The heart wants what it wants

People never say that about things that are, like, convenient. Oh, that's completely in line with my plans! The heart wants what it wants!

I have acquired a lot of books -- in my life, yes, but more specifically, in the last four months or so, and they have been arranged into a perfectly logical priority order. There are some awesome-looking books in that stack, and of course I have a staggering amount of professional reading I should be working through.

But man. I just have not wanted to read any of those things. Just about the only thing I have wanted to read is Aubrey/Maturin books.

The only illustration anyone needs for this topic

It's gone exactly according to script. Maybe two months of not reading anything at all, then finally, I give in and suddenly I'm reading all the time, in all those situations when I was so frustratingly stuck before: just not what I was so stubbornly focused on making myself read. So that's where I'm at: I have nothing to report except comfort reading: many books about ships.

It's so good, though. O'Brian has an almost Wodehousian ear for language, I think; both authors have those perfect turns of phrase that make me stop and laugh out loud in sheer appreciation. Much more importantly -- and I'm only just putting my finger on this -- O'Brian is like Jane Austen in that he generates humor as well as character by slyly slipping into a character's own perspective (if not his or her own voice) as part of the narration without giving any particular explicit indication that he's doing so. He also does the Austenian thing of reporting conversations telegraphically which just always tickles my funny bone. I probably mentioned these things the last time I wrote about these books? It's all still true.

So in short: I hope you are also reading things you enjoy this summer.

Russia, where everything's terrible

Alice and I were at our favorite used book store recently and I pulled a book confidently off the shelf. "What's that?" she asked. "I don't know, but it's Melville House," I answered. Some publishers are just kind of cool and niche, or they seem that way to me, and I naturally pay attention to their books. It helps that Melville House has super cool cover designs. I am shallow.

The Duel, by Alexander (or Aleksandr, as the website puts it) Kuprin is one of several novellas with that title published by Melville House. Interestingly, while I sort of expected the whole book to revolve around a duel, the duel crops up right at the end. It's not out of nowhere, but at the same time the main character has so many other problems and relationships and worries going on that the duel is both a culmination and the triumph of a minor thing over major things. Essentially it's a book about a young man on the edge -- he's on track to totally waste his life, and he knows it, but he's not sure if he should or can escape. The parallels to the author's life are fairly obvious from the very short blurb in the back flap, and that probably explains the vividness of the main character's dilemma. It was obvious how brutal and pointless his current path was, but at the same time I could understand why it might suck him in.

This is quite possibly the most Russian novel ever: toward the end our main character receives nihilistic enlightenment from a man dying of alcoholism, among other things. The description promises "an absorbing account of the final days of Czarist Russia" and I was not disappointed in that regard. Probably going along with this is the fact that the women in this story are evil, manipulative harpies. There is really no other explanation for the things they do and say. Of course, the men in the book are all pretty seriously debased, so they're not alone in that.

What I wanted from this book was an interesting story and a little historical detail, and what I got was lots of very interesting historical insight and a solid story, so I'd recommend this book to others. Plus you get to feel cool carrying around that very cool cover, so win-win-win.

"For such a little girl, you know, you're neurotic."

Portia is 16. (It's the 1930s.) Her parents have died, and she's been sent to live with her much older half-brother and his cold and stylish wife in London for a year. It's awkward. The wife's volatile and ambitious admirer flirts with Portia a bit, Portia falls in love as only a girlish teenager can do. You know this can't end well, right?

Well, actually it doesn't end all that badly. No one dies or suffers any huge injustice or gets pregnant or ruins their life (well, they don't ruin their life in any way that they weren't already doing so). The Death of the Heart is more of a psychological novel: when you boil the plot down, there isn't much that's all that remarkable. But the personalities are thoroughly and carefully described, so that even where I felt like I recognized a type each character felt like a real person, and I was interested to keep reading and understanding each one more thoroughly.

There are sparks of wit in the story, and the conversations are really brilliantly captured, but Elizabeth Bowen's writing style felt a little overdone to me. It didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book at all; every once in a while, though, I'd just sort of think, "yeah, ok, reign it in." Still, on the whole it's beautifully written, full of little observations.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved in part of one's self-respect... Alone, one has a rather incomplete outlook---one is not sure what is funny, what is not. One solid pleasure of love is to check up together on what has happened.

