Booking Through Siblings

Do you have siblings? Do they like to read?

My mother had my brother nine months after she married my dad; my sister, 15 months later. I didn't come along until 15 years after my sister.

My brother, who died when I was 16, took after my dad and loved to read. By the time I was paying attention to what he read, he'd become obsessed with religion, and spent every free moment on the Bible or other religious material expounding on the Bible. I can remember him becoming quite upset with me when I suggested he read Franny and Zooey--totally the wrong kind of thing to be reading, in his eyes.

In hindsight, it's easy for everyone to see he was an untreated bipolar, and I still wonder how his life would have turned out if he'd had the proper meds. Would we have read the same books or continued down separate reading paths?

My sister, on the other hand, took after my mother, and has never been much of a reader. Part of this, no doubt, is because she has dyslexia, although, of course, no one figured this out while she was in school. She did, however, manage to read and love East of Eden, and endured her teacher's ridiculous notion that East of Eden was a dirty book that she ought not to have read.

In general, though, she finds books, and blogging about them, very dull.


Booking Through Thursday

Squee!

Not only did the Girl Detective read As I Lay Dying and discuss it with two separate book groups, but she made the most fantastic diorama of one of the most memorable scenes.

Check it out.

Books Read in April

This month the same tile that's in the kitchen was laid in the family room. There was a great shifting around of furniture, resulting in the family room looking the best it ever has, and the living room becoming the depository of a sofa and two wingback chairs that desperately need reupholstering.

And the books went back on the tbr bookcase now situated a newly-created "study corner" of the living room. They'll have to come off once I decide what color the bookcase should be painted, but for now it's enough just to have the books off the floor.

This month I completed:

The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes. Olivia Manning. Now that I've completed The Balkan Trilogy, I'm eager to continue on with Harriet and Guy Pringle in The Levant Trilogy. Has anyone watched The Fortunes of War?


The Beginner's Goodbye. Anne Tyler. If you want to know why I was thrilled when the main character in Tyler's latest checked his phone messages, read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant first. Luke Tull lives!

The Last Gentleman. Walker Percy. I'd been plotting to reread The Moviegoer this year, but Jeanne inspired me to pick up this one instead. And a good thing, too: I'd forgotten everything.

The Abbess of Crewe. Muriel Spark. A very short book that I had to force myself to finish. I think I just wasn't in the right frame of mind.

And three novels from the Some Dark Holler list:

The Cove. Ron Rash.

A Land More Kind Than Home. Wiley Cash

The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. M. Glenn Taylor

I'll have something more to say about the last three later.

Miss Brodie and The Finishing School

I bought The Abbess of Crewe earlier this year, just as soon as I learned that Muriel Spark had written a Watergate novel. I mean, how cool is that? Then I held off on reading it, waiting for Muriel Spark Week.

And while I've now read the slim little thing, dog-earing many pages, I find myself disinclined to say anything about it. I didn't particularly like it, but that may say more about my inability to stay focused the day I read it than the book itself. Maybe I'll try it again someday and find it utterly brilliant. This time round, we just didn't click.

