June 16, 2015 by Kat

Historical Novel Summer: From Tolstoy to Jean Plaidy to Gore Vidal & More

Sometimes I feel like indulging in a truly trashy historical novel summer.

Even writers of the most literary historical novels spin tales about sensational events and larger-than-life characters.

And why not? There is nothing more fun than hanging out with historical characters. Take the Tudors. I love the Tudors. A few years ago, after much protesting and resistance, I finally read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I was intrigued by her story of Thomas Cromwell, the Chief Minister/lackey of Henry VIII. And do I get Booker bonus points if I read the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies?

Then there is Jean Plaidy. Yes, I like to go from the high to the middlebrow. I have enjoyed Jean Plaidy’s Tudor series, which consists of nine novels. Jean Plaidy was a pseudonym of Eleanor Hibbert, who also wrote Gothic novels under the name Victoria Holt. As Plaidy, she penned historical novels about the Tudors, the Stuarts, Catherine De Medici, the French Revolution, and more.

On the other hand, I might prefer to devote myself to the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer. They are witty, well-written, and well-plotted, and the heroines are spunky gals who live for more than marriage. Some of them gamble and hang out with rakes. And I do adore going out in public with a novel with a cover like the pink edition of The Convenient Marriage. It gives everyone the wrong idea. All right, I admit Sourcebooks has reissued Heyer’s books with more respectable covers.

If you like pseudo-Victorian novels, you will enjoy D. J. Taylor’s historical novel, Derby Day, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. Set in Victorian England, this entertaining novel describes the double dealings and crimes revolving around a horse favored for the Epsom Derby. In the prequel, Kept, Taylor peppers a traditional narrative with a fictional diary of George Eliot’s, the musings of a mad woman in an attic, the double-dealings of out-of-pocket Londoners who turn to crime, and The Great Train Robbery.

My favorite historical novel is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Forget the length: War and Peace is a page-turner. The plot revolves around Russian life at the beginning of the 19th century, during the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. It has all the elements of the most entrancing fiction: romance, elopement, gambling, parties, balls, aristocratic society in Moscow and Petersburg fortunetelling, battles, and the fall of Moscow.

The BBC remake of Poldark will be shown on PBS starting this Sunday. It is based on the first two books of Winston Graham’s Poldark series, Ross Poldark and Demelza.. The hero, Ross Poldark , a veteran of the Revolutionary War (on the Brisish side), returns to Cornwall to find his father is dead and his girlfriend engaged to his cousin. Though brooding and disappointed, he is dashing, passionate, radical, brave, and a proponent of social justice–every woman’s ideal. And we all adore Demelza, the scruffy girl in boys’ clothes whom he saves from a fight at the market and many years later marries. There is also much detail about the mining business and the lower classes.

Gore Vidal’s Julian is a stunning take on Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century emperor who tried to stop the spread of Christianity.

John Williams is best-known for Stoner, but he won the National Book Award for his brilliant novel, Augustus, about Julius Caesar’s heir , who became arguably the most powerful Roman emperor. The novel is told in letters, despatches, and memoirs.

Nobel Prize-winning Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavrandatter is one of my favorites, a trilogy about a woman in medieval Norway who, after a youthful passion, marries her rakish, charming, but careless lover and struggles to manage his neglected household and raise her children as good Christians.

Have you ever seen a trashier cover?

Sergeanne Golon’s best-selling Angelique series, recommended by a librarian friend long ago, cheered me up during a ghastly week in a cabin that had no running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing. To quote Goodreads, this French series “begins in 1648 during a time of insurrection, terror and revolt in a divided France….[Angelique] is one of the most irresistible heroines in the history of fiction. Her stormy adventures have taken her from the gutters of Paris to the harems of Africa to the silken prison of a King. Angelique has loved, intrigued, hated and fought her way into the hearts of million of readers all over the world.” Unfortunately, these old paperbacks are very expensive–and out of print–so I have no idea if they are as good as I thought they were. (On a par with the Poldark books.)

June 14, 2015 by Kat

Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

I am always reading something by Tolstoy. I love Anna Karenina, but War and Peace is a masterpiece. I now limit my rereadings of it to once a year.

I must make do with Tolstoy’s short stories for a while. Anyway, I have not read all the stories.

In the Penguin edition of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, translated by Ronald Wilks, Anthony Briggs, and David McDuff, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is a grisly masterpiece. It is both satiric and incredibly grim.