The humor part of it is fairly understated; it's not so much humor as, again, observations, but it's still really enjoyable and certainly capable of making me smile now and then.

Pas Avant les Domestiques might have been carved on the Peppinghams' diningroom mantelpiece, under Honi Soit qui Mal y Pense.

What's interesting about this is that Portia's personal history and connection to the other characters is so odd, and yet her experiences felt quite relatable. Portia is the product (that's kind of a gross word but it's hard to word this sentence otherwise) of her half-brother's father's late-in-life affair. Her quiet, apologetic upbringing, moving from cheap hotel to cheap hotel on the continent, was the outcome of her father's sense of shame and loss. When she comes to live with her half-brother, her mother has just died. I sort of thought this background would play more of a role than it did. I mean, it's the explanation for why she's so childish and mousy, for why she has so little experience of friendship or family, for why her half-brother and sister-in-law have so little affection for her, for why it's so awkward for her to be living with them. But, I don't know: Portia's feelings of loneliness, her uncertainty about her place in the world, and certainly her innocent experience of heartbreak all seemed fairly universal for a teenager. I mean, the whole thing hinges on Portia melting down because someone's been reading her diary! Teens!

Thank you!

You were right. Yep, I feel pretty confident in predicting (projecting?) that you, dear reader, probably read The Rosie Project and then wrote a blog post or a tweet or something about how cute it was. When I saw that, I made a little mental note. And you were totally right!

I was at a book swap event* and spotted this being put out onto the Romance table, and immediately I thought, That's that book my dear internet friend -- yes, her/him -- said was adorable! Gotta grab that one! So thank you for that recommendation, because it was adorable. I read the whole thing today, start to finish, breakfast to dinner. I thought it was like having a really good burger and fries and beer at the end of a long day. There might not be anything especially innovative or surprising about that, but it's so satisfying.

The haul.

A photo posted by Julie (@jfount2) on Apr 16, 2015 at 4:59pm PDT

* The book swap was quite interesting. I can't help myself, I am always interested in how things get organized and I've been thinking about the concept of book swaps lately since at least three have appeared on my radar this month. The one I went to was totally free (*fist pump*). People arrived with their books (the organizers requested a maximum of 15). They dropped the books off at the front table. The organizers then assembled stacks of same-genre books and carried them out to the genre tables as rapidly as they could. Us patrons milled around in an addicting loop examining the tables. It was all extremely simple, and devilishly hard to leave because there were new books being put out constantly and what if. In this case, the leftover books were going to be donated to Open Books, Everyone's Favorite Book-Selling Chicago Literacy Organization. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the books (although of course there were some clunkers being offloaded too). I brought eight and left with five, which I was quite pleased about.

As so often is the case, the ending of The Rosie Project was less fun than the rest of the book, but that was ok. The best parts were the "Don is oblivious" parts so the conclusion was bound to be a little underwhelming. I mean:

'You want to share a taxi?' asked Rosie.
It seemed a sensible use of fossil fuel.

Adorbs. I saw the ending coming from a mile away but it was fine; just because you know that burger and fries are going to be awesome doesn't make them any less awesome.

I was sort of intrigued by the little author interview in the back of my edition, where Simsion reveals that the book is actually the product of many years chasing a passion for screenwriting. I have to admit, that's not the kind of thing I expect someone to admit to: a kind of Plan B success. Or Plan C, I guess, since Simsion had a career in IT that he quit for film. I feel like this little anecdote will be useful in the future.

Oh, and I scored 61 on the questionnaire (also in the back of my edition).

Hewers of wood, drawers of water, and inspectors of prisons

I have a long relationship with the cover of this book (Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey).

Gosh, I love that cover art. The red ink, the handwritten title! Every time I went into a Waterstones I would end up picking it up and considering it, but it's a chunky book to have to fit in your suitcase, not to mention the price of hardcovers; and then the description just didn't seem all that interesting. "An irrepressibly funny portrait of the impossible friendship between a master and a servant." The heart wants what it wants, and the heart likes the cover art way better than that description. But sometimes fate intervenes: I found a copy of the UK hardcover at the Newberry book sale over the summer priced at only $2 ("...that must be a mistake!" said the checkout volunteer as I mentally willed her to just finish the transaction) and obviously.