So here's a review from six years back, when I read The Finishing School along with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the Slaves.


~~~~~~


“You begin,” he said, “by setting your scene. You have to see your scene, either in reality or in imagination. For instance, from here you can see across the lake. But on a day like this you can’t see across the lake, it’s too misty. You can’t see the other side.” Rowland took off his reading glasses to stare at his creative writing class whose parents’ money was being thus spent: two boys and three girls around sixteen to seventeen years of age, some more, some a little less. “So,” he said, “you must just write, when you set your scene, ‘the other side of the lake was hidden in mist.’ Or is you want to exercise imagination, on a day like today, you can write,’The other side of the lake was just visible.’ But as you are setting the scene, don’t make any emphasis as yet. It’s too soon, for instance, for you to write, ‘The other side of the lake was hidden in the fucking mist.’ That will come later. You are setting your scene. You don’t want to make a point as yet.”

So begins Muriel Spark's last novel, The Finishing School,
a satiric look at a private progressive institution that Miss Jean Brodie in her prime would have been quick to deem a “crank” school and would have been loathe to be associated with.

Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina Parker operate College Sunrise, a school where parents with “dire wealth” consent to send their teenagers for a year or two to get them out of the way. College Sunrise could not in any way compete with the famous schools and finishing establishments recommended by Gabbitas, Thring and Wingate in shiny colored brochures. Indeed, College Sunrise was almost unknown in the more distinctive educational circles, and in cases where it was known, it was frequently dismised as being rather shady. The fact that it moved house from time to time, that it seldom offered a tennis court and that its various swimming pools looked greasy, were the subject of gossip when the subject arose, but it was known that there had so far been no sexual scandals and that it was an advanced sort of school, bohemian, artistic, tolerant. What they smoked or sniffed was little different from the drug-taking habits of any other school, whether it be housed in Lausanne or in a street in Wakefield.

When the novel opens College Sunrise is in operation on the lake at Ouchy after previously being located in Brussels and Vienna. Nina conducts “casual afternoon comme il faut talks” with the school’s eight students ("'Be careful who takes you to Ascot,' she said, 'because, unless you have married a rich husband, he is probably a crook.'") while Rowland teaches creative writing. In fact, one of the students, 17-year-old Chris Wiley, red-haired, handsome, annoyingly self-assured, has enrolled in College Sunrise specifically so that he can write his historically inaccurate novel on Mary, Queen of Scots.

Rowland reads the opening pages of Chris' novel, finds them "quite good," and then experiences a debilitating case of writer's block where his own novel is concerned. Most of Spark's novel is thereafter concerned with the uneasy relationship between Rowland and Chris: Rowland's jealousy at first amuses Chris, who taunts Rowland with his hidden-away work-in-progress and thrives on reports that Rowland has been searching his belongings in a desperate attempt to find it. Later, after Nina is finally able to convince Rowland that his obsession with Chris' novel is bordering on insanity and he seeks a cure by temporarily checking into a monastery, Chris finds he requires Rowland's presence or else he is unable to write. Clearly, the madness goes both ways.

Nina wants Chris gone but realizes his tuition is needed less the school go under. She begins an affair with an art historian who lives in a neighboring villa. Rowland knows and doesn't care; he's busy attempting to sleep with the servant who is sleeping with Chris.

Nina, her lover, and the students all speculate whether Rowland's obsession with Chris' novel is actually a case of misplaced homosexual desire.

Finally, two of the publishers Chris has sent his novel to come to Ouchy and begin to offer a bit of perspective on Chris's talent and prospects. Chris' confidence is momentarily shaken, but he's quick to once again manipulate those around him, especially when he sees Rowland's chances at literary success wax considerably. I won't say who or how, but someone almost dies.

Now, while I loved The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I remained largely indifferent to The Finishing School. I read it twice to see if I could put my finger on what kept it from being a more enjoyable, a more memorable read. The best I could come up with is that Spark’s natural inclination to omit all but of vital import undercut her efforts here. Chris and Rowland discuss whether they feel their characters take on a life of their own; Chris maintains that his are firmly under his control and can do nothing he does not will. Spark’s characters here definitely fall under strict authorial control; she pushes them about to advance her story without bringing them fully to life. And why she chose to have the character whose writing is called "actually a lot of shit" by a prospective publisher, who recognizes that Chris' approaching success is based on his youth, not his talent, be the one whose methods most mimic her own is definitely beyond my understanding.

I also thought that the use of flash forwards, which I am, in general, exceedingly fond of, and found most effective in Jean Brodie (and in The Driver's Seat, which I read last month), undercut my concern in The Finishing School. While knowing that Miss Brodie is to be betrayed, that Sandy will become a nun, that Mary will be killed in a fire (or that that strange Lise is going to be murdered before morning comes), heightens the suspense and keeps me engaged with how future events are to come about, foreknowledge here deflated my interest. Why should I care now about the state of Rowland and Nina's marriage when I know she's going to be much happier as an art historian married to someone else? Why should I care now that Chris' novel is no good if he's still going to manage to get it published? Why should I care now about any of the students at the Sunrise School when I know they all have enough money or family prestige to take the rough edges off their years to come?

Based on these two books, I'd have to say that if an author can't or isn't willing to vary her style and technique from book to book, she ought to take care that the stories she has to tell will work with her style rather than against it.

I do intend to read more by Spark. I'm going to chose titles for the most part, though, from the first half of her career when her style is economical, but not yet miserly. I don't have a problem meeting a writer halfway, but I'm not willing to do more than that.

I'd rather be in some dark holler

(cue the appropriate background music here)

I picked up the new Ron Rash, The Cove, from the public library this morning. Last week I ordered Wiley Cash's debut,  A Land More Kind Than Home, which I hope will arrive by the weekend. Earlier this year I bought three Wilkes County-centric books. I am officially kicking off a new reading project, although I am hard-pressed to find the appropriate heading for the thing.

Library of Congress prefers Mountain People and Appalachian Region - Southern  to Hillbilly (music can get away with the hillbilly designation, evidently; not literature). Western North Carolina is also an appropriate subject heading, although not one that's been used on any fiction in the university's library catalog, and one that would exclude books set beyond the state line. The public library here uses Mountain Life - North Carolina - Fiction for Sharyn McCrumb's The Ballad of Tom Dooley, but it's a dead end: clicking on that subject heading won't lead a reader to any additional titles. North Carolina - Fiction takes you to 373 titles at the public library; to 103 at the university, but it isn't a designation that's been used more than haphazardly: Cold Mountain's only in the catalog as United States - History - Civil War, 1861-1865 - Fiction and John Ehle's fiction, shelved in the North Carolina Room at the public library, receives no subject headings at all.