Divided into chapters, it begins with the end. Anthony Briggs writes in the introduction that it is a very unusual story.

…we are barely a hundred words into the narrative when we are told, ‘Gentlemen! Ivan Ilyich is dead.’ So much for suspense. At no stage in the succeeding pages are we going to entertain doubts about the protagonists’ fate, which has been settled and sealed.

The structure is a ring composition. It begins with and ends with Ivan’s death.

In Chapter 1, Ivan Ilyich’s colleagues learn from the newspaper that Ivan has died. Nobody is emotionally affected. They start immediately thinking about how it can benefit themselves: can they get a promotion? can they get their brother-in-law the job?

And that is how society is: brutally shallow.

Tolstoy

All the characters in Ivan’s social circle care about the same things. They furnish their houses the same, they make the same conversation, they have the same opinions. No one deeply cares for anyone else. Even Ivan’s wife and daughter do not care much for him. His long illness, with its intense pain, has been vaguely diagnosed by the doctors as a floating kidney or colitis. For his family, it is a drag on their social life.

His daughter Liza says, “I’m sorry for Papa, but why do we have to suffer?”

He tries to deny that he is dying, because it could not be happening to him. He goes to work every day–he is a judge–until he begins to lose his concentration.

According to Anthony Briggs’s introduction, the story was based on a true story. A judge who lived near Tolstoy in the town of Tula died of stomach cancer. The judge sentenced people to very harsh punishments. Tolstoy wondered how he could go home and enjoy his life.

Tolstoy tells the story of Ivan’s life. It is a simple story of a successful man. He graduated from law school and qualified for the civil service.

His career started in the provinces, where he had affairs, played cards, and married a pretty woman.

…it did not take Ivan Ilyich long to arrange a lifestyle that was as easy and agreeable as the one he had enjoyed at law school. He did his work, pursued his career and at the same time discreetly enjoyed himself.

He does not have enough money, he and his wife think, so he goes to Petersburg, and through connections, gets a job as a judge for five thousand pounds a year. He buys a big house and arranges it all to his own taste before the family arrives. He tracks down antiques, rugs, and plants and shows the upholsterer how to hang the curtains. Ironically, all the accoutrements he acquires make Ivan look exactly like every other person who wants to appear richer than he is.

And while he is on the ladder to attend to the curtains, he slips and falls and bumps his side on a window knob. He tells his family,

It’s a good job I’m athletic. Any other man would have killed himself, but all I did was bruise myself a bit here. It hurts when you touch it, but it’s getting better. It is only a bruise.”

That is the beginning of his death. He complains of the pain in his side and a funny taste in his mouth. The doctors cannot make a definite diagnosis, though they sound authoritative. The medicine doesn’t help. He can no longer play cards. The opium makes him sicker. Tolstoy does not say that he has cancer. But the pain, the screaming, implies that he does.

He begins to wonder about his life. “What if I really have been wrong in the way I’ve lived my whole life, my conscious life?”

We are with him to the moment of his death.

This story is so realistic, and even modern, in its depiction of the doctors’ failure to diagnose and treat difficult illnesses that it is difficult to read.

Of course Tolstoy being Tolstoy, there are also spiritual problems.

The translation by Briggs is seamless. He is one of the best Russian translators today. I love his War and Peace (though I also love the other translations of War and Peace.).

June 14, 2015 by Kat

The End of the Conversation

Nobody likes my astrological chart.

I am slightly psychic.

I should live in Lily Dale, New York, a town of psychics, spiritualists, and mediums. It is where the Fox sisters lived.

“Get me out of here,” I said when we drove through there

A very literary classics professor once gave us a handout of excerpts from English literature. We had to identify styles, i.e., the running style, the periodic style, and the pointed style. I also scribbled the names of the authors in the margins: Virginia Woolf, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc.

“How did you know that?” None of his students had ever identified the authors.

“I read.”

It was like identifying a favorite song (except I am tone-deaf, so I can only do this with language.)

My fellow classics students did not read novels. They read about archaeology and history.

In my free time, I read novels like mad.

I have always had an affinity for language.

Knowing Latin, a language of ghosts, can be eerie.

It makes you intuitive. Words are arranged differently. Nobody knows how it sounded.

And so it has happened that I have conversed with my mother’s ghost to exhaustion for two years.