This was a very enjoyable book in the end, although it gets off to a slow start. The story is told from the perspective of Olivier, the French aristocrat, and Parrot, his multi-talented servant/secretary, in alternating chapters. Parrot is pretty clearly the "main" character here in terms of development/mystery/conflict/interest, although, fittingly for the society they're living in, Olivier's chapters provide the real start-to-finish timeline for the novel as well as the engine for the plot in the novel's present. The book starts out with each character narrating his childhood; you then get Olivier narrating up to the "present"; then Parrot comes into the story, and we find out about his intervening years as we go along.

Parrot's life in particular is shaped by a whole slew of historical forces, and I recognized a lot of the things Carey was playing with in terms of the movement of people and ideas. I feel like there's a more sophisticated reference to make here than Forrest Gump, but let's don't stand on ceremony; Parrot's life story at times feels a bit Gumpian, not because he crosses paths with famous people and events but just because of the sheer number of settings he goes through. He's also blessed by his author with intelligence and skills that make him an equal with Olivier. It's not just "a master and his servant" in other words, but rather more a story of how this guy ends up as a servant as one odd episode in a life full of odd episodes; odd episodes that are nevertheless all firmly within the experience of the working class at this time. I felt aware of all this as I read, but I was still moved by the pathos of his situation.

The inside flap of my copy describes the book as "an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville" and although that description made me skeptical at first, in the end I was totally on board. Somehow Carey manages to strike the right tone of being historically inspired but not quite claiming to be historical fiction, if you follow. Describing it as an "improvisation" is actually perfect: it's pulling out the really fascinating aspects of Tocqueville's life and world and blowing them up so you can get inside and really look at them. As you know(?), I often approach historical fiction with a heavy dose of skepticism, but this book seems like a good example of how fiction can be a means of interpreting and commenting on a particular time and place. Plus it's just plain fun to read (once you get past the childhood chapters, those are slightly rough going although key to the character development).

Now: a final note; an extremely mild observation. This book seems like an example of something else, the diversity problem in publishing, as it was apparently shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Now, I don't know how those awards work and I have even less clue what else was eligible in 2010, but while I enjoyed this book and thought it was really masterfully written I have a hard time seeing it as major-award-worthy. This isn't to take anything away from the book or its author whatsoever, and I've already noted that it succeeds at something I don't often see books succeeding at; but just, when I think about the whole world of UK publishing and English-language writing... it just strikes me as a data point that would, on its own, support the notion that the publishing industry favors established white guys writing about white guys. I will leave the strong criticism to people who actually have a clue about the real world. If I'd read this in 2010 it might have made it onto my shortlist of best books published in that year, but as we all know I only ever read two books a year that were actually published in that year so that's not a particularly high honor.

If there are awards for cover art though, I'm behind it all the way.

In which the Polar Vortex forces me to write a post

I think I would have to rank The Way We Live Now among my favorite book titles ever. It's maybe not a particularly original phrase but something about the rhythm of it appeals to me. It's evocative and immediate; as soon as you read the phrase it conjures up something of the change we all have to deal with in our own lives. Maybe that's just me. Anyway, not only is it a nice little string of words, it also fits the book perfectly and even lends a little focus to a fairly wide-ranging plot.

Y'all know I love some Trollope. Apparently this is one of the books that gets singled out as his "masterpiece" and I can see that. There's a lot going on, but the book never gets lost in the weeds or bogged down (or other landscape metaphors). Even as I was reading I was impressed by the way the different elements unfolded, and pleased to find that there were no over-the-top satirical digressions like some others of his books (yaaaaaay).

