→ December 7, 2008
→ By

The Way of All Flesh.

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh was #12 on the Modern Library 100 (a cheat, since it was written before 1900 but published posthumously) and made the Bloomsbury 100. I don’t usually give up on books, but I’m setting this one aside, at least for now, after making it through less than 15% of the book.

I’ve got two major problems with the novel. One is the sentences, which are positively Proustian (despite coming years before Proustian sentences existed) and meander between dependent and independent clauses that made me dizzy and, worse, disinterested. But the bigger problem for me was Butler’s creation of a central character for whom he has nothing but a deep, pathological loathing. George Pontifex is a weak, insipid man, barely capable of an independent thought, much less an independent decision, and Butler obviously hates him. George’s father, Theobald, is apparently a stand-in for Butler’s own father, so while I guess it’s OK to work out your daddy issues in novel form, the combination of the two characters makes the book start out at the top of a downward spiral, and 40-odd pages in I was still descending. I guess I should never say never – I did return to Tess of the D’Urbervilles 15 years after putting it down after half a chapter – but it ain’t likely.

Instead I’ll start Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool on the flight to Vegas.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 13, 2008
→ By

The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (on the Bloomsbury 100; #34 on the Guardian 100) is a sort of gothic novel that crosses a morality play with the epigrammatic style of his (other) magnum opus, the play The Importance of Being Earnest, employing what today would be called magical realism for the key plot point. The story is a straightforward riff on the Faust legent, but the witty prose – particularly the dialogue given to one character – make it a must-read.

The plot, in case anyone here doesn’t know it, is simple: Dorian Gray is a young, well-off romantic who has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward, who (unbeknownst to Dorian) is obsessed with him. Prodded by the Mephistopheles stand-in Lord Henry Wotten, Dorian utters a wish that the portrait would age and he would remain young, which, of course, comes true. Dorian becomes a heartless, dissolute wastrel as the image on his portrait becomes not just old, but ugly and mangled. There is one small plot twist, but otherwise, you can figure out where the whole thing is headed.

The scene-stealer, however, is Lord Henry, who is the little red devil on Dorian’s shoulder, and who speaks in paradoxes and epigrams that are usually funny and sometimes thought-provoking, but never superfluous. Coupled with the occasional quip from Dorian himself, these bons mots infuse the book from sour morality play with a streak of cynical humor. Some of my favorite lines:

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

It’s hard for us to see it now, but at the time of its publication, the book was controversial because it was seen as immoral, a stance that Wilde himself contested unsuccessfully by arguing that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Of course, the book scolds the reader on the wages of sin, and I can’t fathom how contemporary readers missed that. Dorian lives a hedonistic life, enjoys it less and less all the time, and eventually gets what’s coming to him. How this is an “immoral” book is beyond me. If anything, it was too direct in its moral, but the pedantic style is softened by the cleverness of the language.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 22, 2008
→ By

North and South.

I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a somewhat forgotten (at least in the U.S.) classic of 19th century Brit Lit which I discovered by way of the Bloomsbury 100. It’s a sort of Pride and Prejudice meets Germinal, combining a romance between two people who can’t admit their feelings for each other with a commentary on Britain’s “social problem” during its Industrial Revolution in the early to mid-1800s.

North and South‘s heroine is Margaret Hale, who opens the book by rejecting a marriage proposal from Henry Lennox, the old-fashioned and paternalistic lawyer whose brother has just married Margaret’s cousin, Edith. Margaret’s father then announces that he has become a Dissenter and is leaving his post as minister in the southern hamlet of Helstone, instead moving the family north to the industrial town of Milton (a thinly-disguised version of Manchester) where he’ll become a tutor to a local industrialist named Mr. Thornton. Thornton and Margaret take an instant dislike to each other, sparring over the rights and responsibilities of labor and management in a mirror of the contemporary debates over workers’ rights in England at the time. And, of course, they fall in love.

What works about the novel is that while the romance is the foundation of the story, it spends most of the book in the background as Gaskell uses Margaret and Thornton as launching points for subplots around the labor-management strife in Milton. Margaret’s chance encounter with Bessy Higgins, who is terminally ill from working in a textile mill during her childhood, and her father creates a direct window into the life of workers in England’s factories during the 1800s. Gaskell relies a little heavily on coincidence to make sure that the lives of Margaret, Thornton, the Higginses, Margaret’s godfather Mr. Bell, and even Henry Lennox all intersect, although this was very common even in the best literature of the period, and it’s a justifiable maneuver to ensure that both the social commentary and the romance come to a conclusion in the book’s 500-ish pages.

