After the flute solo from Gluck's Orpheus

When he came to an end we sat silent in the darkness. So I was not prepared for it when my mother burst out, in the full flood of impatience, "Jock, nobody could play the flute like that with ill-fitting dentures. I don not believe you have false teeth at all."

"So far as I know he has not," said Constance.

"He would not have them, since he is so young for his age," my mother angrily pursued. "Jock, why must you play the clown? Mrs. O'Shaughnessy! That way of talking Scotch! When you can play the flute like that! Why must you try to spoil everything?"

He answered with no more accent than herself, "Life is so terrible. There is nothing to do with it but break it down into nonsense."

"Terrible?" asked Mamma in surprise.

"What's the good of music," he asked, "if there's all this cancer in the world?"

There came a voice out of the darkness, speaking so earnestly that it was shaken with tears. "What's the harm in cancer, if there's all this music in the world?"

I know that Mamma and Mary and Richard Quin would be as disconcerted as I by this brave answer, for it was Cordelia who had given it, Cordelia who would never know what music was. It was as if Cousin Jock had not gone far enough, it was as if life were breaking itself down into nonsense. Mama said, "Light the gas, please, Richard Quin," and we were all suddenly visible, blinking under the brightness, still pleased and startled by the beautiful music we had heard, and confused by the interchange that had followed it. Mama looked tenderly at Cordelia and said, "We must leave those poor souls who have cancer, please God we all may be spared, to work out that argument." Then she turned her eyes to Cousin Jock, who had gone back to his chair and was sitting with his face in his hands. "Why, Jock!" she said. Of course she felt kindly to him now, nobody could dislike a man who played the flute like that, no matter what he was like. "We all love you when you are reasonable. And from today you can ask my children for anything you want. None of them will forget your playing till the last day of their lives. Drink your beer, eat your sandwich."

--Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

Couple of links for a Sunday morning

The upright citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, didn't think much of young Henry David Thoreau. The cabin on Walden Pond, the night in jail for tax evasion, the constant scribbling in journals—it all seemed like a waste of a perfectly good Harvard education. Even more mysterious was his passion for flowers. "I soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leafed," Thoreau confided to his journal in 1856, "and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day."

Thoreau planned to turn his vast botanical records into a book, but he died of tuberculosis in his mid-40s, the project undone. Walden and his handful of other published writings languished in near obscurity, and even his close friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said that Thoreau had squandered his talents on the woods. "I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. ...Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party," Emerson lamented in his eulogy of Thoreau.

Michelle Nijhuis's article in this month's Smithsonian explains how Thoreau's botanical notes (eight years worth) are helping scientists monitor global warming.

Of the nearly 600 plant species for which Thoreau recorded flowering times during the 1850s, Primack and Miller-Rushing found only about 400, even with the help of expert local botanists. Among the missing is the arethusa orchid, which Thoreau described with admiration in 1854: "It is all color, a little hook of purple flame projecting from the meadow into the air....A superb flower."

And, in The American Scholar, Melvin Jules Bukiet takes to task a portion of today's contemporary lit that he calls Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness, he writes. [T]he BBoWs usually toss a child into a situation of extremity and then rescue her from the jaws of narrative.

He contrasts these escapists books--The Lovely Bones in particular--with serious fiction, which, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue.

Water, water, every where (or, I amuse myself)

So when I added Margaret Drabble's The Sea Lady to my list of completed books last night and noticed Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows burbling underneath, I thought an actual water cycle might make for some interesting reading. A quick scan of my shelves detected a veritable reservoir of books for quenching that thirst.

Gap Creek? Platte River? Buddenbrooks?

Should I finally get around to The Waves or The Falls? What about Three Men in a Boat or In the Wake?

Sandra would no doubt suggest I read The Thames next, but I might as well wade into the pool I already have instead of logjamming my reading until the Ackroyd's U.S. publication date.

Well, I suppose I could reread Ferris Beach or On the Beach or even The Sea, The Sea.

Or would that be going as overboard as my husband, who actually wished this morning for a hurricane to end the drought we're having?

At the moment I've settled on Lawrence's The Rainbow, but I'm finding it a little dry.

I obviously need some Water Wings.

Decorum

Booking Through Thursday

Do you have “issues” with too much profanity or overly explicit (ahem) “romantic” scenes in books? Or do you take them in stride? Have issues like these ever caused you to close a book? Or do you go looking for more exactly like them? (grin)

Well, certainly, when I was younger, those scenes were the sole raison d'etre for many of the books that made their way through our hands. We weren't reading Kathleen Woodiwiss and the like in Latin class and on the band bus for anything but such nonsense. And while there certainly was much more to The Godfather than sex, I skipped all the parts that weren't (except for the notorious horse head in the bed scene).

Such was my youth.

But these days, I don't have the interest in or the patience for that kind of writing. I didn't have a problem with Sons and Lovers, but I am curious if I'll reach a point with D.H. Lawrence where I'll start cringing or skipping or--shades of The Bridges of Madison County--reading it aloud to mock it (surely not).