Suggestions? Will it make sense if I just call this my Some Dark Holler Project?

Initial proposed reading list:

Surreal South: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry. Laura Benedict and Pinckney Benedict, eds.
The Astronomer and Other Stories. Doris Betts (okay, so this is kind of a cheat. Only the northwest corner of  Iredell County's the least bit mountainous. Sue me; it's my list)
The Wettest County in the World. Matt Bondurant (Virginia)
A Land More Kind Than Home. Wiley Cash
Ancestors and Others. Fred Chappell
The Landbreakers. John Ehle
Thirteen Moons. Charles Frazier
The Ballad of Tom Dooley. Sharyn McCrumb (Wilkes County)
Rain on the Just. Kathleen Morehouse (Wilkes County)
We Are Taking Only What We Need. Stephanie Powell Watts (Wilkes-by God-County)
The Cove.Ron Rash
Serena. Ron Rash
The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. M. Glenn Taylor (West Virginia)

What was the point in being a second-rate writer?

Clarence listened to all this with an occasional murmur, then picked up the book she had been reading. It was one of the D.H. Lawrence novels on which Guy was lecturing that term.

"Kangaroo," he read out scornfully. "These modern novelists! Why is it that not one of them is really good enough? This stuff, for instance. . . "

"I wouldn't call Lawrence a modern novelist."

"You know what I mean." Clarence flipped impatiently through the pages. "All these dark gods, this phallic stuff, this - this fascism! I can't stand it." He threw down the book and stared accusingly at her.

She took the book up. "Supposing you skip the guff, as you call it! Supposing you read what is left, simply as writing." She read aloud one of the passages Guy had marked. It was the description of the sunset over Manly Beach: 'The long green rollers of the Pacific,' 'the star-white foam', 'the dusk-green sea glimmered over with smoky rose'.

Clarence groaned through it, appalled at what was being imposed on him. "I know!" he said, in agony, when she stopped. "All that colour stuff - it's just so many words strung together. Anyone could do it."

Harriet re-read the passage through to herself. For some reason, it did not seem so vivid and exciting as it had done before Clarence condemned it. She was inclined to blame him for that. She turned on him: "Have you ever tried to write? Do you know how difficult it is?"

Well, yes. Clarence admitted he had once wanted to be a writer. He did know it was difficult. He had given up trying because, after all, what was the point in being a second-rate writer? If one could not be a great writer - A Tolstoy, A Flaubert, a Stendhal - what was the point in being a writer at all?

Disconcerted, Harriet said lamely: "If everyone felt like that, there wouldn't be much to read."

"What is there to read, anyway? Rubbish, most of it. Myself, I read nothing but detective novels."

"I suppose you do read Tolstoy and Flaubert?"

"I did once. Years ago."

"You could read them again."

Clarence gave another moan. "Why should one bother?"

"What about Virginia Woolf?"

"I think Orlando almost the worst book of the century."

"Really! And To the Lighthouse?"

Clarence wriggled in weary exasperation. "It's all right - but all her writing is so diffused, so feminine, so sticky. It has such an odd smell about it. It's just like menstruation."

Startled by the originality of Clarence's criticism, Harriet looked at him with more respect. "And Somerset Maugham?" she ventured.

"Goodness me, Harry! He's simply the higher journalism."

No one else had ever called Harriet 'Harry' and she did not like the abbreviation. She reacted sharply, saying: "Maybe Somerset Maugham isn't very good, but the others are. So much creative effort has gone into their work - and all you can say is 'Really!' and condemn them out of hand." She rose and put on her coat and fur cap. "I think we should go," she said.

--Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune

I don't know why using Blogger has to be such an ordeal.

These days I can't write a blog post unless I use Goggle Chrome, but I can't respond to a comment on my own blog unless I use Internet Explorer. And it took me awhile to figure out that solution.

My apologies to everyone who's tried to comment here and failed.

Classics Club Challenge

As much as I love contemporary literature, I love the old stuff--especially now that I'm, uh, a bit older myself. So I always get a thrill when other book bloggers decide to focus on classics instead of whatever the publicists and publishers determine to send our way. Maybe I won't be sidetracked from starting that Gissing I've been eyeing for a couple of years now that Jillian's started the Classics Club.

My objective will be to read 50 books from the list below by April 2, 2015. In addition to obvious classics like Dostoevsky, Trollope, Eliot, and Gissing, I'm calling anything published by NYRB, Virago, Persephone, Penguin or Modern Library modern classics. Science fiction classics count as well, no matter the publisher.

I'll be adding books to this initial list; we had a flood earlier this year and until the new floor is in place (finally ordered last week after weeks of agonizing over what to put down in place of the ruined carpet), an entire bookcase full of tbr possibilities is out of commission.

Really Old Stuff
New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha
The Book of the City of Ladies. Christine de Pizan
Coriolanus. William Shakespeare
Journal of the Plague Year. Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe
Candide. Voltaire

Nineteenth Century
The Adolescent. Dyodor Dostoevsky
The Eternal Husband. Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Adam Bede. George Eliot
Felix Holt. George Eliot
Bouvard and Pecuchet. Gustave Flaubert
North and South. Elizabeth Gaskell
Born in Exile. George Gissing
Eve's Ransom. George Gissing
The Nether World. George Gissing
Our Friend the Charlatan. George Gissing
Thyrza. George Gissing
Workers in the Dawn. George Gissing
Far from the Madding Crowd. Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Canterbridge. Thomas Hardy
The Charterhouse of Parma. Stendhal
Orley Farm. Anthony Trollope
Phineas Finn. Anthony Trollope
The Eustace Diamonds. Anthony Trollope
Phineas Redux. Anthony Trollope
The Prime Minister. Anthony Trollope
The Duke's Children. Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington. Anthony Trollope


New York Review Book Classics
Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Norman Mailer
The Balkan Trilogy. Olivia Manning (April 2012; counts as three)
Letty Fox. Christian Stead
etc.

Persephone Books
The Winds of Heaven. Monica Dickens
The Wise Virgins. Leonard Woolf
etc.

Virago Modern Classics
Plagued by Nightingales. Kay Boyle
Sisters by a River. Barbara Comyns
A Touch of Mistletoe. Barbara Comyns
The Vet's Daughter. Barbara Comyns
The Beauties and the Furies. Christina Stead
Salzburg Tales. Christina Stead
At Mrs. Lippincote's. Elizabeth Taylor
etc.

Twentieth Century
The Aleph and Other Stories. Jorge Luis Borges
Death Comes For the Archbishop. Willa Cather
My Mortal Enemy. Willa Cather  (March 2012)
The Man Who Was Thursday. G.K. Chesterton
The Enormous Room. E.E. Cummings
Death in Venice. Thomas Mann
Doctor Faustus. Thomas Mann
Song of Solomon. Toni Morrison
The Discovery of Heaven. Henry Mulisch
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. Iris Murdoch
A Dance to the Music of Time. Anthony Powell
Call It Sleep. Henry Roth
The Abbess of Crewe. Muriel Spark (April 2012)
Robinson. Muriel Spark
History of Mr. Polly. H.G. Wells
Kipps. H.G. Wells
Black Lamb and Grey Falcoln. Rebecca West
A Train of Powder. Rebecca West
Night and Day. Virginia Woolf
etc.

Science Fiction
Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction
The Man Who Folded Himself. Gerrold
The City and the City. China Mieville
Perdido Street Station. China Mieville
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. James Tiptree
The War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells

poets are like birds

poets are like birds
pulling words like worms from earth
singing poems
singing "fee-bee fee bee/chick-a-dee-dee"

pulling words like worms from earth
brown thrasher couplets on telegraph poles
singing "fee-bee fee bee/chick-a-dee-dee"
I lean on the kitchen windowsill, watching

brown thrasher couplets on telegraph poles
now the baby is awake
I lean on the kitchen windowsill, watching
the joyful bouncing flight of poets and birds

now the baby is awake