At the center of the book is change, and particularly change around the relationship between money, honor, and social acceptance. The sinister Augustus Melmotte is making unheard of sums of money, and he has a daughter who will presumably be the heir to all this. Although he, his Jewish wife (yes, it goes there, or skirts close), and the mousey daughter are completely uncouth, various impecunious nobles and members of respectable society start cosying up and/or scheming to become part of his business or to marry the daughter. Melmotte is making his money through -- brace yourselves -- SPECULATION

which obviously makes everything worse. Trollope's big point is that there's no there there, both in terms of the money (that's not really a spoiler, is it?) and in terms of Melmotte's social acceptance. People don't really want to associate with him, but the fact that other people apparently are willing to tolerate him (for his ££££) makes them willing to go along too. Here, this passage captures the line of thinking at the heart of the novel nicely:

There is money going. There must be money where there is all this buying and selling of shares. Where does your uncle get the money with which he is living like a prince at San Francisco? Where does Fisker get the money with which he is speculating in New York? Where does Melmotte get the money which makes him the richest man in the world? Why should not you get it as well as the others?

Trollope obviously has a problem with Melmotte as a foreigner, and the book certainly leaves the door open to anti-semitism, at the very least. It's interesting that Melmotte himself is not Jewish, but his wife, who basically does and says nothing, is Jewish; and also that in an episode in which a young lady decides to marry an old rich Jewish guy for the material advantages and gets rejected by her parents for doing so, it's the Jewish financier who comes off best of all. So while Melmotte's cosmopolitan background and association with, yes, Jewish moneylenders, are all very sinister, Trollope seems to be pretty deliberate in trying to make his book not about evil Jews corrupting everything. Certainly he's not up to modern post-Holocaust levels of decency and sensitivity, but he does also seem to be trying, in the context of his own time and contemporary developments, to align himself on the progressive, open-minded end of things. And in this book, it's actually America that is the most consistent source of sketchiness and danger. Anyway, just as important is the fact that the "respectable" English characters do not cover themselves in glory. There's lots of shameless conniving around cash-grab marriage matches; the young heirs to respectable positions are pissing away their inheritance and youth gambling and corrupting young working women; and of course everyone's primarily concerned with what everyone else thinks of them.

Well, that's what Trollope's concerned with, but it's an entertaining book because the characters are interesting. Trollope does his thing with the romantic pairings, showing how love is both a natural phenomenon that can't be helped or created, but also something that can be influenced by circumstances and even rational considerations. I just like the way he writes these things; it's not just overwhelming romantic love that wins the day, but rather a combination of (irrational) affection and (rational) admiration that lead to a happy pairing. Trollope likes giving counter-examples, where people are attracted to each other or respect each other but the match just doesn't work because the other half of the equation is missing, and while the mother or the lover or someone else might urge the girl (it's usually the girl) to go through with it anyway, Trollope upholds the ideal that both things ought to be there. Well -- he upholds it for the middle class at least. Ruby Ruggles has affection and romance confused (due to reading novels, bad girl), but I don't think she ever had much affection for whats-his-face the miller.

A surprise awesome character in this book is Dolly Longstaffe -- Dolly, short for Adolphus, he's a dude and yes that threw me for... a while. If we're keeping a list of proto-Bertie-Woosters, he goes right on there, not least he becomes the one who sets the ball rolling for the great unraveling in the final third of the novel. He starts out as a kind of nothing background character and, thanks in no small part to his own clueless bullheadedness, becomes a kind of hero in the end by sticking to his guns and refusing to play the game(s).

FINALLY, I come to the thing that prompted me to actually sit down and write this. Hilariously (to me), one of the great modern social evils Trollope wanted to expose in this book was the evil of authors and reviewers colluding to promote books. That's right: threats to the social order, new forms of financial trickery, and FALLACIOUS BOOK REVIEWING, oh noes! So in service of this very important theme one of the main characters is Lady Carbury, who is seeking literary fame. (There is a lot to be said about Lady Carbury, and how she is a much more sympathetic character than Trollope means her to be, and how his solution is for her to just support a male writer, but dammit this post is already too long.) At one point she starts writing a novel and she names the main character Cordinga, "selected by Lady Carbury as never having been heard before either in the world of fact or in that of fiction." Which I was reminded of when I read Alice's post about Carmilla, because I was all "that's not a real name, silly Victorian authors."