Profanity in books bothers me not at all.

Way back in college, in a writing class, I wrote up to a bedroom scene, skipped a line, and continued after the fact. My classmates--a dirty-minded lot--were united in insisting that I include the damned sex scene in the rewrite. So I did. The protagonist, a guy who regularly wore a Superman T-shirt, couldn't get it up.

I'll take character development over a gratuitous sex scene any day of the week.

The unread meme

There's a new meme going around--the top 106 books tagged "unread" in the Library Thing catalog (why 106? I copied and pasted 114, which is just as random). I saw this first at Only Books All the Time. I never can remember which books I'm supposed to underline or bold or italicize to reveal this, that and the other, so I've simply bolded the ones I haven't read and provided a brief annotation.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell


2. Anna Karenina


3. Crime and punishment


4. Catch-22


5. One hundred years of solitude


6. Wuthering Heights


7. Life of Pi : a novel


8. The name of the rose


9. Don Quixote


10. Moby Dick


11. Ulysses (The first three chapters only. Maybe next year?)


12. Madame Bovary


13. The Odyssey


14. Pride and prejudice


15. Jane Eyre


16. A tale of two cities


17. The brothers Karamazov


18. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (Own it. Got it free from someone at Readerville who found it way too dry.)


19. War and peace


20. Vanity fair (I have my mother-in-law's leatherbound edition on my shelf. She hasn't asked about it in awhile, so it isn't currently top priority.)


21. The time traveler's wife


22. The Iliad


23. Emma


24. The Blind Assassin


25. The kite runner (Do I need to?)


26. Mrs. Dalloway


27. Great expectations


28. American gods : a novel (Started it in one of those awful soul-sucking bureaucratic lines one day. Can't attempt it again until I recover.)


29. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (Do I have to?)


30. Atlas shrugged (I read Anthem and found that quite enough, thank you.)


31. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books


32. Memoirs of a Geisha (No way, no how.)


33. Middlesex (I'll get around to it eventually. I liked The Virgin Suicides.)


34. Quicksilver (Um, probably never.)


35. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West … (My high school crowd was obsessed with Wizard of Oz, so much so that I can safely say I wouldn't touch this one with a ten-foot pole.)


36. The Canterbury tales (Only a few tales)


37. The historian : a novel


38. A portrait of the artist as a young man


39. Love in the time of cholera


40. Brave new world


41. The Fountainhead (My daughter told some guy who was interested in dating her awhile back that the only books I'd forbidden her to read were Ayn Rand's and Dan Brown's--his favorite authors. Which, of course, isn't true. All I'd done is tell her Brown wasn't worth bothering with when she asked about The Da Vinci Code and beg her, back when she was in high school and prone to making grand pronouncements, not to put me in the position of having to deal with yet another political stage she was sure to out grow: ergo, keep away from the Rand.)


42. Foucault's pendulum (One of these days.)


43. Middlemarch


44. Frankenstein


45. The Count of Monte Cristo


46. Dracula


47. A clockwork orange (Nope, don't think I ever will.)


48. Anansi boys : a novel (Someday, probably. S. owns a copy.)


49. The once and future king (Someday.)


50. The grapes of wrath


51. The poisonwood Bible : a novel


52. 1984


53. Angels & demons (Why no, I don't believe so.)


54. The inferno (Just bits of it. Certainly not a priority.)


55. The satanic verses (Own it. Someday.)


56. Sense and sensibility


57. The picture of Dorian Gray


58. Mansfield Park


59. One flew over the cuckoo's nest


60. To the lighthouse


61. Tess of the D'Urbervilles


62. Oliver Twist (Probably not.)


63. Gulliver's travels (Probably not, but own a copy.)


64. Les misérables (A definite someday.)


65. The corrections


66. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel


67. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time


68. Dune


69. The prince


70. The sound and the fury


71. Angela's ashes : a memoir


72. The god of small things


73. A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (Eventually.)


74. Cryptonomicon (Nope.)


75. Neverwhere (Nope.)


76. A confederacy of dunces


77. A short history of nearly everything


78. Dubliners (Individual stories, but not the whole thing.)


79. The unbearable lightness of being (I've read other Kunderas, but not this one.)


80. Beloved : a novel


81. Slaughterhouse-five


82. The scarlet letter


83. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu… (Maybe someday.)


84. The mists of Avalon (Not interested at this point.)


85. Oryx and Crake : a novel


86. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (Bought it earlier this year)


87. Cloud atlas : a novel


88. The confusion (Never heard of it.)


89. Lolita


90. Persuasion


91. Northanger abbey


92. The catcher in the rye


93. On the road (Nope.)


94. The hunchback of Notre Dame (The sewer system did me in. Maybe I'll attempt it again at some point.)


95. Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of… (Nope, but it's currently on reserve and I handle it everyday. . .)


96. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into … (Started, but never finished.)