hungry and needy I hold her, seeing
the joyful bouncing flight of poets and birds
dishwater and soap clinging to my hands

by W.M. Kibler

Books read in March

The Marriage Plot. Jeffrey Eugenides
I'm a little sad this didn't have a better showing in the Tournament of Books since I loved it from start to finish. Eugenides doesn't need a live rooster at this point in his career, though, and I am terribly happy that THE WESTERN ultimately took home the prize. Same as Teresa, I l found Madeleine very true to life and think she got a bum rap in the discussion. I should get around to Middlesex sooner rather than later, shouldn't I?

Searching for Caleb. Anne Tyler (reread)
Outside a few books from childhood, I've probably internalized more from this, my first Tyler, from way back in '79, than any other. I know many people who don't like Caleb, including a few who ordinarily count themselves as Tyler fans, but this one never lets me down. I'm rather scandalized that it had been 14 years since the last start-to-finish read, but then, I'd promised myself to read it back-to-back with One Hundred Years of Solitude so that I could conclude whether Caleb was consciously modeled on it, and that will make a person hesitate. Oh well, self, I lied, but I promise I'll reread Garcia Marquez one of these days.

And I am going to go on the record as saying yes, I realize I'm still cutting Duncan way more slack than he deserves. He's my bad boy and I'll always love him. So there.

The Sense of an Ending. Julian Barnes.
Why have I never read Barnes before? Wish this had done a little better in the TOB as well.

The Middle Ground. Margaret Drabble
I read this back in '82 when I was working my way through every Drabble I could get my hands on. I don't know that I'd recommend this as a starter Drabble, definitely not if the reader requires an actual plot to keep her turning the pages, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

Cora Glynn. Peter Cameron
I really like the way Cameron continually defied my expectations. I'd think I knew where he was heading, then the compass needle would whirl.

Arcadia. Lauren Groff
Loved this, even the section that takes place in the future that others don't enjoy. I need to go back and read Groff's earlier books.

The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins
First Wendy asked me the day the movie came out if I'd read the book. Then, no matter where I turned online that day, it was all #hungergames #allthetime. And it was only $5 for the Kindle. Read it in a day. Not opposed to reading the sequels.

Chronic City. Jonathan Lethem
This book cracked. me. up. Usually when I say I found something funny I mean I LOL'ed inside my head. Chronic City gave me a genuine outside-my-own-confines can't-stop-once-I-get-going laughing fit, one that had S. saying, "What?! What?!" and L. ignoring me with all his might (he works from home; he was on the phone) out of fear he might make my fit last even longer.

My Mortal Enemy. Willa Cather
A reread for the Slaves.

How We Got Insipid. Jonathan Lethem
A couple of short stories, one a science fictional They Shoot Horses, Don't They? kind of thing, and the other, a surreal fantasy with a grown-up but still sweatshirt-and-sneakers-wearing Harriet M. Welch as the main character.

Worth noting that Chronic City contains a minor character named Harriet Welk.

My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather

How apropos is this?

Last night one of the library's regular patrons, a Chinese man who often has us explain English idioms or figures of speech that have confounded him, came by to ask if I'd participate in a one-question survey he was taking.

Sure, I said.

Do you, he said, regard your spouse as a friend or an enemy?

And I, who'd finished My Mortal Enemy less than 24 hours before, startled him by ducking underneath the desk for my purse, then brandishing my Cather before him, telling him he had to read this book.

He wrote down Cather's name, then told me 70 percent of married Chinese consider their spouse their enemy while 70 percent of Americans consider them their friend. He didn't understand why there was such a wide swing in perception between the two nationalities. I suggested it might be because Americans generally divorce a spouse they regard as an enemy.

But now, today, I'm thinking about how my own parents would have fallen into the enemy camp, and they were married for more than 61 years.

My mother remained angry at my dad throughout my life, for more than 40 years, because of something he'd done before I was born (I was a midlife accident; they'd eloped when she was 17 and he was 22 and no one --i.e., my sister-- told me what he'd done to get in her bad graces until I was 22, a month or so shy of marrying myself). Then, during  the final months of their lives (they died five weeks apart), thanks to the Alzheimers, she either forgave him, or more likely, forgot that she had ever been mad at him. Unfortunately, my dad remembered that anger and while the series of strokes he'd endured left him unable to communicate with anyone very well verbally, his demeanor made it clear he had not forgiven her.

What a mess we can make of our lives if we put our minds to it, huh?

I can't remember if I connected my parents' relationship with that of the characters in My Mortal Enemy when I read it in '83. My suspicions are that I probably speculated more on how a particular friend would grow to regard her husband as her mortal enemy if he failed to provide her with the level of material success and social standing she desired--back then another friend and I were quite intrigued with her machinations and expressed desire: I want more. We couldn't figure out how she always managed to get it. Shouldn't the universe at some point say no?

So, now that I've gotten all that out of the way, on to an the actual  Willa Cather novella.

It is, as you may have surmised, the story of a marriage gone awry. Myra Driscoll falls in love with Oswald Henshawe, the son of a man her wealthy uncle, who's raised her, holds a grudge against. Myra's uncle gives her an ultimatum: marry Oswald and get cut off without a penny. "It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money," he warns her.

With the help of her friends, who are thrilled with the secret romance, Myra chooses love over money, and elopes with Oswald, never once returning to attempt reconciliation with the uncle, who leaves his fortune to the Catholic church. As our narrator Nellie Birdseye tells us (Nellie is the daughter of one of Myra's girlhood friends), "[H]er life had been as exciting and varied as ours was monotonous." But Nellie finds it disheartening when her aunt Lydia, who remains in touch with Myra over the years, reports that they are only "as happy as most people." Nellie's opinion is that "the very point of their story was that they should be much happier than other people."

At the age of 15, Nellie finds herself spending the Christmas holiday in New York with the Henshawes and her aunt. She observes Myra at her best--when she is with her artistic set of friends--and at her worst--quarreling with, then leaving Oswald, who is expected to come to her in Pittsburgh to win her back. Although ample evidence is presented that Oswald has a secret life and may very well be conducting an affair, Myra's conduct keeps her from gaining much sympathy from either Nellie or her aunt:

Aunt Lydia was very angry. "I'm sick of Myra's dramatics," she declared. "I've done with them. A man never is justified, but if ever a man was. . . "

Ten years later, on the West Coast, Nellie finds the Henshawes living in the same hotel as she. They have fallen on hard times financially and are, as Myra calls it, "in temporary eclipse" from their friends. Myra is in fact dying, and consumed by regrets for how her life has turned out, questioning why she in the position to die, "alone with my mortal enemy":

She smoothed his hair. "No, my poor Oswald, you'll never stagger far under the bulk of me. Oh, if youth but knew!" She closed her eyes and pressed her hands over them. "It's been the ruin of us both. We've destroyed each other. I should have stayed with my uncle. It was money I needed. We've thrown our lives away."

"Come, Myra, don't talk so before Nellie. You don't mean it. Remember the long time we were happy. That was reality, just as much as this."

