the post–took it out of the “published” categroy and made it private–because I did not want to upset Diski mourners or fans. After all, de mortuis nil nisi bonum (“about the dead say nothing except good.”). I don’t knuckle under to everybody, because (a) it doesn’t pay (yet another money metaphor), (b) I’m not great at slavishly concealing my opinion, but I really don’t want to add salt to any wounds.

Periodically, when the nuances get too much for me, I even shut off my comments. Sometimes I like silence. Lawrence Durrell in Justine writes, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

I do keep up with six or seven blogs–not nearly enough, I know–and try to leave comments, hoping I write enough to show my very real interest. It all takes a certain amount of time, because I’m not a master of the comment. I think it would be easier if I branched out and read blogs about subjects I know very little about. I’m not in any particular network of blogs: I just visit the ones I like!

So have I used any clickbait? What do you think about clickbait and sassiness?

May 15, 2016 by Kat

The Dollmaker by Hariette Arnow

American working-class women’s literature can be devastating. We’re not talking Raymond Carver’s out-of-work drunks or Arthur Miller’s tragic Death of a Salesman: we’re talking about women’s shattered lives as their husbands work for starvation wages as tenant farmers or factory workers. Sometimes the women take in laundry or baby-sit, but they still cannot eke out a living. In fact, working-class American literature is often so bleak and gritty that people find it too depressing to read.

Harriette Simpson Arnow’s masterpiece, The Dollmaker, is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. That said, it has quietly disappeared from the canon. Published in 1954 and a finalist for the National Book Award, it is now a women’s “cult classic,” passed on by word of mouth. I admit, it is too shattering to be a popular read, but the writing is beautiful and the story unforgettable.

Set during World War II, it centers on Gertie Nevels, a tenant farmer in Kentucky whose feckless husband, Clovis, takes off to Detroit to work in a factory and make “big money.” Gertie has always been the farmer, while Clovis tinkered on people’s trucks and other machines and lost money. She has secretly saved money to buy a farm.

When the Army doesn’t need him right away, he flits off to Detroit and doesn’t write to Gertie until he has a job. Gertie figures Clovis will come back after the war, when the factories lay people off. And she is relieved that he won’t interfere with her buying the farm.

The first 150 pages or so are idyllic. The land is peaceful and beautiful, and Arnow’s glorious descriptions of nature and the changing seasons are exquisite.

The heroine, Gertie, is one of my favorite characters in literature. She is a big, tall, strong woman who enjoys working on the farm and, while the men are away at war, she helps other women dig potatoes and carries heavy loads for them. She is also brilliant, though she has minimal education. She meditates on theological questions and teaches her children at home from McGuffey readers. She is also an artist: she “whittles’ dolls and pine cone turkeys, and is sculpting a figure of Christ in huge block of wood .

Living in gorgeous Appalachia, she appreciates not only the beauty of the land but the quirky people in her family. Her interactions with her daughter Cassie are especially empathic. Cassie, who has an imaginary friend, Callie Lou, cannot learn to read. This imaginative child is jeered at and accused of lying by her sensible, unimaginative older sister, Clytie.

Here is a beautiful passage that shows the sensitivity of Gertie on a walk to her parents’ farm.

She walked faster, but slackened her pace when she heard Cassie’s prattle, behind her, now. She looked back and saw her high in a wide-branched pine by the road, and called, “You could fall, climben so high,” her tone kindly with no scolding, speaking less in fear that Cassie might fall than to fling some sound into the silence of road, pine tree, and sky.

“Callie Lou, she’s th one that’ll fall. She’s clean to th tip-top branch. Cain’t you see her red dress?”

“She’d better git down,” Gertie said, walking on.

Arnow’s use of dialect is masterly, but perhaps dialect abbreviates a book’s shelf life. Yes, we all used to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but nowadays people who don’t understand Twain’s humor want it censored or excised from curricula. I don’t believe anyone writes in dialect anymore, and yet we all used to hear it.. In my home state, people used to say “warsh” for wash and “git” for get. I don’t miss it, but I wonder: has dialect vanished? And are books with dialect somehow controversial?