There was an odd event at the funeral. The priest shook the censer as he walked around her coffin. The rope broke and the incense burner and bells flew off and crashed.

Nobody talked about it at the burial service.

It was her poltergeist. It only appeared once, thank God.

I kept trying to imagine what had happened to her. Why was she here every day? What did she want me to remember? Why, why had she said the sixties were the best time of her life? Was she so unhappy? Was she too alone? After the sixties: husband gone, her mother died, working at a job that gave her a heart condition (housewife was the ideal job for her), collecting things, watching too much TV, years of playing Bridge, aging, getting sick, then clapped in an assisted living facility which couldn’t take care of her, landing in the hospital three times, an eventual intercession to get her into a safe place.

The sixties were such a short time.

And so I’ve gone over it again and again.

So many scenes, good and bad. Picking up apples in the yard, sitting on the stoop in the shade of the willow tree, laughing, going to movies, shattered by divorce, then becoming brisk, our attempts to converse as we got older. We went to movies because we both liked movies. (She fell asleep at Pollock; laughed at Bridesmaids.)

There were some sad times at the nursing home.

She was happy, though. But she would rather have had the married life.

She said (says) it was all good.

I recently put plastic flowers on her grave. She preferred plastic. Once, when she was very old, she tugged her cheeks up like a facelift and said, “See how good I’d look?”

I am not making fun of her at all.

The women in our family suffer.

It is a plastic culture. She knew that.

Her ghost left me. She knows I know who she is.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Like all things, this leads to Jerry Garcia and The Aeneid.

The Aeneid, Lines 893-899, translated by Dryden

Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;
Of polish’d ivory this, that of transparent horn:
True visions thro’ transparent horn arise;
Thro’ polish’d ivory pass deluding lies.
Of various things discoursing as he pass’d,
Anchises hither bends his steps at last.
Then, thro’ the gate of iv’ry, he dismiss’d
His valiant offspring and divining guest.

June 11, 2015 by Kat

Catalogues, Ruined by Classics, & Literary Award Burnout

Sears Catalogue 1968:

I love the summer.

Summer is the relief we feel when we shed thick coats and boots. We sit outside, walk, bicycle, go camping (ugh), rent a cabin (better), or stay in a lovely hotel (best).

Winter is cabin fever and going to the mall. We disembark from the bus with the other puffy-parka-clad stragglers, and begin to sweat. We drink a gigantic coffee and try on sweaters and wonder if anyone still eats Maid-rites and end up buying blankets and Yaktrax.

Summer is the end of mall rat season. Instead of being a mall rat, we do what little shopping we do via catalogues or online.

I have always loved mail-order catalogues, which have historically been a lifesaver on the prairie. The first Sears catalogue was published in 1888. Catalogues provided a wider selection of goods than general stores for farmers and others in remote locations.

We loved the Sears catalogue at our house. We circled everything we wanted for Christmas. My mother was an ardent shopper in department stores, but she also ordered clothes from Sears and Montgomery Ward. It was very exciting. Would that plaid jumper fit? And how about those rather odd ’60s psychedelic pink and lime-green mini-dresses my mother ordered for me?

I am fond of catalogues and online stores. Without leaving the house, you can order books, black-out curtains, tables, towels, pans, fine china….everything.

Ruined by Classics and Unable to Read Award Winners & Nominees.

I am ruined by classics.

Here is what has happened.

You cannot really go back and forth between Chekhov’s stories and, say, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, which was longlisted for the Bailey Women’s Prize last year.

I do not know if Chekhov was nominated for any prizes, but guess which writer is better?

Semple’s novel is both enjoyable and dismaying. Bee, the teenage narrator, arranges a mix of emails, reports. and letters in chronological order to figure out why and where her mother Bernadette disappeared. I like Bernadette’s voice best. Her emails, reminded me slightly of E. M. Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady. But there is a little too much here of the crazy neighbor’s emails. And it essentially reminds me of a Y.A. book.

Now I realize that politics are involved in these prizes, though as I have said elsewhere, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT. I intend to avoid all articles this year that are likely to spoil the charm of the literary awards.

Oddly enough, reading Semple’s novel (not many pages to go) has made it impossible for me to go on to Ali Smith’s How to Be Both .

Smith’s How to Be Both won the Baileys Women’s Prize this year. It is divided into two stories, one set in the present and the other in the Renaissance. Half of the books have been printed with the present narrative first, and the other half with the Renaissance narrative first. In my e-book, you are simply given a choice.