"We were never really happy. I am a greedy, selfish, worldly woman; I wanted success and a place in the world. Now I'm old and ill and a fright, but among my own kind I'd still have my circle; I'd have courtesy from people of gentle manners, and not have my brains beaten out by hoodlums. Go away, please, both of you, and leave me!" She turned her face to the wall and covered her head.

While Oswald remains devoted to her (although simultaneously enjoying the admiration of another young woman living in the hotel), Myra becomes focused on Catholicism, literature and nature. She misses her long-dead uncle, thinks he wisely left his money where it was needed and would do good, and claims how like him she really is:

"We were very proud of each other, and if he'd lived till now, I'd go back to him and ask his pardon; because I know what it is to be old and lonely and disappointed. Yes, and because as we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forebears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton."

Myra calls on the savagery within herself to face death on her own terms. Nellie is left to comfort Oswald, and come to grips with the hard lesson learned from the woman who uttered "such a terrible judgment upon all one hopes for."

I wonder if Myra had lived longer, if she would have managed to forgive her husband for his transgressions, the way she came to  forgive her uncle. Or would she have continued to believe that she couldn't forgive him because of the harm she'd done to him? Even Nellie, earlier in the story, had sensed that Oswald's life "had not suited him; that he possessed some kind of courage and force which slept, which in another sort of world might have asserted themselves brilliantly."

What a mess we can make of our lives even if we don't put our minds to it.

Feel free to join in the discussion of My Mortal Enemy over at The Slaves of Golconda.

You may not want to read this if you haven't already read The Sense of an Ending

Last night I read Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Yes, the night before it went up against Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time in the Tournament of Books. I'd thought about letting February be a month of reading nothing but TOB contenders, but I didn't pick up a single book from my TOB stack until I'd flipped the calendar over to March. First The Marriage Plot. Last night, The Sense of an Ending.

And after I finished it last night I went looking for some discussion of the ending. I was totally blown away with how my interpretation differed from the interpretations that have been put forth on other blogs. Okay, I saw one person get around to mentioning the same idea I'd had in the comments to a post, but this comment didn't seem to snag anyone's interest.

Agree with me, argue with me, discuss with me. I'm throwing out what I think and hope you'll feel free to do that same.

The last email Tony's old girlfriend Veronica sends to him, near the end of the novel: "You still don't get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying." This isn't the first time she's said these same lines to Tony.

Barnes is putting us on guard that any conclusions Tony reaches are apt to be wrong. So what does Tony conclude shortly thereafter?

That Veronica and Tony's old friend Adrian had a child together. That the deerstalker-helmeted mentally- challenged man that Veronica takes Tony to observe is the child that Veronica and Adrian had together before Adrian philosophically decided to end his life. Later, he modifies this conclusion when one of the caretakers of Adrian Jr. tells him that Veronica is actually Adrian Jr.'s sister. Tony's conclusion: Adrian had an affair with Veronica's mother. Tony's responsibility in all of this, he concludes (as many readers have as well), is that he wrote an ugly letter that sent Adrian to talk to Veronica's mother, who'd been nice to him, Tony, during one particularly trying weekend visit to his posh girlfriend's home, and who then subsequently must have been so nice to Adrian that she got pregnant by him. And then Adrian slit his wrists from shame, not philosophy.

Sorry, but I just don't see the nonpatronizing Sarah Ford, Veronica's mother, as a Mrs. Robinson simply because she waved goodbye to Tony that weekend in a way he interpreted as "not the way people normally do."

Remember how Tony points out that while these events were taking place in the Sixties, it was the Sixties "only for some people, only in certain parts of the country."

Back in the Sixties, in the places where it still felt like the Fifties, a daughter who got pregnant by a boy who didn't want to marry her, might very well find herself delegated into the role of sister to her own child while her mother raised her biological grandchild as her own. This was a common enough practice while I was growing up that whenever I wanted to be a smartass to my sister, who's 15 years older than me, I'd ask her to prove she wasn't really my mother. Yeah, I was a brat.

The importance of Sarah Ford's frying eggs, "in a carefree, slapdash way, untroubled when one of them broke in the pan," speaks of the ease she'd have of stepping in as mom after Adrian failed to provide legitimacy to the grandchild.

Remember how Adrian is the one who wonders whether Robson's girlfriend may have been pregnant by someone else. Why wouldn't he also wonder if his own girlfriend is carrying someone else's child, particularly after he receives Tony's letter? Adrian's so-called philosophical reasoning for suicide--"that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision"--certainly reads differently if we consider that maybe he doesn't want to be stuck raising a life that he suspects belongs to Tony.

Why waste so much time at the end of the book on Tony's misunderstanding of what "hand-cut" chips means, if that's not a clue that Tony still doesn't have a clue?

Why did Veronica insist Adrian write Tony and tell them they were going out if she wasn't trying some last-ditch effort to make Tony try to win her back before she'd have to switch gears and convince Adrian, who was falling in love with her, that the baby she was carrying was his?

I'm not so sure Barnes gives an indication of when exactly Sarah Ford would have learned that Veronica's baby was fathered by Tony instead of Adrian. My take is that she wanted Tony to know the truth; hence, the "blood money," as Veronica calls it, left to Tony in her will and the bequeathing of Adrian's diary. I wouldn't be surprised if Sarah never had the diary in her possession (although he could have left it there when he went down to Chislehurst), but used it as a mcguffin to spark Tony's interest in uncovering the truth. Unfortunately, Tony being Tony, even in his old age is unable to do more than see the barn owl in a poem, not the Eros and Thanatos. He's like unimaginative Robson, who by Tony's mother's standards, should never have killed himself, because he wasn't clever enough to become unhinged.

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

And for Tony, although he cannot see it, the answer to the question is everything; he's responsible for everything.

"Really, it's a classic case of deviant behavior."

Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book

(via the adventures of jenn (I)n (R)eal (L)ife)

Maybe in this reading it will come out better

She continued reading for a while in The Odd Women. And found that, over the years, her reader's response had changed. She still rooted for the two women for whom some chance of love was still possible. The other three she grew impatient with out of despair (as she had despaired of her student Portia): what hope for Monica's two older sisters, eating their meal of rice at a table measuring three by one and a half feet in Lavender Hill, the hair of one falling out, the other becoming an alcoholic? She did not wish to dwell with them longer than absolutely necessary as she herself lay in her young married sister's cast-off room, every other woman in this house warming herself against a man. When Monica Madden who was still young and pretty, met the older Widdowson, a bachelor with money, in Battersea Park, Jane thought furtively, as she had thought the last time she read this novel: Oh, go ahead and marry him. Why not? Maybe in this reading it will come out better. Perhaps he will have learned his lesson and won't hound you literally to your death with his jealousy. And you will have learned to be more discreet, to value a good home. Likewise, Jane counseled Rhoda Nunn, the young spinster career woman with whom she most identified: Stop playing this feminist power game with Everard Barfoot. You've proved your admirable point--that in the nineteenth century you are able to forgo the legal form of marriage to preserve your independence. And he has proved he loves you enough to give up his prized bachelorhood and marry you. Why not get married and do more interesting things than destroy your love with ideologies? Nevertheless, Jane found herself circling Rhoda's angry outcry:

