Just stuff I've read lately, with quotes and commentary. Likely to be reposted on Bookflurries, plf515's diary, and other bookish koszy korners like that.
Bliss, and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield:
Oh!—oh!—what had happened. The ribbons and the roses were all pulled untied. The little red table napkins lay on the floor, all the shining plates were dirty and all the winking glasses. The lovely food that the man had trimmed was all thrown about, and there were bones and bits and fruit peels and shells everywhere. There was even a bottle lying down with stuff coming out of it on to the cloth and nobody stood it up again.
And the little pink house with the snow roof and the green windows was broken—broken—half melted away in the centre of the table...
"Have a bit of this ice," said father, smashing in some more of the roof.
Mother took a little plate and held it for him; she put her other arm around his neck.
"Daddy, Daddy," shrieked Moon. "The little handle’s left. The little nut. Kin I eat it?" And she reached across and picked it out of the door and scrunched it up, biting hard and blinking.
"Here, my lad," said Father.
But Sun did not move from the door. Suddenly he put up his head and gave a loud wail.
"I think it’s horrid—horrid-horrid!" he sobbed.
OK, grampa Miles needs a clue as to why Mansfield is considered a classic writer. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop during these stories, and it didn’t All that happened was a parade of naive, fragile optimists had their souls crushed over little things in a world of surly waiters, exorbitant landladies and piggish spouses, with the added irony that the pear tree continues to blossom and the birds go on singing. Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?
The quote is from "Sun and Moon", which centers around two children who are awed at a big party spread, and then disappointed viewing it again, after the party’s over. You should see their faces later on, when Daddy tells them to help clean up the mess...
My Left Foot, by Christy Brown :
Almost every doctor who saw and examined me, labeled me a very interesting but also a hopeless case. Many told mother very gently that I was mentally defective and would remain so. That was a hard blow to a young mother who had already reared five healthy children. The doctors were so very sure of themselves that mother’s faith in me seemed almost an impertinence. They assured her that nothing could be done for me.
She refused to accept this truth, the inevitable truth—as it seemed—that I was beyond cure, beyond saving, even beyond hope. She could not and would not believe that I was an imbecile, as the doctors told her. She had nothing in the world to go by, not a scrap of evidence to support her conviction that, though my body was crippled, my mind was not. In spite of all the doctors and specialists told her, she would not agree. I don’t believe she knew why, she just knew without feeling the smallest shade of doubt.
Finding that the doctors could not help in any way beyond telling her not to place her trust in me, or in other words, to forget that I was a human creature, rather to regard me as just something to be fed and washed and then put away again, mother decided then and there to take matters into her own hands. I was HER child, and therefore part of the family. No matter how dull and incapable I might grow up to be, she was determined to treat me on the same plane as the others, and not as the "queer one" in the back room who was never spoken of when there were visitors present.
That was a momentous decision as far as my future life was concerned...
Do I really have to tell you I blubbed out loud during this one? Or that I read parts of it out loud to Two-Foot in bed and in the bathtub? Sure, the book is about the author’s cerebral palsy, and has nothing to do with 4Q deletion, but the similarities are striking enough for me. My child is thinking on the inside, and I want her to communicate and be understood, want it with a searing purple want.
It’s also Irish and proud of it, with that special subtle Irish insight and sense of humor that I never can quite define, because it is so much a part of me that I have a hard time distinguishing it from anything else, except that I know it when it’s in a larger concentration than usual.
As of this writing, I haven’t yet seen the Daniel Day Lewis movie version, but I have it out from the library and want to see it with the whole family. It’s that kind of story.
La Bete Humaine, by Emile Zola :
The trembling took hold of him again, and the thought of the girl lying there undressed, her arms and legs spreadeagled, warm with sleep, shook him once more with a sob so violent that he fell forward onto the ground. He had wanted to kill her, wanted to kill her, for God’s sake! He was choking for breath, tortured by the thought that he would be going to her room to kill her as she lay in bed, now, in a short while, if he went back. It would be no good having no weapon, or clutching his head in his arms to blot himself out; he could feel that the male within him, beyond his control, would push the door open and strangle the girl, whipped on by the instinct to assault and driven by the need to avenge some ancient wrong. No! No! Better to spend the night wandering round the countryside than to go back there! Already he had leapt to his feet, and away he fled once more.
Oh the horror! Oh the Beast Within! A book about sex and murder and trains and the bad things that happen when they all get out of control. As usual, I have a hard time viewing graphic descriptions of the dead while being told the story is all about the angst suffered by the culprit, not the victim, or even several victims—the character who causes a full blown train wreck with multiple fatalities just to get at the guy who dumped her never quite regains my sympathy even after moaning with guilt about it.
Also, like many serious novels written just after Freud became popular, the book inspires eyerolls at inappropriate moments. In Zola’s France, you can’t have sex or kill anyone—ever—without a throbbing, powerful train engine zooming into a tunnel at the same time.
Still, it’s a good, quick, suspenseful read, with a good deal of valid food for thought about the attempts of people and civilizations to escape an ugly destiny.
As with most of the Zola I’ve read, everything is a metaphor for the decadence of mid 19th century France, and a harbinger of France’s mass suicide in the Franco-Prussian war.