I chose the part set in the present, because it looked easier.

Smith’s writing is elegant, but oddly I am finding echoes of Maria Semple’s books. In both books, a teenage narrator has lost her mother.

So I am simply going to have to start over with Smith’s book later. I just can’t read it right now.

Perhaps it is a classic, but I cannot judge at this point.

I am put off by the opening of the Renaissance section, which seems to be a poem containing such extravagant phrases as “Fathemotherplease spread/extempore”…

I’ve read so many classics that I need to go to literary rehab so I can appreciate this.

Or perhaps Semple’s book really IS better. I’ve read 275 pages, but am not finished yet.

June 10, 2015 by Kat

Late for Heaven Ali’s Mary Hocking Week: In Which I Read Hocking’s The Very Dead of Winter

I missed Heaven Ali’s Mary Hocking Reading Week, June 1-7.

Due to disorganized calendar-keeping. I galloped through Hocking’s short novel, The Very Dead of Winter, and am posting a week late.

I do like Hocking, and I read three of her novels in 2013, A Particular Place, Good Daughters, and An Irrelevant Woman. I wrote here::

Mary Hocking’s irresistible novels have been compared to Barbara Pym’s.

Is she like Barbara Pym? Well, no. I find her sharp, gracefully-written fiction more like the tart novels of Penelope Lively crossed with the family sagas of Elizabeth Jane Howard.

The Very Dead of Winter was a slow starter for me, and at first I thought, Oh dear, I can’t read this. Hang on: it gets better. I was very moved by the powerful ending.

In the very dead of winter, Florence and her daughter Anita arrive to spend Christmas in a cottage in the woods owned by Florence’s hippieish sister, Anita. (Some think she is a witch.) Florence’s husband Konrad is dying, and he is already installed in an upstairs room. Their son, Nicholas, a world traveler and explorer, has also arrived. There is a mystery about a wooden sculpture in Konrad’s room: soon it becomes clear that Konrad has a closer relationship to Sophia than anyone knew.

And so they are a tense family group.

Florence is flamboyant and insensitive. She can’t face it that Konrad is dying, and barely goes into his room. The care of Konrad falls between Sophia and Anita, who loved her father much more than she loves her mother.

Mary Hocking

Because of her flair for dramatics (she belongs to the drama club at home), Florence insists on giving a huge Christmas party in a blizzard. Despite Anita’s warnings about salmonella, she makes a huge batch of eggnog and poisons the neighbors A few escape, those she deemed worthy of whisky. Florence loudly tells people how much she hated Konrad’s paintings, their violence, and the loud colors. A handsome middle-aged neighbor, Thomas, asks her if Konrad wasn’t known for his colors? She is gobsmacked. Could Konrad have exhibited his paintings without her?

Restless Anita is deeply unhappy with her life. She is an educational psychologist with a handsome boyfriend who lectures on education. On his way to the cottage, he gets stuck in the blizzard, and leaving his car behind is run over by a sleigh. She isn’t surprised that a widow is taking very good care of him.

While she is pulling apart from her boyfriend, Nicholas is falling for one of Sophia’s neighbors, Frances, a beautiful young woman who takes care of Thomas and his grandson, Andrew. Thomas’s son committed suicide, and his wife Margery died. Frances feels obligated to stay.

Does this seem unnecessarily complicated?

It doesn’t become clear immediately why we need to know so many characters, but they are tied together by Sophia and Konrad.

This is not Hocking’s best book. Would I have gotten past the first tangled pages if I hadn’t read three other of her books? No. But it is very good, if you stick it out to the end.

Here are links to Heaven Ali’s four recent Mary Hocking Week blog entries. She has read much Hocking, and there are other entries about her as well.

https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/mary-hocking-reading-week-starts-here/

https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/a-time-of-war-mary-hocking-1968/

https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/the-hopeful-traveller-mary-hocking-1970/

https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/mary-hocking-reading-week-roundup-and-giveaway-results/

June 9, 2015 by Kat

Rediscovering Boredom: Why Eliza, Komako, and I Need Social Media

On “Selfie,” Eliza (Karen Gillan) and Henry (John Cho) find a phone connection at the end of a phone-free weekend on their boss’s country estate.