In The Dollmaker, the idyll of Kentucky ends. Roll over, Mommie Dearest, because Gertie’s hysterical bitchy mother decides it is Gertie’s duty is to go to Detroit. I won’t tell you what evil deed she does to ensure Gertie can’t buy the farm, but it ends in tragedy.

So the family goes to Detroit, with the 10-year-old son, Reuben, smoldering, hating his mother for knuckling under. And guess what Detroit, a gloomy city on Lake Erie, holds for the Nevels? Is it beautiful? No, it is not. Is there money? No. When they get off the train, they can hardly believe how cold and ugly it is. And when the taxi driver takes them to the address Gertie gives him, all of them are bewildered.

She stared straight ahead past the dirty alley snow, littered with blowing bits of paper, tin cans, trampled banana skins, and orange peels, at a high board fence. Past the fence she saw what looked to be an empty, brush-grown field; but while she looked a train rushed past. Everything was blotted out in the waves of smoke and steam that blew down; tiny cinders whirled with the snow against the windshield, and the smell and taste of smoke choked her. The noise subsided enough that she could hear the driver say, “Well, this is it.”

Jane Fonda in the TV film, “The Dollmaker.” It’s on Youtube, though I haven’t watched it.

The sky is ugly, red and smoky from the steel industry. They live in a tiny “unit” in workers’ housing on an alley, which I gather is like the projects. Naturally, Clovis’s money amounts to nothing. And everything has to be a cookie-cutter pattern in Detroit; there is pressure to buy the same things and the children must abandon Appalachian words like “young-uns.” The children struggle at school, and there is fighting among the different ethnic groups fight. The Catholic Daly family is especiallyy: Mr. Daly is in with the police and the union stewards and if he takes against you, you’re in for it.

Gertie is lost and horrified. The eggs are not fresh and the meat is often bad. When she sells some whittled dolls and whittles a crucifix for a Catholic neighbor, Clovis gets greedy. He wants her to stop whittling and carve out coookie-dutter dolls from a patterned saw (a jigsaw?_. The dolls are hideous, and Gertie feels her integrity is compromised. Of course these don’t make money, either.

There is one tragedy after another. But the book is not only stunningly lyrical and unputdownable but an American classic, in the same class as Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

May 13, 2016 by Kat

How to Relax on Saturday Night: Margery Allingham’s The White Cottage Mystery

allingham TheWhiteCottageMystery

There are “do’s” and “don’t’s” for Saturday night.

Do: Listen to the Grateful Dead. What can be mellower than “Box of Rain?”

Don’t: Watch the original Star Trek. Popular with SF geeks, Trekkies who dress up like Klingons, and recovering addicts in rehab, it is almost too exciting “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Do: Read a Golden Age Detective mystery of the 1920s, ’30s, or ’40s. There is something soothing about a murder investigation, especially with a discerning English detective at the helm. The brilliant detective interviews people and finds clues, but all violence is off the page. There are cottages, manors, London flats, fens, helpful butlers…and other elements that make it relaxing.

I recently spent a Saturday night immersed in Margery Allingham’s first detective novel, The White Cottage Mystery, published in 1927. Allingham, one of the Golden Age Detective Fiction writers of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, is best known for her wonderful Albert Campion detective series. (Now I must reread them.) The White Cottage Mystery was recently reissued as an e -book by Bloomsbury Reader.

NPG x2396; Margery Louise Allingham by Howard Coster

Margery Allingham

Allingham has a gift for writing natural dialogue and inventing unsolvable plots (at least I never solve them). This entertaining, fast-paced book opens with a young man, Jerry, offering a lift to a beautiful young woman who has alighted from a bus.

“God bless you! It’s about a half mile down this road, and I’ve such a blister on my heel!”

He drops her off at a house called White Cottage. He stops a little way down the road to put the hood up on his convertible and smoke a cigarette. He borrows a match from a constable and they chat. Minutes later, a screaming parlourmaid runs down the road. There has been a murder at White Cottage. A neighbor, Mr. Eric Crowther, has been shot and killed in the dining room.

Jerry’s father happens to be Inspector W. T. Challoner of the Yard, and it is he who investigates the murder. It is baffling, because everyone is a suspect, and everyone denies having seen the crime. In spite of Jerry’s protests, W. T. insists on questioning everybody, including the girl Jerry gave a lift to, Norah. She is the sister of Mrs. Grace Christensen, whose husband, Roger, a war veteran in a wheelchair, owns White Cottage.