. . . Love--love--love--a sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? They won't represent the actual world. . . . . In real life how many men and women fall in love? . . . Not one married pair in ten thousand have felt for each other as two or three couples do in every novel.

Was Rhoda right? Was "love--love--love" never to be found outside the ideals of novelists? But she remembered Sonia Marks saying, "Most women can identify with heroines who can learn to live without marriage; but not so many want to live without love of any kind."

--Gail Godwin, The Odd Woman

The sound of swords crossing

"Make yourself comfortable," Ada says, motioning him toward the sofa before she heads for the kitchen. But Case doesn't sit. He roams about the room, picks up a book lying on the sofa, glances at the spine. Daniel Deronda. He doesn't recognize the title; it must be Eliot's most recent. He replaces the novel and shifts to the bookcase, which hold a surprising amount of philosophy: Bentham, Mills, Burke, Locke, Hobbes. There are numerous abolitionist pamphlets and bound numbers of a journal called The Lily. Several shelves contain the usual English poets, the plays of Shakespeare, novels by Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Thackeray, Trollope, and Defoe. There is much more George Eliot, including the essays.

He startles at the bookcase, embarrassed, when Mrs. Tarr enters the room. Clearing his throat, he says, "Your husband has a fine library."

She carries a lacquer tray holding two glasses of iced tea. Her black eyebrows lift and a mocking smile tucks the corner of her mouth. "My husband's library? It is mine, Mr. Case. Or rather it was my mother's--which I have augmented over the years. Mr. Tarr never puts his nose in a book--except a law book."

. . . . He hears her say, "My mother used to claim that one can learn more about a person by scanning their books than could be learned by years of acquaintance. Do you think that true, Mr. Case?"

. . . . He senses she is trying to conduct him, direct him the way she did the audience the previous night. He is to spring into action at her command. Well, if that's what she wants, he will. Trying to adopt her insouciant manner he says, "If I were a medical man and those books were symptoms, I would diagnose a case of mortal seriousness." Even worse, he thinks. Ponderous, silly.

Case detects a mercurial flash of intelligence in those dark eyes, a slight colouring of her extremely pale skin. But she looks more intrigued than angry. Whatever the woman thinks seems to register itself on her face. "Mortal seriousness? Particularly deadly for a woman, I take it. And what is the cure, Doctor?"

"A dose of Dickens is what I would prescribe, ma'am." He crosses his legs; his foot begins to flick impatiently up and down. He wills it to be still.

"Oh, I don't think Dickens will do," says Mrs. Tarr. "My mother could not abide Dickens. She said his characters resembled no human being she had ever met. She called Dickens false to life. It was the gravest charge she could level." Her eyes fall on Case's shoe, which has resumed a frantic jigging.

He uncrosses his legs and shoves both feet firmly to the floor, grips both knees hard to keep them from bouncing. "I would say that it is all to Mr. Dickens's credit that he gives us the sort of characters he does. I find them entertaining. Who would read a novel just to meet the same bores they encounter on their daily rounds?"

"Click, click, click," says Ada, and sticks her tongue impudently in her cheek.

"Beg pardon?" says Case.

"The sound of swords crossing. I do enjoy a fencing match, a lively discussion about the respective merits of artists. It has been ages."

--Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man

I'm not making this up

At the library. Someone just called and asked if we had audiovisual books.

I referred him to the public library.

Some results from the Verso Digital survey of consumer purchasing behavior:

Avid readers--those who purchase 10 or more books a year--tend to be older, female, wealthier and better educated--and represent 30.2% of the U.S. adult population, about 70 million people. "They are the market that's a driver for our industry," McKeown said. These avid readers buy books for a variety of reasons, including entertainment/relaxation (32%), education and self-improvement (22%) and for gifts (14%).
and

Readers find out about books mostly through personal recommendations (49.2%), bookstore staff recommendations (30.8%), advertising (24.4%), search engine searches (21.6%) and book reviews (18.9%). Much less important are online algorithms (16%), blogs (12.1%) and social networks (11.8%). These results "reaffirm the power and necessity of bricks-and-mortar stores and traditional marketing efforts," McKeown commented.

Seventy million of us. I find that heartening. And while others may be bummed that blogs are even less influential than online algorithms, I'm not.

I'm quite amused.

Okay, so I'm going to revive a practice abandoned a few years back . At the beginning of every month I'll post a list of the books that I hope to read by its end. There will often be more books on the list than I can possibly read, but I'll try to be realistic in my expectations and shoot for two books a week, with a small number of substitutions and extras to choose from in case things don't work out as I'd planned.

For January:

A World Elsewhere. Wayne Johnston
Earth. David Brin
State of Wonder. Ann Patchett (campus book club)
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Reif Larsen (Slaves of Golconda)
The Day of the Triffids. John Wyndham
Assumption. Percival Everett
Hard Times. Charles Dickens
The War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells

if time enough:
Measure for Measure. William Shakespeare
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Harry Bates
The Paperbark Shoe. Goldie Goldbloom

Hello 2012!

I've decided that making resolutions--for me, at any rate--is a lot like having Alzheimer's disease. In December I decide on the direction I want to go in, put some thought into my goals for the year. . .  then check the preceeding January's resolutions and see that they're exactly the same, and were exactly the same the year before as well! Good grief.

And looking at the lists of books I intend to read is depressing. There are carry-overs that keep popping up year after year, so no more of that. There's much more brawn to my read-at-whim muscle than you might expect, although putting together my fill in the gaps list of one hundred authors back in 2009 allows me the flexibility to be both flighty and on task. I knocked off another 20 from that list in 2011, bringing my total to 60. I should have no trouble reaching one hundred by the project's end in April 2014.

I'm bringing in the new year with David Brin's Earth, the type of hard science fiction I intended to read last year, before I became sidetracked by a fairly steady supply of time travel fare. I'm also reading Wayne Johnston's A World Elsewhere, a book that won't be published in the U.S. until late summer. After I saw it pop up on a couple of Canadian blogs several months back, I added it to my wish list--portions of the novel take place in North Carolina, in a mansion modeled after the Biltmore estate, so how could I resist? And then I thought I'd see if I could get it through interlibrary loan, and yes, there was a library in Texas willing to send it my way, although they want it back this Friday.

In theory, I remain committed to avoiding all reading challenge entanglements, but there are so many fantastic ones taking place this month: Carl's Science Fiction Experience; Redhead's Vintage Science Fiction Month; Kim's Australian Fiction Month; Allie's Shakespeare Month; and Amanda's Charles Dickens Month. Might I squeeze in one title from each challenge before I swear off them all for the rest of the year? In addition to book group obligations?