UGH FINE I will make brief comments about Lady Carbury. If you read her plot as "Trollope is offended by no-talent people who only write for the sake of getting attention, and who are willing to game the system to get that attention," it's like, ok T, you're kind of an elitist dick, but if you're seriously bothered by this, fine, whatever. But the fact that she's a woman, and her failings as an author seem characteristically feminine -- well. And then he gives her this super-sympathetic backstory, where she's had a really shitty life, including an abusive marriage, and so she has set her cap at literary fame to redeem her life now that she's a widow. So while she behaves really awfully to her children, it's hard to see her literary aspirations as anything other than mildly humorous, and certainly not as a point against her. Again, as an individual character who doesn't have any particular love or talent for writing, it kind of works for her to end up settling to enjoy the literary scene through a social connection to it rather than as a celebrated author -- but that's not actually it, is it: it's that her proper role in the end is as wife and hostess. Mmhm.

Anyway. As usual, I did really like this book even though Trollope is like, Dead White Guy Number One. I read it over Christmas and even though it's a big ol' Victorian novel I happily picked it up whenever I got a chance.

This post brought to you in a cleft stick

Fun fact: you can be "finishing your dissertation" for a year (or more!) but at some point, you have to actually finish the dang thing -- and it's, like, work. But then, as you wait for the defense and hope hope hope there are five people not hating your work, you have some weird awkward space to attempt job applications and read things again.

When I bought this copy of Scoop at Open Books, having skipped out of a play with Alice like delinquents or possibly discerning theater-goers, she said something like, "you found a pretty-covered Waugh!" It is that exactly; I like these very distinctive editions, although I'm not fond of the fact that they have not even one sentence of plot description on the back. Look, I just want to be sure I haven't read this one before, but I guess I'm just supposed to be sold by the author's name. It's Waugh, what more could you possibly want to know, I imagine the publisher saying. Or it could be ironically appropriate since in Waugh's books actually knowing anything is generally a handicap, and those who can spin a line, go with the flow, bluff their way through, are the ones who get ahead.

Scoop is certainly in that vein; a socialite convinces a newspaper magnate to hire a trendy writer friend to cover a civil war in Africa, but the newspaper ends up hiring a rather Bilbo-ish country life columnist with a similar name and sending him instead. The civil war isn't real, unless maybe it is, although it doesn't really matter as long as the reports being filed at home are exciting enough.

Like A Handful of Dust, this is a book with a sharp, almost contemptuous driving energy. Western ideologues and journalists have concocted the fake civil war, while capitalist-imperialist interests are behind whatever is actually happening. No one operates under any concept of truth or justice, and this is as true in the fictitious Ismaelia as in London. I was reminded of the current fluster about Ebola as I read; hundreds or thousands of people can die in Africa but it doesn't get as much reaction as one death (or one possible ill person!) in America or Western Europe. Waugh's not making quite that point, but he is talking about a similar kind of self-centeredness and callousness.

It occurs to me that I might not describe Scoop as "funny". It is funny, start to finish it's funny; but if I had a dedicated shelf for comedy, it wouldn't get shelved there. (I am tagging this post humor, but that's metadata. Har har.) It's not a lighthearted book, I think. Waugh's writing reads as a bit angry to me, and I'm not entirely sure that I'm right about that. Maybe I'm bringing certain preconceptions about Waugh as a literary writer to the table, or maybe media manipulation, commercially expedient crisis, etc, just don't feel like much of a laughing matter in 2014. But I got this sense from A Handful of Dust too, where Waugh is unsparing in dishing out disaster in the real world outside the London social round. So, consistency in the writer or consistency in the reader?

"That which was supposed to happen had happened"

This is a heck of a book. I suspected it might be: I mentioned to a twitter contact that I'd just taken it out from the library and he told me to get in touch when I'd finished it, because he wanted someone to talk about the ending with. And yet -- almost right up until it happened -- I was still surprised at how taken aback I was by the ending. In the best possible way.

Look, we may or may not know each other, and I certainly can't tell you how to spend your time, but I really think you want to read What Happened to Sophie Wilder.

The central characters, Charlie and Sophie, were intense college lovers at their exclusive liberal-arts-college writing program, and in the novel's present, Sophie comes back into Charlie's life under murky circumstances. The novel alternates between the two of them, unfolding the past both directly and indirectly.