What worked less for me was the romance itself, which felt a little too derivative of Pride and Prejudice and finds a resolution that is driven in large part by money, rather than by emotions or the development of the main characters. In Austen’s masterpiece, Elizabeth Bennet comes around as she learns more of Mr. Darcy’s character and has to admit to herself that she did him an injustice in their earlier meetings. Here, Gaskell imbues Margaret Hale with similar strength of spirit, but denies her the chance for a completely self-sufficient redemption.

Next up: I like big books and I cannot lie – John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a parody of the picaresque novel, in all its 750 pages of glory.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 23, 2008
→ By

Germinal.

The Novel 100 author Daniel Burt described Emile Zola’s Germinal as “perhaps the angriest book ever written,” and it’s hard to deny that anger – or perhaps rage – is the fuel on which the book’s engine runs. It’s also a riveting novel, a highly readable novel, and a complex novel that is expertly plotted and contains within it stories of unrequited love and deep suspense.

Germinal, which is present on the Novel 100 (#66) and the Bloomsbury 100, is the story of a conflict between the poor laborers of a coal-mining town in 1860s France and the bourgeois management and owners. The workers live in grinding poverty, barely earning subsistence wages, dying in the mine or because of it, and ultimately living lives devoid of meaning. Ownership pits worker against worker to drive labor costs down, yet points to the subsidized housing it provides as evidence of its beneficence. Zola doesn’t exonerate his laborers, showing how their infighting and ignorance hold them back.

The plot centers around Etienne, an unemployed mechanic who finds work in the mine but, discovering the appalling conditions and dead-end wages, decides to put his knowledge of Marxism to use and organizes a general strike. The strike has severe consequences for everyone in the town, and to some degree for ownership, and precipitates a spree of violence punctuated by one of the most vicious scenes I can recall in a Western novel.

Buried within the greater story is a for the time progressive view of women’s rights and role, by way of a savage depiction of the women in the mine, including Catherine, who captures Etienne’s heart but instead chooses to be with the violent man who first “takes” her virginity by force. Zola attacks nearly everyone and everything by distilling them into sharp and unappealing characters, from abbes more interested in peace than helping the poor to shopkeepers who prey on customers near starvation to the idle rich who own the means of production.

The primary literary criticism of Germinal seems to be its inaccuracy. Zola introduces early-1800s working conditions into the latter half of the century, but adds Marxist ideas and organizations before they could have reached France. I have less of a problem with this, since the novel is functioning on some level as satire, and satire works via exaggeration.

Next up: Italo Calvino’s short work Marcovaldo, or seasons in the city.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 11, 2008
→ By

Zeno’s Conscience.

Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, listed in the Bloomsbury 100 and in the honorable mentions in the Novel 100, was Svevo’s third and last novel, published shortly before his death in a car accident and resulting from a lengthy professional relationship with James Joyce.

Zeno’s Conscience, previously translated as The Confessions of Zeno, is a modernist comedy, narrated by the neurotic, duplicitous Zeno, looking back on his life and his marriage, his affair with a young singer, his business partnership with his brother-in-law, and his interminable attempts to quit smoking. Zeno’s analyst has asked him to write down his “confessions” as part of his therapy, and the short introductory note from “Dr. S” says that the therapist is publishing them as a sort of revenge against his former patient, who has revealed that not everything he wrote therein is true. Because the story is told from Zeno’s perspective, it’s full of amusing rationalizations and subtle attempts to shift blame on to the people around him.

Zeno’s antics and his descriptions of them are amusing for about 300 pages, but halfway through the book’s longest section, the description of his partnership with brother-in-law Guido, the narrative begins to drag, and the fact that that story offers a distinct conclusion doesn’t help the fact that the path there was aimless. Guido is, himself, a fraud, but I could never be sure how much of Zeno’s written treatment of him was real and how much was projection. The strongest section is the story of Zeno’s courtship of the beautiful Ada, who spurns him for Guido, and how he seems to enjoy watching Ada deteriorate physically in middle age.