Clarissa Harlowe, by Samuel Richardson :
He told me that he had, upon this occasion, been entering to himself, and had found a great deal of reason to blame himself for an impatiency and inconsideration which, although he meant nothing by it, must be very disagreeable to one of my delicacy. That having always aimed at a manly sincerity and openness of heart, he had not till now discovered that both were very inconsistent with true politeness, which he feared he had too much disregarded while he sought to avoid the contrary extreme; knowing that in me he had to deal with a lady who despised a hypocrite, and who was above all flattery. But from this time forth, I should find such an alteration in his whole behaviour as might be expected from a man, who knew himself to be honoured with the presence and conversation of a person who had the most delicate mind in the world—that was his flourish.
I said that he might perhaps expect congratulation upon the discovery he had just now made, that true politeness and sincerity were very compatible: But that I, who had by a perverse fate been thrown into his company, had abundant reason for regret, that he had not sooner found this out: since, I believed, very few men of birth and education were strangers to it.
He knew not, neither, he said, that he had so badly behaved himself as to deserve so very severe a rebuke.
Perhaps not. But he might, if so, make another discovery from what I had said; which might be to my own disadvantage: since, if he had so much reason to be satisfied with himself, he would see what an ungenerous person he spoke to, who, when he seemed to give himself airs of humility, which perhaps he thought beneath him to assume, had not the civility to make him a compliment upon them; but was ready to take him at his word.
...He was surprised! He was amazed! At so strange a turn upon him! –He was very unhappy that nothing he could do or say would give me a good opinion of him. He wished I would let him know what he could do to obtain my confidence—
I told him I desired his absence, of all things.
Sigh.
If my book list is shorter than usual this month, this one is the reason why. I was prepared to call Richardson’s masterpiece "thicker than the phone directory and only twice as funny", but now that I’m done, that wouldn’t be fair. The latter half of it is well worth the slog through the first few hundred pages. And not because of the moral tone of the book, which is a dire warning about such cutting edge popular mistakes as:
Arranged marriages;
Subjecting those you love to a painful and completely unnecessary, fraudulent ordeal that puts you in a horrible light, solely to test your loved one’s loyalty in the crucible; and
A suitable remedy for rape being to force the culprit to marry his victim.
Apparently, Richardson needed to warn his contemporaries that those things were maybe less than good ideas. Really. Pre-Victorian England is one of the few historical places that I’m sometimes dumb enough to wish I could visit instead of living in my own time and place. This book has cured me of that for a good long time.
No, the real fascination in this book comes from the two main characters, who are maybe more unsuitable for each other than any pair of protagonists in any love story I’ve read, and whose interactions, though completely predictable, are nonetheless riveting all the way through, not the least because both are simultaneously shown as models of humanity and as infuriatingly bad—he because such a charming, cultured, exuberant force of nature is capable of such abominable behavior, and she because she’s too pure and virtuous to sully herself by accepting any of the many life rafts that might save her—to the point where we begin to wonder how badly she really wants rescuing, deep down.
The first 200 pages or so should be skimmed. They consist of a seemingly endless round of:
You MUST marry Lord Ugly!
I CAN’T marry Lord Ugly!
You MUST marry Lord Ugly!
I CAN’T marry Lord Ugly!
We WILL be obeyed!
...at which point the father storms out of the room and passes the fake mustache in succession to the mother, the brother, the sister, a couple of uncles, the maidservant, the family dog, and a stranger or two who were just passing by, and the whole thing starts all over again. By the time the daughter has had enough and runs off with an unseelie satyr, we’re ready to applaud out loud, even if the result is merely another 200 pages of:
I MUST put the party in your pants!
You’ll NOT put the party in my pants!
I SHALL put the party in your pants!
You’ll put NOTHING in my pants!
Obstinate minx! Why not?
Becawth I am wearing a hoop skirt! Hrumph! Men!
In the updated version, their carriage overturns, leaving them to tease and banter their way to London along a path strewn with gallant highwaymen, inns with several doors, King George’s army, Prince Charlie’s rebels, a team of rustics rehearsing for the king’s festivities, a couple of saucy tavern wenches, and a philosophical village idiot. Eventually they settle down in London, get married...and solve crimes! In the original Richardson, however, the rakish satyr, delighted at his own sensual wickedness, continues to confront the sidhe, commanding and fearsome in her wrath yet completely defenseless against the cold forces of mundanity.
Later on, he’s sincerely repentant, head over heels in love, and begging for the chance to do anything at all to make amends, and she’s off getting the vapors and declaring her intention to die rather than ever once look at his face again. And that’s where, for me, it became gut wrenchingly painful. The facts of the story are such that no one who respects women can really take his side, and yet—I had swimming before me all my memories of every beautiful, magnificent, angelic, powerful, rejecting, cold-hearted, merciless, contemptuous, judgmental female who ever declared me unfit for the crumbs from her table, and who assisted in making my adolesence one long scream of despair. There are two genuine sides to this story, both of them tragic.
They’d never make a happy couple. Never in a million years. But on some level, you really, really want them to. High recommendations, but only for people with a lot of time and patience.