Everybody has a motive. That’s the problem. Mr. Crowther has tortured everybody with his knowledge of their pasts, and threatened to tell their secrets. Everybody says he was a devil who deserved to be dead. He visited Joan almost every day, despite her wishes to the contrary, and the sense is that he harassed her. She found the body but says she was in the garden with her daughter before the shot, but the little girl says she was at the other end of the garden. Estah, the child’s nurse, says she wishes she had killed Crowther herself, because he was the devil. As you can imagine, his servants didn’t like him, either: Crowther’s valet, Clarry Gale, is an ex-convict with a special hatred of him; and Mr. Cellini, Crowther’s Italian companion, has disappeared.

Penguin-4616 Allingham White Cottage Mystery Allingham explores the ethics of a murder investigation. They track one of the suspects to France, and when they meet up with Joan and Norah there, W. T. says there is no choice bu tto investigate them further. Jerry is upset: he wants his father to leave Norah alone and asks, “What does it matter who killed him?”

‘Jerry,’ he said, ‘in our business one must never be afraid to know the truth. You want me to throw up this case –a thing I could never do for my own self-respect’s sake –because you’re afraid to face what you believe to be true. You believe Mrs Christensen fired that shot –don’t interrupt me –I repeat you believe she murdered Eric Crowther, and you’re afraid to prove it. That’s no good, my boy –a doubt is always dangerous. For her sake as well as for everyone else’s we’ve got to find out all we can….’

Jerry sighed. ‘Then you won’t give up.’

A fascinating philosophical discussion. Who is right? W. D. or Jerry? There is a very weird ending, utterly unexpected.

What a stunning little book! I absolutely loved it.

May 11, 2016 by Kat

The Summer Giant Book Project: After Broch’s The Death of Virgil, What? Perhaps The Tale of Genji

No more Broch: There's a new sherrif in town!

No more Broch: There’s a new sherriff in town!

It is a running joke in my family that I have a Giant Book Project every summer. I am happy to read a giant Dickens, a giant George Eliot, or a giant Sigrid Undset. No one would be surprised to see me lugging a set of Balzac in one of those carts you attach to your bike. In 2010, I made a mistake: I decided to read Hermann Broch’s modernist classic, The Death of Virgil. I have started it, abandoned it, and restarted it for six summers… and after 100 pages last year I crossed it off my list as unreadable.

Naturally it should be the perfect book for a former Latin teacher who taught Virgil’s Aeneid many times. (Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris/Italiam, fato profugus... And if I were your teacher, you memorized more.)

What could be more intriguing to a Latinist than a novel depicting Virgil’s dying days, in the form of poetic stream-of-consciousness, with the sole action in the first 100 pages being the dying man’s ogling a boy as Virgil is carried on a stretcher from Augustus’s ship to the palace? Give me a cereal box. Give me the directions to the microwave. Give me The New York Review of Books. Snore zzzzzzzz

Lovely prose, if you like your sentencesto go on for pages.

And floating in his awareness, floatingly borne aloft over the shouting heads, floatingly borne aloft over the festival fires of uproarious Brundisium, floating, held high in the undulant movement of the present, he experience the boundless contraction of trime’s onrush in the style of immutalibity: everything was his, all was embodied in him…

That floating goes on for a couple of more pages.

In Mary McCarthy’s academic satire, The Groves of Academe, she sketches a hilarious picture of a “progressive” college where the students have tutorials instead of classes, and major in whatever they want, even if it is Broch’s The Death of Virgil and they don’t know Latin. I can ditch the whole problem of what is possibly a bad translation of Broch and reread Virgil in the original.

So what will my Big Book of the Summer be? You know, the one I’ve always meant to read, but never finish!

POSSIBILITIES

The Tale of Genji.

Years ago I read 300 pages of this lyrical if rambling eleventh-century Japanese novel in Tyler Royall’s translation (Penguin). l enjoyued it up to a point, but shut the book one day and realized I preferred reading Fielding’ randy rambling Tom Jones to Lady Murasaki’s randy g1100-plus page masterpiece. But Last summer I had second thoughts: I bought an e-book of Dennis Washburn’s new scholarly translation for $2.99. I quite liked it in moderation, but I was critical of Washburn’s style. It has that slightly awkward air of this-may-fit-well-in-Japanese-but-the English-is-improvised-Western-man-meets-Lady Marasaki.