If this seems like a more indifferent review than I normally give, it reflects my uncertainty over whether or not I liked the book. I tore through the first three-fourths of it, then stumbled to the finish line as I lost interest. The introduction labels the book as a commentary on the idle rich of pre-War Trieste, which may be true but might be too far removed from us to have as much impact as, say, Fitzgerald’s portraits of the idle rich in America in his books.

Next up: I’ve just finished the last book of A Dance to the Music of Time, and will post my thoughts on the whole twelve-volume series shortly.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 3, 2008
→ By

Independent People.

I love this book. It is an unfolding wonder of artistic vision and skill – one of the best books of the twentieth century. I can’t imagine any greater delight than coming to Independent People for the first time.

That’s not my take on Halldór Laxness’ novel; it’s from novelist Jane Smiley, who wrote a more direct takeoff on King Lear and provided the above blurb for the cover of Independent People. No, I didn’t think that the novel was a revelation on every page or a life-changing experience. I thought it was awful.

To be more specific, I think it is the most bleak, humorless, and misanthropic book I’ve ever read. Laxness himself admitted that his protagonist, Bjartur, was “stupid,” but it’s worse than that – he’s a complete asshole whose lack of regard for the feelings of others, above all women, borders on sociopathy. The ideal of “independence” around which the novel is structured is folly and leads to Bjartur’s ruin in various ways. And none of the supporting characters is built with enough depth or dimension to overcome the long shadow of Bjartur’s obstinate, materialist, misogynistic point of view.

Independent People is the story of Bjartur’s adult life as he leaves the servitude of the local Bailiff of Myri and attempts to build an independent life as a self-sufficient farmer on a local croft. He marries twice, although his stubbornness and lack of empathy lead to the deaths of both women. His eldest child, Asta Sollilja, is the only one to whom he shows any affection, but when she becomes pregnant at fifteen at the hands of a rapscallion whom Bjartur himself invites into the home, he throws her out and resolves (with finite success) to have nothing more to do with her. Depending on how you interpret the ending, his assholishness may lead to her death too. Around all of this happiness is famine, bankruptcy, fraud, parochialism, and the pointless deaths of several people and many animals.

What made the book so difficult to gut my way through was the complete lack of warmth. You could freeze your drink if you sit it too close to the novel; the only glimmers of empathy from any major character come from Asta, but they’re depicted as the confused feelings of an ultra-sheltered teenaged girl, and she too falls into a cynical stoicism when her father throws her out. Laxness tries to create some embers of emotion in the short conclusion, but it seemed forced.

Laxness won a Nobel Prize and appears to have a small but highly devoted following, at least in the literary world. All I can say is that I’m glad I went to Iceland long before I read this book, because I doubt he would have made the country come off any worse if he’d written that the locals bite the heads off of live puppies.

Next up: Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, a modernist comedy of psychoanalysis and self-absorption.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 29, 2008
→ By

Berlin Alexanderplatz and another list of novels.

I’m still not sure if I liked Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I did not enjoy the process of reading it: It is slow, disjointed, and frequently aimless. Döblin uses a weird stream-of-consciousness style that almost seems to be an attempt to represent the inner thoughts of a borderline lunatic, even though Franz Biberkopf, his main character, isn’t so much crazy as unintelligent. He bounces from dialogue to thoughts to poetry and song lyrics to text from advertisements seen on posters and in newspapers. The book is written in the third person, but the majority of the prose is spent in Franz’s head, making it thoroughly confusing when Döblin switches to the internal monologue of another character. And on top of all that, the plot is relatively thin on action, with the pace only quickening in the final two chapters (of nine). So if the question is whether I enjoyed reading Berlin Alexanderplatz, I’d have to say no.

At the same time, I can understand why the book is consistently ranked among the greatest novels ever written, including #70 on the Novel 100 and an appearance in the Bloomsbury 100 as well (more on that list in a moment). It is a novel of ideas, or more specifically a novel of an idea, that of the increasing sense of alienation brought about by rapid urbanization and industrial development. The more that we are surrounded by people, the more we are alone. Yet we can not survive or thrive alone, and solving this conflict is key to the redemption of Biberkopf towards the novel’s end. I can also see why literary critics would heap praise on the book’s writing style, which is thoroughly modern and clever and draws from one of the century’s most exalted works, Joyce’s Ulysses. (Apparently Döblin rewrote Berlin from scratch after reading Joyce’s magnum opus.)