Boredom is good for you, they say. Social media overstimulate and rewire our brains. At The Huffington Post, Michael Harris wrote:

To rework an old Jean-Paul Sartre line: If you’re bored when you’re alone, you’re in bad company. Boredom itself isn’t a sign that you need some distraction; it’s a sign that you’ve grown addicted to distractions and you need to develop a rich interior life. “

Certainly social media can be addictive. I ruthlessly lock up my tablet during the day so I don’t spend too much time online.

Karen Gillan and John Cho in “Selfie” (a canceled sitcom)

My favorite TV show last fall, “Selfie” (cancelled in November), was an updated version of Pygmalion. It revolved around the problem of unconnecting from social media and connecting socially. Eliza Dooley (Karen Gillan), a sexy pharmaceutical saleswoman, spends her days taking selfies and updating Instagram and social media. She has millions of followers but no friends. Henry Higgs (John Cho), a strait-laced marketing rep, teaches her manners after she discovers no one likes her.

Eliza learns cyberstalking is a “don’t” in friendship, and, instructed by Henry, begins to ask people, “How do you do?” But a relationship is a two-way street: Henry discovers Facebook is crack.

There has to be a middle ground, the writers of the cancelled show seem to conclude. In the episode, “Even Hell Has Two Bars,” Henry and Eliza spend a weekend on their boss’s country estate with no cell phone connection. At the end of the episode, after a reaffirmation of their friendship, a look of calm appears on Eliza’s face as she discovers her phone is working again. Henry looks wistfully at her, but then he too becomes absorbed in his phone.

Don’t we all know that calm of reconnecting on the internet?

I don’t have a cell phone, though.

One of these days we’ll all have to carry one as part of a government ID. program. Shades of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.

Meanwhile…

Is boredom so wonderful?

Yes, probably.

On a hot summer day, I rediscover boredom.

Temperature: 95 degrees

Humidity: 31%

Air conditioner: off

Fan blowing: one

Pitchers of iced tea in the refrigerator: two

I decide not to go outside.

Just an old-fashioned day at home, I say, sneaking on to the internet four times.

But you know, it is nice on a hot day to sit and read. I have chosen a Japanese novel, Kawabata’s Snow Country, for its coolness. Set in a mountain town with a hot spring, it describes the relationship between Shimamura, a married man, and Komako, a woman who learns to be a geisha. She loves him, but Shimamura is cold and insists that many of her activities are a waste of time.

Komako keeps a detailed reading journal, cataloguing every novel and short story she has read since she was fifteen.

You write down your criticisms, do you?”

“I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all.”

“But what good does it do?”

“None at all.”

She has no one to talk to about books in her small town. The words pour out as she tells him about her reading. He observes, “There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire. It occurred to Shimamura that his own distant fantasy on the western ballet, built up from words and photographs in foreign books, was not in its way dissimilar.”

With social media, Komako would have connected to others about books.

Perhaps she would read less, though. We do a lot of clicking online.

There is good and there is bad in our 1984 world.

Below you can watch the scene from “Selfie” in which Eliza and Henry find their phone connection.

http://abc.go.com/shows/selfie/video/VDKA0_819yw3ni

June 8, 2015 by Kat

Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel

I have been rereading the Brontes this summer.

I just read Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel, a Japanese retelling of Wuthering Heights, which won the Yomiuri Prize For Literature in 2002. The translation by Juliet Winter Carpenter was published in 2013.

It is the most elegant new novel I’ve read this year.

If you haven’t read Wuthering Heights, you are missing out on the most poetic Gothic romance and poetic family saga ever written. It is not just a love story: it is defined by its complex structure. There is a frame story: Mr. Lockwood, a tenant, has a horrific encounter with his rich landlord Heathcliff, and later hears Heathcliff’s long story from Nelly Dean, the housekeeper. Here is a recap: Catherine Earnshaw grows up with Heathcliff, an orphan, at Wuthering Heights, but after Catherine’s brother Hindley inherits the house, Heathcliff is treated as a rustic servant. Cathy tells Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, that she loves Heathcliff but it would degrade her to marry him now. And so Cathy marries Edgar Linton, a gentleman, and Heathcliff disappears to make his fortune. The next generation suffers, money or not.

Like Wuthering Heights, Mizumura’s A True Novel is narrated at two removes from events (or actually three, since we are conscious of the writer crafting the novel). The author, Minae Mizumura, reflects in the long prologue (one third of the first volume) on “how to take ‘a story just like a novel’ and turn it into a novel in Japanese.”