And I'm definitely taking part in C.B. James's TBR Double Dare, although I am turning it into a book buying ban until April. In fact, although I'm not officially making any resolutions this year, I do have a catchy slogan--Eschew the New--and I'm going to chant it whenever my finger gets twitchy over at the Evil Place. My daughter's moving to Berlin for six months in a couple weeks and we're going to want to visit her while she's there; I don't need to divert any money on books that I could get from the library if I'm patient enough.

Eschew the new. Or, to quote Maurice Sagoff:

Eschew
The norm
(Dull minds conform)

Guess that means I'm bypassing the buzz books in 2012 to re-read some of my old favorites.

Oops.

I just made a resolution.

Let's pretend it never happened.

2011 reading stats and favorites

I shouldn't have waited until the last minute to work on this post, particularly since I've known since the middle of the week that I wouldn't be finishing another book until 2012, but if I've been consistent about anything this year, it's been in being as bad a blogger as I could possibly be. I'll do better next year--but that's a good hour-and-a-half away.

So what conclusions have I drawn from this year's hastily-assembled reading stats?

That while 82 completed books (I've lost count of the number of books set aside, yet still in progress) is quite respectable, if not awe-inspiring, I'm still a little bummed when I compare that number to the 101 that I managed the previous two years.  Couldn't I have looked at less kitchen porn, read fewer political blogs? Couldn't I have tried harder to convince the guys that six seasons of Lost should take longer than five weeks to watch? Perhaps I could have finished a bit more nonfiction, read a volume or two of poetry, if I'd used my time more wisely.

But of course the most appalling stat is the number of new books that came into the house and remained unread. Dare I mention that I ordered three more this morning, before I go cold turkey for the next three months? Only one of those books do I intend to read right away; I should have waited on the others.

My reading stats for the last seven years (this year's in bold):

Books Total  82  / 101 /  101  /  78  /  81  /  74  /  77
Nonfiction    12  / 16 /  15  /  13  /  8  /  14  /  13
Novels   66  / 78 /  79  /  62  /  62  /  50  /  47
Short Story Collections  2  / 7 /  7  /  3  / 4  / 1  /  8
Library Books  39  / 26 /  48  /  27  /  14  / 31
Newly Acquired/Read  12 / 23 /  32  /32  /  31  /  24
Newly Acquired/Stockpiled  120+ / 113 /  140  /  88  /141+  /  75+
E-texts Read 12  / 17 /  10  /  12
Free E-texts Read 6  / 9 / 5  /  7
Just-published books  21  / 36 /  55 /  41  /34  /  33
Classics    23  / 21 / 10  /  8  /  23  /  12
Pre-20th Century  10 / 9 / 7  /  4  /  12  /  11
Written by women  38 / 46 /  55  /  42  /  33  /  28

Two plays: Othello and Agamemnon

Authors with multiple books read: W. Somerset Maugham (Wendy and I read five Maughams over the summer); Alice Thomas Ellis (3); H.G. Wells (3); Stewart O'Nan (2); Mary Doria Russell (2); William Styron (2); Anthony Trollope (2); Rebecca West (2); and Connie Willis (2).

Rereads: Othello, Pride and Prejudice, The Razor's Edge, House of Mirth, Darkness Visible and Atonement.

I read several books this year that I finished knowing that I want to read them again some day. At the top of that list is Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, which the Slaves read back in April.

Other favorites from the year are:
Started Early, Took My Dog. Kate Atkinson
Who Was Changed, and Who Was Dead. Barbara Comyns
Galore. Michael Crummey
The Sisters Brothers. Patrick deWitt
A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan
Wounded. Percival Everett
We Had It So Good. Linda Grant
The Sundial. Shirley Jackson
Skippy Dies. Paul Murray
Doc. Mary Doria Russell
There But For The. Ali Smith
He Knew He Was Right. Anthony Trollope
Among Others. Jo Walton

The complete list of books read in 2011 can be found here.

See you next year!

Reading Shakespeare

Three years ago, at one of the lowest moments of my life, I started doing something I never thought I’d do. I’m reading every single play William Shakespeare ever wrote. And I’m reading most of them aloud. From the three dour Henry VIs, through all of your Macbeths and Romeos and Hamlets, all the way to nutty Cymbeline and beyond.


--DG Strong, "How Shakespeare got me through unemployment"

Something beautiful

Meanwhile Richard is demonstrating with his hands the goggles the police use to be able to see what the microdrone is seeing. Hugo puts his hands over his eyes too. Jen and Hugo, still with his hands over his eyes, start a conversation about democracy and internet porn. Mark feels queasy. He thinks about the couple of times he's brought himself off by watching the free porn on the net: two men on the steps of a blue swimming pool, three men dressed as soldiers in a toilet. Both times he had to go in search of something else on there afterwards to make himself feel less degraded. The second time he had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google. He surveys the strewn table. Sure, there's a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante's inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shadows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.

--Ali Smith, There but for the

What I read in October

by Susan

The Revisionists. Thomas Mullen [on the Kindle]

It seems I am surrounded by text in this city. Even without my seeking it out, it haunts me, hovers in the background, is invisibly sent from one handheld to another. I am a mere punctuation mark--we all are--in stories someone else is writing. Or has already written.

Caleb Williams. William Godwin (for the Classics Circuit) [on the Kindle]

The pride of philosophy has taught us to treat man as an individual. He is no such thing. He holds necessarily, indispensably, to his species. He is like those twin-births, that have two heads indeed, and four hands; but if you attempt to detach them from each other, they are inevitably subjected to miserable and lingering destruction.

Nightwoods. Charles Frazier

At some point, Stubblefield wondered how much he was really learning about Luce. She would talk freely about dress patterns, the daily details of gardening, his grandfather. But Stubblefield kept feeling like he was watching a cardsharp shuffle the deck, all the fine subtle movements to misdirect your attention, and at the end, a reassuring spread of hands to hide the pit opening under her life.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Helen Simonson (for book club) [on the Kindle]

"I did give [Kipling] up for many decades," she said. "He seemed such a part of those who refuse to reconsider what the Empire meant. But as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy. It's so hard to maintain that rigor of youth, isn't it?"

Pillars of Gold. Alice Thomas Ellis

Only a few years before, Camille had been acutely concerned about her mother's appearance, sometimes refusing to be seen with her in public, but now it seemed that she no longer minded: she had expropriated from Scarlet's wardrobe those few articles that she felt would suit herself and had thereafter left her mother to her own devices. It gave Scarlet the impression that she had grown very old and from now on might just as well go round in her shroud.

Home Life. Alice Thomas Ellis

One of the things I like about the country is that the problems it presents are different. For instance while the drain in London sometimes get blocked up it is never because there is a hedgehog in it.

Zone One. Colson Whitehead

 If the beings they destroyed were their own creations, and not the degraded remnants of the people described on the things' driver's licenses, so be it. We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

The Island of Dr. Moreau: It was the wantonness that stirred me

 I've repeated a review only a time or two in the seven years I've been blogging. But I'm dusting off this one from August 2006 (it was a Slaves of Golconda group read) because 1.) I've been reading H.G. Wells this fall; and 2.) I wanted to participate in the Dueling Monsters challenge.

Also, I don't normally respond as viscerally to a book as I did to The Island of Dr. Moreau. As far as I'm concerned, The Time Machine and Invisible Man can't hold a candle to it, and as far as Dr. Moreau himself goes, he's the biggest monster of them all.