Berlin tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a ne’er-do-well just released from Tegel prison, where he’d served four years for beating his girlfriend to death in a drunken rage, back into Berlin in the 1920s. The city, which is the second-most important character in the book, is changing rapidly, urbanizing and industrializing, facing social upheaval between communist and fascist movements, suffering an apparent decline in morality, and isolating its residents from each other and from society as a whole. Biberkopf says he wants to live righteously, but ends up falling in with the wrong people and making some stupendously bad choices, getting tied up in murder and racketeering, all the while blaming Fate for what’s happened.

Up until the final 30-40 pages, Franz’s refusal to take any responsibility for his actions, which among other things cause the death of someone close to him, drove me insane, particularly because the narrator appears to agree with Franz’s point of view. Franz’s redemption is incomplete and deliberately ambiguous, but it requires Franz to face up to who he is, the choices he’s made, and the need to adapt his approach to life to the changing environment of Berlin. If you can tough your way through the prose and are willing to ignore the allusions you missed (as I did, although I found myself wishing for an annotated text), there’s some payoff at the end both in terms of plot and the novel’s philosophical aims.

Next up is a nonfiction book I’m already mostly through, John Emsley’s The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus, an entertaining if somewhat macabre read. I admit it might be more entertaining because of the macabre material, though.

—

Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides: 100 Must-Read Classic Novels is yet another list of 100 novels (actually, 99 novels and one collection of short stories), with a strong emphasis on the classics. This one comes with a short essay on each entry, and each ends with short lists of similar books to read if you liked the one covered in that essay. The author/editor, Nick Rennison, limited himself to books published by 1950, and cast a fairly wide net, including a number of books with which I wasn’t familiar (such as Icelandic Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness’ Independent People, currently on my to-be-read shelf) and mixing in a P.G. Wodehouse book to balance out all the depressing books on the list. Rennison does have one strong bias towards English authors, who account for 42 of the books on the list, 46 if we include the two Scottish authors on the list as well as Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland but moved to London in his early 20s and wrote in English. I was dismayed at the omission of The Master and Margarita, which is mentioned in at least one of the recommendation lists, but pleased to see that some of the overlong “classic” novels of early English literature, like Pamela and Clarissa, the latter of which runs to over a million words or roughly 3300 pages of normal text, weren’t included.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ November 30, 2007
→ By

A Handful of Dust.

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust starts out as another great Waugh black comedy, detailing the gradual decay and eventual end of the marriage between Tony and Brenda Last, an upper-class couple who can barely afford to live on the outsized estate they own, paralleling the end of an era in British society. But the last thirty-odd pages prove a grave disappointment for anyone wrapped up in the plot.

An odd sequence of events puts John Beaver, a social parasite who does the luncheon circuit but has little money of his own, at the Lasts’ house for a weekend, where Brenda, bored with her stale marriage and disconnected emotionally from her son, John Andrew, develops a bizarre obsession with Beaver, eventually conning her husband into getting her a flat in London so she can pursue the affair. She detaches so much from her home life that when her son dies in a freak horse-riding accident and she is told that “John is dead,” she bursts into tears, only to recover when she hears it was “John Andrew,” saying, “Thank God.” A few days later, she insists on a divorce, leading to the novel’s funniest passage, the attempt to create evidence of infidelity to justify the divorce request.

The decline in English morality was a regular theme in Waugh’s work, cropping up here in the ease with which Brenda cheats on her husband and forgets her son, as well as in a few offhand references to other affairs and peccadilloes among their gossiping social set. Waugh’s own marriage had ended badly shortly before he wrote the novel, but he spews almost equal venom at the husband as he does at the faithless wife.

But the novel’s resolution falls flat, working on a metaphorical level but deflating like a balloon with a rusty nail through it on a straight plot level. The end of Tony’s plot line is macabre, but it’s also a bit contradictory – Tony finally grows a pair in his dealings with Brenda, but turns back into a sniveling git once in Brazil, almost a case of character undevelopment – and it’s also more of an infinite loop than an ending. (It’s also oddly similar to Stephen King’s Misery, so much so that it seems improbable that King was unfamiliar with Waugh’s book.) Brenda’s fate is mentioned in passing as we see the Lasts’ cousins taking over the estate, which means that neither of the main characters gets a fully realized conclusion. So while A Handful of Dust works as a comedy, as a novel, it’s short of the mark.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,