This is a book about lives and narratives: the versions of our lives and others' lives that we construct and tell (think of the title as a question at a party: "Whatever happened to..."), and the relationship between those stories and real events, the march of time. What does it mean when it seems like someone else's story should be to fall in love with, or reconcile with, or help me, but they refuse? Can we know another person the way we know a character in a book? What does it take to change our own story; however sincere a conversion, can it really ever change our path? What Happened to Sophie Wilder effortlessly (!) drew me into these deep waters, as Charlie tries to piece together the plot of Sophie's life and find his own place in it. It's effective at conjuring up all these different layers of narrative and reality without getting in the way of the actual experience of reading; it's only when you get to the (puzzling, contradictory) ending, as you review the whole thing in your mind, that all of this comes to the surface. I guess it's a little like those Magic Eye posters (google it, youngsters): the ending knocks your eyes out of whack, so to speak, and then the thing you were looking at all along suddenly transforms into something deep and textured and surprising.

I'm trying not to give away too much (the unfolding is part of the effect), and so I'm falling into freshman lit major mumbo jumbo and possibly making the book sound weird or hard. It's not; it's an engaging novel that you can happily read on the train. Just as a story about young people figuring out what to do with their lives, it caught and held my interest. Plus the writing is notably good.

I miss that about those days---the freedom to want; the belief that our desires could never disappoint us, so long as we remained loyal to them; the sense that we could choose our fate, as though the absence of choice weren't exactly what made it fate.

And if you think, a novel about twenty-something capital-w Writers in New York City, goodie; I had a similar thought and, hilariously, on the next page it agreed with me:

Outside the world of mean-spirited media blogs no one had any idea who we were. Max secretly faulted me for this, though in truth people were simply tired of comfortable young white guys from New York. I couldn't blame them; I was tired of us, too.

So go get What Happened to Sophie Wilder. Better yet, get it and give a copy to a friend and make a pact to get together and talk about the ending when you've finished it.

Adventures in "giallo" literature

I believe in getting to the airport early for an international flight, but for various reasons I was outrageously early for my flight out of Fiumicino, meaning that I got to investigate all the shops at my leisure (and my wallet's peril). This included a Feltrinelli's outlet -- the Waterstones or Barnes & Noble of Italy -- which had a single, but generous, table of books in Inglese. This is an interesting thing, the forty or so titles in English that make up the selection in an airport bookstore; what would you choose and/or expect? In this case, there were the usual sorts of things, I guess, the supernatural romances, the pinky-purple chick lit, the conspiracy thrillers, the award short-list titles; but also, and I thought this was a nice touch, a selection of novels with Italian connections, whether written by Italians or simply set in Italy. And among these was a detective novel translated from Italian which sounded pretty interesting, but I virtuously chose not to spend my money in such a fashion (and promptly went and spent four times as much-- look, I don't have to explain myself to you). Having arrived home, I tried asking google what that book was so I could look for it at the library, and google suggested the Inspector Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri. Now, I think the Big G is wrong, I don't think Camilleri is the author I saw at the airport--

"Wish you had Glass now, eh?" - no, really no

--but Camilleri was readily available at the library and so I took out The Shape of Water, the first of this apparently much-loved series.

A man is found dead of a heart attack in his car, parked in an area notorious for prostitution. But of course, the dead man was a political heavyweight, this is Sicily, and it's a crime novel, so it's not so simple as all that.

"Wonderful, eh?"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."
"It's wonderful, that is, that someone in this fine province of ours should decide to die a natural death and thereby set a good example. Don't you think? Another two or three deaths like Luparello's and we'll start catching up with the rest of Italy."

I found it interesting that the tagline on my edition is a novel of food, wine, and homicide in small-town Sicily, which makes it sound sort of travelogue-esque; plenty of murder mysteries trade on readers'/viewers' interest in the setting, serving up atmosphere along with a puzzle.* In fact, The Shape of Water is a fairly sordid little story of sex, politics, scandal, and death, and while food features from time to time, I wouldn't say it's particularly prominent. The tagline may be drawing on the series as a whole rather than this particular installment.