~~~~~~~

When I was pregnant with my son I developed preeclampsia. The doctors determined that they'd have to take him out two months early if either of us were to make it.

He spent his first month in a neonatal intensive care unit across town before being transferred to the hospital closest to us until he'd gained enough weight to leave hospitals altogether. A NICU is, of course, a miraculous place of care and compassion, but it is also a place where much pain is experienced.

S. fought against a respirator that insisted on forcing breath in and out at a rate to which his body didn't want to conform; with his face contorting in silent screams, he was continually pricked and poked for blood samples, then transfused with fresh blood when he couldn't make enough to keep up with the amount taken (the scars on his wrists and ankles from the blood-taking did not fade away for more than a decade afterwards). Repeat.

Wired, tubed, and for several days blindered, he suffered. The painful procedures continued until eventually we--doctors, nurses, parents-- could tell that he was not only going to survive, but thrive.

Not all the babies did. There were those of two or three years of age, still in no shape to live outside NICU, abandoned by their parents, depending upon volunteers and scraps of time from the nursing staff for a bit of human contact. And there were several who lasted mere hours or days before they died.

A nurse caught me finger-stroking S.'s tiny arm on one of my first trips to the NICU. Did I not realize how much pain I was causing him? she snapped. Because he had no fat stores, the lightest touch was an assault to the nerve endings just underneath his skin. She taught me to cup my hand around him and to keep it still.

A couple weeks later I saw a new mother stroking her baby the way that I had. I waited for a nurse to correct her, but no one said a word. I knew then that her baby was going to die. No one was going to deny her the bit of comfort she could gain from touching him, even if her touch caused him distress, because these moments with the baby were going to be all that she had.

As you've maybe gathered by such an introduction, I responded to The Island of Dr. Moreau on a very personal level. If a person, if an animal, is to suffer by someone's hands in a House of Pain, it had better be for a damned good reason.

Moreau, well regarded in scientific circles in London prior to the publication of a pamphlet that exposed his cruel methods of vivisection, left England for a private island in the Pacific where he could continue his experiments outside the strictures of society. By cutting and mutilating and grafting he molds an assortment of animals into a tribe of Beast People, teaching them rudimentary language and a form of religious law designed to keep them under his control even after he has turned them out for retaining undesired animal characteristics. Imperfection really bums the man out.

Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own.

Moreau isn't driven to mold animals into human shapes out a desire to help either man or creature, but merely because he wants "to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape." Ethics are not of interest to him: "The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature," he claims. Pain is immaterial; it is animalistic; intellectual desire transforms others into problems to be solved, nothing more or less.

Doctor Moreau is, in short, as psychopathic as they come despite the god-like appearance and demeanor that Wells has given him.

Edward Prendick, our narrator, is no match for him. Because Prendick, a shipwrecked gentleman taking shelter on Moreau's private island, has dabbled in natural history and studied biology under the famed T.H. Huxley, Moreau eventually reveals the truth about his experiments to someone he assumes can appreciate them and will henceforth stop hindering his work due to silly behavior. Instead Prendick is horrified, but offers weak and minimal objection. He reminds me of a journalist who lands an exclusive interview and then is afraid to ask any follow-up questions to the canned nonsense he's given. Time and again I wished the narrator were someone like Patrick O'Brian's Stephen Maturin, someone who both understood the science and was willing to argue the ethics of a situation, to insist that being human means behaving humanely toward those not on your level. Someone who could at least read the Greek and Latin classics shelved near his hammock instead of revealing yet another skill he's lacking.

Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau's cruelty. I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau's hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the hands. But now that seemed to be the lesser part. Before they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau--and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.

Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even had his motive been hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on, and the things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer; at last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves, the old animal hate moved them to trouble one another, the Law held them back from a brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their natural animosities.


In these days my fear of the Beast People went the way of my personal fear of Moreau. I fell indeed into the morbid state, deep and enduring, alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence, and I, Moreau by his passion for research, Montgomery by his passion for drink, the Beast People, with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.

I'd like to read more H.G. Wells and I intend to return to this one again as well, possibly in a few weeks with S. My response to it next time may not be quite as visceral. Perhaps I'll see Prendick in a more appreciative light; he does makes an excellent narrator even though his passive nature infuriated me on my first reading.

They lay, opened and half read, all over her house

'It rubs off,' said Constance. 'All those models carried on the same way the artists did. You only have to read a book about the Left Bank.'

'I don't read as much as you,' said Scarlet.

'You should go down the High Street,' said Constance. 'You'd be amazed what you can pick up on the remainder counter for a song.'

'We've got no room for any more books,' said Scarlet. 'The shelves are full.'

'They say you can tell all about a person from looking at his books,' said Constance, who had become addicted to book-collecting since she had acquired a car-load of second-hand volumes from a fair in the Midlands. She had originally intended to resell them but found she had grown attached to them and had built shelves in her sitting-room. They lay, opened and half read, all over her house.

'I don't know what they'd make of ours,' said Scarlet. 'Brian only buys novels by those men, and I haven't bought a book for years--not since Elizabeth David, I don't think.'

'I can't read books by men,' said Constance. 'They will go on about their willies and chopping blondes to bits, and who cares?'

'I think they think we do,' said Scarlet.

'I don't think they do,' said Constance. 'I think they just can't really think about anything else.'

--Alice Thomas Ellis, Pillars of Gold