I am, however, not wedded to this transltion. In Ian Buruma’s review in The New Yorker last summer, he described the difficulties of translation, named the former translators, and compared their styles of other tarnslators.

Arthur Waley’s translation (abridged)

Edward Seidensticker’s translation

He explains,

The chief difficulty in translating “Genji,” into modern Japanese almost as much as into English, is the extreme elusiveness of Heian-period court Japanese—not just the language itself but also the many references and allusions. Every page is sprinkled with poems or phrases pointing to Chinese and Japanese literary sources that an eleventh-century aesthete might have been proud to notice but are lost on most Japanese today, let alone the reader of an English translation. Another problem lies in the character names. Since it was thought to be rude to call people by their birth names, most of the people in “Genji” are identified only by rank. A common solution in translations is to use nicknames derived from poems the characters compose or from their physical surroundings or qualities: Lady Rokujo lived in a mansion on Rokujo, or Sixth Avenue; Lady Fujitsubo lived in the Fujitsubo, or Wisteria Pavilion. Genji’s grandson, Niou, a devastatingly handsome womanizer, is known as the Perfumed Prince, because of his exquisite smell (niou, in Japanese).
A literal translation of “Genji” would be unreadable. And the vagueness, so poetic in Japanese, would simply be unintelligible to the Western reader. The trick is to retain the flavor of Murasaki’s lyrical style while transmitting, with some degree of precision, what she meant to say. Since we often don’t really know what she meant, much has to be left to guesswork and interpretation.

The two most famous English translations of “Genji”—Arthur Waley’s, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and Edward Seidensticker’s, in 1976—could hardly be more different. Waley regarded gorgeous prose as more important than accuracy. When he found a passage, or even a whole chapter, too boring or obscure, he just skipped it. He compensated for the vagueness of the original Japanese by making up something equally lyrical in Bloomsbury-period English.

This is all very interesting, and I’m thinking of trying the Waley or Seidensticker.

Have any of you read this?

Any recommendations?

May 10, 2016 by Kat

Sigrid Undset’s Marta Oulie & Goodreads Gladiators

Sigrid Undset Marta Oulie 31vrQ2hXW6L._SX320_BO1,204,203,200_ Sigrid Undset, who won the Nobel Prize in 1928, is best known for her brilliant historical trilogy, Kristin Lavrandsatter, and The Master of Hestviken tetralogy. I recently reread Kristin Lavransdatter, one of my favorite books of all time. (I wrote about it here.)

I just read Sigrid Undset’s breathtaking novella, Marta Oulie (1907), her first published book, available in a new translation by Tina Nunnally.

Told in the form of a diary, this beautifully-written novella is the story of Marta Oulie, a woman crushed with guilt because she has been unfaithful to her husband, Otto. He is dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium, and his letters bore her, another cause for guilt. He knows nothing about her affair with Henrik, her cousin and his business partner. He always asks about their youngest daughter, Ase, his favorite child, but she is actually Henrik’s child.

She knows it would shatter him to learn the truth. She has to bear the burden of her guilt.

I know only his life would be destroyed so thoroughly that nothing would be left of it. Where would he turns with such a boundless, appalling grievance? The fact that we betrayed him, while he himself was so faithful, painfully faithful in every way. Ever since we were married, I’ve seen how he lives for his home, for me and the children–as if we were his creditors, and it was our right to take every hour that he could spare and every ore he earned.

Marta Oulie is reminiscent of Tolstoy’s early story, Family Happiness, a predecessor of Anna Karenina.

tolstoy family happiness 1c94ec11a4834908724063c680f68249 In both stories, a marriage begins happily, but becomes boring to the women. Both heroines (Marta and Tolstoy’s Masha) tire of their constricted lives. Marta, a teacher, is restless. She was very much in love with Otto when they married, but after her second child she needed something else.

I think it actually began as a kind of weariness. I had become sated with happiness. I’ve read somewhere that happiness is always the same. And it was.

