→ August 22, 2008
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Vanity Fair.

Ah! Vanitus Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?

That would have to make the list of famous penultimate lines, as it summarizes Vanity Fair on its final page, number 809 in the edition I read. The book appears at #24 on the Novel 100 and #19 on the Guardian 100.

Thackeray’s magnum opus is a sort of anti-picaresque satire of pre-Victorian society – anti-picaresque because most of the “action” is decidedly dull and because the book lacks a hero, a satire for Thackeray’s unflinching looks at the hypocrisy and self-importance of both old- and new-money aristocrats. The novel’s twin centers are the kind, witless, and occasionally simpering Amelia Sedley, born to moderate affluence but with a father who is absolutely reckless with money, and her boarding-school friend Becky Sharp, an orphan with borderline personality disorder who views every person she meets as a potential stepping stone or obstacle to her rise to fortune and status. Both make questionable marriages, bear sons, and follow their husbands to Belgium where both men participate briefly in the war against Napoleon’s forces. From there, the storylines split, only to reunite towards the book’s neither-happy-nor-unhappy ending.

Thackeray’s characterizations are the book’s strength. He sets Becky up as the underdog, only to reveal her as a Machiavellian home-wrecking bitch over the course of a few hundred pages. Amelia might emerge as the heroine until you realize that she’s ineffectual and weak. Even Major Dobbin, probably the one clearly “good” character among the primaries, reveals his own character flaw with his childlike devotion to Amelia, even as she takes him for granted and marries another man.

On the other hand, the satire may have been rapier-sharp in the mid-19th century, but it’s hard to fully appreciate it with little knowledge of the society he’s lampooning. I got more humor from the wordplay (with some help from the footnotes), his knack for absurdly named characters (foreshadowing Wodehouse and Powell?), and his snarky narration. If you think lines like “And the worthy civilian being haunted by a dim consciousness that the lad thought him an ass…” are funny, you’ll enjoy the humor in Vanity Fair, which is much more of that sardonic variety than of a slapstick or other laugh-out-loud style.

Next up: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, a story about immigrant life in the U.S. prior to World War I. It’s also on the Novel 100.

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→ May 23, 2008
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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.

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→ February 9, 2008
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The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear.

Walter Moers’ The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear was described in a Washington Post review as “equal parts J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein,” which isn’t too far off the mark. It’s a flight of fancy, a children’s book written for grown-ups, showcasing an amazingly creative mind, but a little light on storyline.

The book follows Captain Bluebear from his first memories as a tiny cub afloat on the ocean in a nutshell through his first thirteen and a half “lives” – a bluebear has twenty-seven, although these are lives in the sense of chapters of his life, rather than twenty-seven separate mortal coils – each of which is sort of a self-contained story. Most take the form of “Bluebear finds himself in a new environment, gets into trouble (generally not of his own making), and needs to escape.” There are recurring secondary characters through several of the stories, and Moers’ facility with creating both secondary characters and unusual places is incredible – for example, the Earspoonlets:

Even more innocuous and equally beneficial to society were the acoustic vampires popularly known as Earspoonlets, which lived on speech. They were little bigger than dachshunds but had hearing organs of which a young elephant need not have been ashamed. They spent most of their time lying around in public places and pricking up their ears – an extremely amusing sight. Earspoonlets were capable of storing up all they heard for months and regurgitating it before it was fully digested. Thus they were much in demand as itinerant purveyors of information of witnesses of arguments. You could easily annoy them by noiselessly opening and shutting your mouth as if talking. This made them bounce around like mad things, vainly trying to catch the words they thought they were missing.

The whole book is deliberately silly, and there’s little narrative greed to drive you towards the end – no big foozle to kill, no major question to answer, etc. It doesn’t have the relentless plot of the Harry Potter books or the cheerful nihilism of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but instead floats along on its own absurdity. It’s a bit like empty calories, but speaking as someone who loves a rich dessert, empty calories are a perfectly acceptable part of a balanced literary diet – as long as they’re worth it.

Next up: Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

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