Minae, a character in her own novel, ponders the difficulty of transferring an English novel to Japanese culture. The structure of the Japanese language is so different from European languages that even the abstract idea of a “subject” is foreign. There is, for instance, no equivalent to the personal pronoun “I” in Japanese.

Minae is creating a novel from an oral tale of doomed romance related to her by a young Japanese man, Yusuke Kato, who heard it from Fumiko, a maid at the summer cottage of Taro, a Japanese billionaire.

During her short teaching gig at Stanford, Minae is sought her out by Yusuke because he wants to talk to her about Taro, whom she knew slightly. One stormy night, he tells her the story of Taro’s doomed love for a privileged woman named Yoko. Yes, Taro is Heathcliff to Yoko’s Catherine.

Minae asks herself why tell another love story?

The story I was told on that stormy night was merely one of many love stories already told a thousand times. Why turn it into yet another novel? there was only one answer I could think of: it recalled the translated Western novels I had encountered as a girl, especially one that never failed to make a disturbing impression on me every time I read it, a literary classic set on the wild Yorkshire moors and written more than a hundred and fifty years ago by the Englishwoman E. B. Indeed, it was only my intimate acquaintance with this book that made me recognize that Taro’s tale had the makings of a novel.

Minae explains that very quickly her work starts to diverge from Emily Bronte’s.

“It …. had to follow the inner logic of the Japanese language and interact with countless Japanese texts of the past, all the while maintaining a keen awareness of the small place the language occupies in a world dominated by English, an awareness inescapable to someone writing in this day and age.

After the prologue, which is also a brief autobiography of Minae, she switches to the third person and tells the story from Yusuke’s point of view. During a summer when he stays at a friend’s cottage, he gets lost on his bicycle and has an accident, and finds himself at a dilapidated cottage owned by this eccentric tycoon. The maid, Fumiko, befriends him, and lets him sleep in the shed. That night he sees a girl–the ghost of Yoko. Later, Fumiko tells him that Taro was so in love with Yoko that he has taken to sleeping in the shed, hoping to see her. Yusuke hears the whole story from Fumiko, who traces her genesisfrom poor farm girl to prosperous maid in the house of Dr. Utegawa, his beautiful wife Netsue, ,the doctor’s mother, Mrs. Utegawa, and Yoko, the youngest daughter.

How did Taro get involved with the family?

In post-war Japan, Taro Azuma, an orphan, was mistreated by the aunt and uncle who had reluctantly taken him in. But he is saved by the fact that his great-uncle works as a handyman for the doctor’s family next door, and he is has constant contact with the grandmother and Yoko, the privileged girl next door. In fact, the grandmother hires him ostensibly to help around the house. but in reality, she makes sure he eats well, has clean clothes, and does his homework. Like Heathcliff and Catherine, Taro and Yoko become best friends and fall in love, but Yoko, like Catherine, believes it would degrade her to marry him.

In the second volume, Fukimo continues the story of the complicated relationship between Yoko and Taro when he returns with money.

This is a gorgeous book. I couldn’t put it down.

I hope I can find some more of her work in translation.

June 7, 2015 by Kat

Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop

It took me one and a half years to read Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. On Jan. 28, 2014, I blogged after 200 pages:

I love Dickens, but …couldn’t get past the wax works.

(The main characters, Little Nell and her grandfather, briefly travel in a caravan with Mrs. Jarley and help her with her waxworks show.)

I am a fan of Dickens, especially of his dark final novel, Our Mutual Friend.

But his fifth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, is a strange blend of darkness and sentimentality. It was hastily scribbled for a literary magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock.

The good news: The scenes, though plotless and often pointless, are extremely vivid.

The bad news: The characters are caricatures. The portrait of the child heroine, Little Nell, is mawkish. Little Nell was created out of Dickens’s excessive mourning for his wife’s 17-year-old sister, Mary Hogarth, who lived with them and who he claimed in a letter to his friend Forster “died in his arms.” Dickens wore her ring for the rest of his life.

The plot of The Old Curiosity Shop, such as it is, is the disturbing flight of Little Nell and her grandfather.