This is a powerful allusion to the opening of Anna Karenina : “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And it certainly foreshadows the tragedy of Undset’s plot.

Happiness can turn into unhappiness very quickly.The heroine of Marta shifts speedily from the mere flirtatiousness of Masha in Family Happiness to the infidelity of Anna Karenina. Otto, a successful if not very bright businessman, is annoyed when she returns to teaching after the birth of their second child. He wants her at home, where it can be seen that he supports her financially, and he also objects to her spending time at women’s clubs where she discusses, among other things, women’s rights. She does not want to be reduced to “nothing more than one of the entries” in her husband’s “catalog of blessings.”

Her affair with Henrik began because she noticed he was attracted to her. He says he has been in love with her since childhood. Of course they break it off eventually, but Otto’s illness is a heavy price to pay. Not only does she realize that Otto is a good man as he lies dying but frantically realizes she is losing the protection of a man. Otto converts to a dramatic form of Christianity before he dies; Marta cannot believe. What will her future be without Otto?

This book is billed as “a novel of betrayal,” but it is actually a “novella of betrayal” (just so you’ll know! ). It is a perfect little book. Not my favorite Undset, but one i’ll reread.

GOODREADS GLADIATORS & KINGSLEY AMIS

kingsley amis the old devils vintage 41c1d74LerL._SX324_BO1,204,203,200_ I know, I know: you don’t expect me to wrtie about Goodreads. I trashed it at this blog once. But I am now a full-fledged gladiator of the consumer culture. “We who are about to read salute you!”

Some of the reviews are great, others absurdly brash. What do I enjoy? The star ratings. I disapprove, but they’re so much fun! Sigrid Undset’s Marta Oulie? I gave it 5 stars out of 5. Kristin Lavransdatter? 5 stars. D. E. Stevenson’s Katherine Wentworth? 5 stars. Laura Caspary’s Bedelia? 5 stars.

I gave everything 5 stars!

Until…

amis_the-old-devils-fcx-700px I gave 4 stars to Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.

And now I’m guilt-racked.

I haven’t blogged about Amis’s brilliant Booker Prize-winning novel because I didn’t enjoy it much. It’s not that it’s not a perfect book: it is! But Bookerish? I’m not sure. I was in the mood for another satiric Lucky Jim. and naturally he did not write the same book over and over.

In the short, sharp-edged novel, The Old Devils, Amis portrays a group of elderly couples in Wales whose lives are disrupted when their friend Alun Weaver, a self-promoting Welsh poet, returns from England to retire. His cronies, who spend their days drinking hard, have their own problems (constipation, nightmares, not being able to reach down to cut their own toenails), and are not impressed by Alun. In fact, they disapprove of his schmoozing with reporters.

Their hard-drinking wives also”know’ Alun a little too well. But this story of old people drinking together is amusing , because of his perfect characterizations and honest sketches of the indignity of aging. Charlieo has panic attacks and nightmares but shoots straight from the hip when it comes to criticism of Alun’s work; Dorothy is always drunk and ranting about New Zealand, where her daughter lives, but her old friends put up with her; Peter, an unhappily married fat man who had an affair long ago with Alun’s wife, Rhiannon, still loves her; and Rhiannon, my favorite character in any Kingsley book, is both charming and kind. Honestly, if we could all be that kind and charming. And as good-looking! The novel rolls along easily but…

Why CAN’T I give it four stars? It’s not my favorite, and the average rating is 3.35. But I just can’t do it. IT’S THE FORMER SCHOOLMARM IN ME. My professors would be spinning in their graves if they saw Goodreads. Thank you for the liberal arts education, by the way. The average Goodreads rating for The Old Devils is 3.35–a C! I have to laugh… and if I’m going to be a Goodreads Gladiator I must change my four-star rating to a five in the pursuit of fairness! Let’s face it: whether or not I enjoyed it, it is brilliant book.

Here’s a synopsis of the Goodreads page (sans consumer reviews). Sorry, it doesn’t allow me to copy the page with stars and images for some reason. But it looks sort of like this.

The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, John Banville (Introduction)
3.35 · Rating Details · 1,989 Ratings · 143 Reviews
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world i …more
Paperback, 320 pages
Published October 2nd 2012 by NYRB Classics (first published 1986)

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