I didn't call the book "gritty" there because the writing seemed a little too spare for that particular adjective. The quotes on the back compare Camilleri to Hammett and Chandler, so I have a vague notion that this is a matter of style. It wasn't my favorite; in a couple of places it felt flat rather than taut or hard-bitten or whatever. Nevertheless, there were parts that stood out, including passages that were genuinely funny, which as we all know is not easy to do.

At the end of the book I discovered endnotes which explained some of the political references and undercurrents and gave rough dollar values for the lire quoted in the text -- these notes were minimal and genuinely useful, or would have been if there were any indication in the text that they existed! Seriously, no asterisks or anything. Hopefully that was corrected in later editions; pity the translator who went to the trouble of compiling them if not.

In sum, this book didn't totally win me over but then it didn't turn me off either. I have another volume in the series (not the second one, but a later one) and I'm still going to read that one too. I didn't see anything here that would make me particularly love this series the way that readers in other languages apparently do, but neither did I dislike the book. Certainly Sicily makes a unique environment for crime stories, and I thought it was handled really well; I mean, I don't know what would actually be "realistic" but this didn't feel didactic or exoticized. I suppose that's one value of reading a translated book.


* Has anyone else seen Endeavor? The second series just aired on PBS. I never liked Inspector Morse much (although Lewis I like), but Endeavor is pretty gorgeous.

"'How nasty,' I said tactfully."

Margaret has agreed to marry Syl; well, not so much agreed, as remained silent when he asked and he's taken it from there. Syl is twice her age -- he's her mother's contemporary -- and it's plainly obvious that Margaret's embarrassed and repulsed by him, but she's paralyzed and desolate and meanwhile the wedding is drawing nearer and nearer. What is going on with Margaret? And who is going to put a stop to this?

The Summer House [by Alice Thomas Ellis; there are a lot of other The Summer Houses out there] is a "trilogy" -- three novels that describe the events leading up to Margaret's wedding day from different perspectives. It seems more correct to call it a "triptych" but that's pretentious and I defer to the publisher. Anyway, the first novel (...novella? I'll stop now) is from Margaret's perspective, the second from Syl's mother's, and the third is in the voice of Lili, a free-spirited half-Egyptian friend of Margaret's mother. I don't know how to describe it -- the books manage to unfold incomplete information in a way that you don't necessarily realize what you don't know; so that, for instance, you think you have found out what has traumatized Margaret... and then you find out a little more which colors your initial understanding... and then you find out more which turns the whole thing on its head. Even just finding out someone's true motivation feels like a sea change. It's dramatic and subdued all at once in a way that feels, somehow, very true to life.

When I got to the last twenty pages I was completely gripped and had to bring the book with me to finish it. The pattern of the three novels is a little counterintuitive: you start with the person most closely involved in the planned wedding and move out to the wedding guest; but then, as you'll see, you are also paradoxically moving from the person who knows least about what's going on to the person who knows the most. There's some dark stuff here, definitely, but I think this makes a good summer read. Plus: it has "summer" in the title and it has those sweet teacups on the cover of my copy.

At the intersection of "oriental" buffets and western homesteads

Lee Lien, uncertain about her identity and future, and faced with an implosion in her Vietnamese family, goes investigating a favorite childhood author, making connections between her own immigrant background and an American cultural icon along the way.

On one level that premise seems a bit trite, but in practice Pioneer Girl gets it right.

I've had this title bookmarked (read: lounging on my Amazon wish list, because capitalism has thoroughly subsumed my life and ambitions as a reader) since Meg reviewed it as an ARC. The blend of fact and fiction makes an interesting premise for a book, and it's done in a really light-handed way. Lee's life and family problems have that touch of reality to them, where things aren't always clearly defined and problems (including research problems) aren't always "solved" in any sort of final way. On the other hand, you have convincing fictional research about real women, positing a secret baby given away for adoption. You learn about the careers of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane (real), the Lien family history (fiction), and the Vietnamese/Asian experience in the Midwest (real), while Lee researches Rose's secret baby given up for adoption (fiction). It's really well blended, where a couple of times I flipped back to read the author's bio just to remind myself that Beth Nguyen is not Lee Lien and therefore it's probably not totally scandalous to be revealing Rose's baby in a novel.

Right, I'd better go study this some more.