Little Nell, a very responsible 13-year-old child, takes care of her gambling Grandfather, the owner of the Old Curiosity Shop. He has been bankrupted by a savage dwarf, Quilp, and is now imprisoned in the shop. Quilp has a weird fixation on Nell, whom he repeatedly terrifies by teasing her with the question if she will be his next wife. (Quilp does have a pretty wife.) Nell and her grandfather go on the lam. They take refuge with kind people along the way, and, most interestingly, with showbiz types, including a pair of Punch and Judy puppeteers and Mrs. Jarley, who owns a waxworks display. Quilp tries to track Nell and her grandfather, but fortunately the Single Gentleman is also looking for them. Who will find them first? Quilp or the Single Gentleman?

The most sympathetic and interesting character is Richard Swiveller, a friend of Little Nell’s dissipated older brother. Swiveller, though easily manipulated, and placed by Quilp as a clerk to a corrupt lawyer, Sampson Brass, and his tougher, smarter sister, Sally Brass, is very kind and has a good sense of humor. Dick Swiveller helps an orphan child, who is a kind of shadow of Little Nell, and nicknames her the Marchioness. The Marchioness, the Brasses’ maid, has been imprisoned in a kitchen and starved, and Swiveller sends out for food and teaches her to play cards.

The novel ends with several deaths. I won’t tell you whose, but it really is monstrous.

Fortunately my favorite character survives.

Aldous Huxley said it best when he criticized Dicken’s “really monstrous emotional vulgarity.”

The history of Little Nell is distressing indeed, but not as Dickens presumably meant it to be distressing: t is distressing in its ineptitude and vulgar sentimentality…. Mentally drowned and blinded by the sticky overflowings of his heart, Dickens was incapable, when moved, of recreating, in terms of art, the reality which had moved him, was even, it would seem, unable to perceive that reality.

I love Dickens, but this one is a disappointment.

In his later novels, Dickens develops some of the character types from The Old Curiosity Shop into slightly more rounded, sympathetic characters, i.e., the malicious dwarf is transformed in David Copperfield into Miss Mowcher, the coy but essentially kind dwarf manucurist, and Little Nell becomes Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend, a smart, saucy, crippled child who takes care of her drunken father and supports them as a dolls’ dressmaker. Jenny takes no nonsense: her alcoholic father is more manageable than Little Nell’s addicted gambler grandfather.

Jenny Wren takes no nonsense from her alcoholic father.

June 4, 2015 by Kat

Summer Bookishness, # 1: Attempting to Buy a Baileys Women Prize Book & Reading Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

A Woman Reading in the Woods, 1959 (LIfe magazine)

I love everything about summer: the heat, the humidity, the iced tea, the air-conditioning, the iced tea, and did I say the iced tea?

My mother had strong views about summer. She believed drinking unsweetened iced tea with lemon had “health benefits.” She liked to chat about the antioxidants in tea. She also believed women over 30 should never wear shorts. After menopause, I disappeared as a woman anyway. I am “beyond gender,” as I say. So I wore shorts on my bike ride to the bookstore (I do wish I had culottes) to buy a copy of Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize.

It was a lovely ride, but very hot.

Naturally I found lots of books, but not the one I was looking for.

Well, there’s always the e-book.

Since I had the urge to read a Bailey Women’s Prize-related book, I went home and started Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, which made the longlist last year

It is feather-light and charming, in the manner of Nina Stibbe’s Man at the Helm. Comedies seldom make the prize longlists, and, 100 pages into it, this has the lightness of a successful Y.A. crossover novel. The narrator, Bee, tells us on the first page that her mother Bernadette disappeared before their Christmas vacation to Antarctica (a reward for Bee’s straight A’s in eighth grade). Bee’s narrative is mixed with emails (several from a psychotic neighbor), school reports, letters from the school, her father’s letter to a psychiatrist about Bernadette, and most touchingly, Bernadette’s lonely, personal emails to an administrative assistant she hires through a large company in India to pay her bills and shop for her.

Bernadette may or may not be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. When Microsoft bought her husband’s computer animation company, he was ambivalent about moving to Seattle: it was Bernadette, an award-winning architect, who insisted that they leave L.A. We learn from her husband that in 18 years Bernadette hasn’t made a friend. (From the emails of the other moms at school, we see why.) Their house, a former reform school, is going to seed in a very Gothic way: not only does the roof leak, but plants actually grow up through the floor.

But Bernadette is a good mother, and is extremely solicitous about Bee, who had three open heart surgeries before kindergarten and has asthma.