97. The Aeneid (Translated sections in Latin class, but never read in its entirety. A definite someday.)


98. Watership Down


99. Gravity's rainbow (Not yet.)


100. In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its …


101. White teeth


102. Treasure Island (I think I read a children's version at some point.)


103. David Copperfield


104. The three musketeers (A definite someday.)


105. Cold mountain


106. Robinson Crusoe (Maybe in a month or two. . .)


107. The bell jar


108. The secret life of bees (No way, no how.)


109. Beowulf : a new verse translation


110. The plague


111. The Master and Margarita (A definite someday.)


112. Atonement : a novel


113. The handmaid's tale


114. Lady Chatterley's lover (If not for the Outmoded Challenge, then shortly thereafter.)
     

Considering that I turn into a zombie-brain by 9 most evenings, considering that I've never managed to pull an all-nighter in my life, I cannot explain why I find Dewey's 24-hour Read-a-thon slated for Oct. 20 so appealing.

I rarely read for more than two or three hours at a time. In fact, I often work my way through a book in handful-of-pages (or, if I'm reading at work, mere paragraph) increments. To be left alone to careen through a book without stopping seems downright decadent.

I could read on the treadmill. I could read while eating meals prepared by someone else. I could, of course, read in my favorite chair with my book propped on the cat in my lap. What I don't know if if I could find myself conscious and coherent during those late-night hours.

And I could find myself wishing I were scrubbing bird cages or mopping the kitchen floor, long before my brain actually shuts down for the night, but have I mentioned that Dewey's put together a cheerleading squad? Imagine having a You Go, Girl chorus to keep you focused on the task.

No doubt I'll go down to the wire before deciding to commit (a lot will depend on how bad the migraines are that week), but I've already started to compile a list of various short story and essay collections that would be perfect for the occasion. The Read-a-thon's the weekend before my birthday so the family's sure to humor me if I do decide to participate.

How about you? Are you participating in the Read-a-thon?

The Woman Who Waited: The essence of things

In this remote corner of the Russian North, I had expected to discover a microcosm of the Soviet age, a caricature of that simultaneously messianic and stagnant time. But time was completely absent from these villages, which seemed as if they were living on after the disappearance of the regime, after the collapse of the empire. What I was passing through was, in effect, a kind of premonition of the future. All trace of history had been eradicated. What remained were the gilded slivers of the willow leaves on the dark surface of the lake, the first snows that generally came at night, the silence of the White Sea, looming beyond the forests. What remained was this woman in a long military greatcoat, following the shoreline, stopping at the mailbox where the roads met. What remained was the essence of things.

In the mid-seventies, after his girlfriend begins sleeping with other dissidents at parties and his friend leaves Leningrad for a new life outside the Iron Curtain, the narrator of The Woman Who Waited escapes to the Archangel provinces. Intending to write an anti-Soviet satire on the side while getting paid to research the folkways of the region, he instead finds himself writing about Vera, a woman old enough to be his mother yet beautiful enough, mysterious enough, to engage him totally.

Vera is an icon in the village--she tends to the elderly and dying, she buries the dead, she teaches what youth there are, she commands the respect of the most lecherous among them because she is waiting, waiting for her Boris who left when she was 16 to fight the German invasion, and who, after 30 years, has yet to return, yet to be declared definitively dead. Although younger than most women in Mirnoe, hers was a shared plight--most of the men never returned, leaving their widows and mothers to live and then die alone.

Acknowledging that he'd be better off researching folkways in a library, that there is nothing in the village to be satirical about, the narrator postpones his departure while he spies upon Vera and integrates himself into her daily life. As he learns more about her and her reasons for waiting, for returning to the village after eight years in Leningrad in the sixties pursuing a doctorate in linguistics, the narrator continually adjusts his earlier attempts to "size up" this woman whose life he'd previously regarded as "woefully simple."

Eventually the narrator and Vera sleep together. His joy at having bedded such a woman turns to dread and fear almost immediately: She'll depend on him! He'll never get rid of her! He prepares to leave the village without telling Vera good-bye. . . but Vera is at her boat same as any morning and she drops the narrator and his suitcase on the far side of the lake to make it easier for him to catch the train. She is calm and composed, defying all the narrator's expectations. While he has earlier stated he'd rather "deal with a verbal construct than a living person" once her mystery "has been tamed," her secret "has been decoded," the narrator is clearly leaving before he's reached that point. Anything he tells us about Vera ultimately tells us more about him than it does her.

Andrei Makine writes clean, spare prose. The gorgeous descriptions of the forests surrounding the abandoned villages and the lake's nocturnal beauty were enough to make me realize that given the chance I'd've chosen to live there instead of back in Leningrad among the hypocrisy and artificiality of the times.

Something I'd like to pay closer attention to on a reread: the narrator frequently mentions the artificiality of those he associates with. They play to the gallery, acting out caricatures; they force gaity; they act out and are upstaged; they "jot down a few fibs about the gnomes in their forests." I don't recall that Vera is ever presented as behaving inauthentically until the night she and the narrator sleep together, when play-acting suddenly comes to the fore.

Many thanks to Litlove for recommending this book to the Slaves of Golconda.