Bernadette doesn’t want to leave the house, but she feels she has to go to Antarctica, which is Bee’s dream. Bernadette writes to her assistant,

Of the million reasons I don’t want to go to Antarctica, the main one is that it will require me to leave the house. You might have figured out by now that’s something I don’t much like to do. But I can’t argue with Bee. She’s a good kid. She has more character than Elgie and I and the next ten kids combined. Plus she’s applying to boarding school for next fall, which she’ll of course get into because of said A’s….So it would be in pretty bad taste to deny Buzzy this.

Is Bernadette having a breakdown? Or is it something deeper?

This feels very much like Summer Reading. Like Nick Hornby, Semple has written for films (well, in her case, TV) and I wonder if that affects the brevity of the narrative and the voice.

Still, I am happy to read a collection of emails. They are, by the way, much longer than the typical email.

June 3, 2015 by Kat

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, More Summer Reading, & Do We Have to Read All of the Award Winners?

Evelyn Waugh is a mercilessly observant satirist.

I prefer his elegiac Catholic novel Brideshead Revisited to his relentlessly acrid satires, but Waugh was astonishingly able to do it all: satire, comedy, realism, Catholic fiction, a war trilogy, short stories, travel, and essays.

I just finished rereading A Handful of Dust.

And when I Googled it I discovered:

The WSJ Book Club is reading Evelyn Waugh’s tragicomic masterpiece “A Handful of Dust.”

Although A Handful of Dust is gut-wrenching, most critics consider it a satire. (Yes, it is a satire.) Is it Waugh’s masterpiece? Well, it is pretty damned good. Waugh is so harshly hyperbolic in his depiction of London society and the casual wantonness of the charming Brenda Last that we laugh. But as the novel progresses, we are shocked by the suffering of the innocent.

The relationship of the Lasts is the crux of the novel. Tony Last, a landowner who adores his unattractive Gothic house, Hetton Abbey, is not very sociable. While Brenda longs to go to weekend parties, Tony likes to putter about the estate. When he reads in the guidebook that his house is “now devoid of interest” because it was rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style, Tony is amused.

Unkinder things had been said. His Aunt Frances, embittered by an upbringing of unremitting severity, remarked that the plans of the house must have been adapted by Mr. Pecksniff from one of his pupil’s designs for an orphanage.

The Dickensian note sounds early in A Handful of Dust. The Pecksniffian architecture divides the feelings of Tony and his charming wife, Brenda, who finds the house depressing. Tony likes tradition; Brenda wants novelty. They are the Lasts.

At first they seem to be a happy couple. He and Brenda endearingly play games about being on a diet, though they are healthy and slim:. And they are amused by their son John, age 6 or 7, who hilariously quotes the racier sayings of Ben, the groom.

But when John Beaver, a London parasite who mooches off his mother, shows up at Hetton Abbey for the weekend, bored Brenda becomes infatuated. That shows a high degree of boredom, because he is very boring.

So she takes off to London and Tony believes she is studying economics.. Brenda is mad for Mr. Beaver, and Tony is the only one who doesn’t know she is having an affair.

I cannot go further without giving away the plot, but there are tragic, shocking developments. Tony pays a high price for Brenda’s infidelity (almost literally). So is this a Catholic novel? What happens is horrifying.

The ending may change your feelings about Dickens.

MORE SUMMER READING.

I used to love literary prizes. I was a serious woman and considered it my duty to read the winners of the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner

Now I suffer from the opposite ailment: “internet overload.” There are so many literary prizes to read about online in excruciating detail that I have become indifferent. Nay, I do not just have ennui: I am traumatized by prizes! Somebody just won? For WHAT! For 1-2-3-Ennui: a collection of poetry written at the End of the Empire. God, I don’t know when that was. I’m too busy blogging to remember any history dates except 451 B.C. Or was it 452? You get my drift.

Shall I catch up with the Man Booker this summer? If I can finish two, I will be satisfied.

Here are three I need to read:

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies. I loved Wolf Hall, but a little of Cromwell goes a long way with me. And I didn’t see the PBS version.

Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. I read part of it and found it very entertaining, but I put it aside because I was in a Tolstoy phase. I shall go back to it one day (I hope).

I don’t think I can bear to read another war novel, so haven’t checked out Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I have already read Thomas Keneally’s Shame and the Captives (World War II POWs in Australia), and two Korean War novels, Jane Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite and Chang-Rae Lees’s The Surrendered.

Why so much war?

End the war. Bring Home the troops.

All right?

Done!

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