In her review, Meg writes "I had some feelings about Rose’s secret child, but I Had Feelings over the improper archival methods." It's true. Lee steals a few things during her research and I had to put the book down at one point, this was so upsetting to me.

Judging from novels, literature scholars think nothing of stealing documents from archives. APPALLING. #posession #pioneergirl
— Julie (@jfount) June 15, 2014

There should be warnings on books that feature scholars doing this kind of thing. I was made happy again, however, when one of Lee's friends points out that she's going to have trouble publishing anything based on stolen materials. THANK YOU. It gets glossed over a bit (at the end, Lee's working on an article but it's not clear how she's going to get over the theft problem) but my eternal thanks to the author for acknowledging this. One thing I liked, otherwise, was how realistic Lee's research was: she's drawing plausible conclusions but you can see how thin the evidence is even as you are drawn along with agreeing with her interpretations.

I picked this book up and finished it the same day, which is a testimony to how good it is. It does a great job linking "American" and "non-American" experiences, collapsing those categories along the way: the mobility of immigrants and pioneers, the drama of success and failure along very small margins, the strain these things place on family life, and the difficult expectations created for the next generation.

Books I inflict upon myself, part one

In my mind, there are definitely some books that No One Reads. Oh sure, maybe some freaks in literature departments (I wouldn't put anything past an English major), but for the rest of us, we get the gist from Wishbone episodes and we're fine, really.

#classicliterature

The main effect that this belief has had on my life is that when I meet someone who has read one of these books, and they recommend it, I feel irresistibly drawn to also read the book. This has happened to me now twice in the last [period of time] [dammit, Jim, I'm a blogger, not a calendar], with mixed results.

Instance the First is Les Miserables. This was brought on, as you might guess, by the movie version of the musical. Hashing it out with girlfriends afterward ("at what point do you think someone started to regret casting Russell Crowe?") it emerged that one of us (not me) could make comparisons to the book. "Oh, the bishop character is so much more wonderful in the book," she sighed, and my fate was sealed.

I honestly cannot remember when I started or finished Les Mis. There's a post here that suggests I was halfway through as of September 2013, so maybe I was done by Christmas? Anyway, reader, I read it.

My first strong takeaway was that the creators of the musical did an impressively good job. Granted, I'm not a real deep thinker when I'm watching things, but the one time I saw the musical and the couple times seeing the film, I felt like it all made sense. Reading the book, I realized how much the musical writers kept in, all the little nods to storylines and character developments that play out at greater length in the book.

The second thing has to do with the infamous digressions. Someone had told/warned me about these: Hugo just spends pages and pages talking about sewer systems or something equally tedious while you're waiting to find out whether Jean Valjean gets rearrested or whatever. Now, granted, I was pretty shameless about flipping through these, but I felt like I understood what Hugo was doing here (beyond being self-absorbed). The digressions pause the action and drop you back in at a different angle. It seemed to me they were creating these almost contemplative spaces in the narrative, inviting the reader not to simply plow ahead absorbed in a fictional world, but to take the time to reengage with the characters as fellow inhabitants of the real world. Maybe it just felt like dipping out and back in because I wasn't really reading the digressions though (heh). Anyway, I still thought they were obnoxious (get on with it man).

So that was Les Mis, and now I've started Ivanhoe, which so far is... Ivanhoe-y. But I'll do you a separate post for that one.

Try not to look too excited, boy.

Summertime, and the reading is series

I can't help it, I like a good series. I think I hinted at this, at least, in my Anne of Green Gables post; I have that sort of gotta catch em all compulsion when it comes to book series. (See also the Dragonriders of Pern books.) (Oh, Pern.) Here in adulthood (?) however, I have learned that it's okay to just move on and not finish the series if I feel like it. One advantage of this is that you don't get caught in an obsessive-compulsive reading cycle (always a plus); another that I've discovered recently is that it's really nice to come back to a series when you've been away. So here are three series I've picked back up in the last week or so.*

So, first up: the SPQR series by John Maddox Roberts. I read a couple of these on Kindle a few years ago and enjoyed them, and recently I saw fellow classics nerd and all-around cool person Meg was reading them, so off I went to the library. After a rather frustrating hunt through the forest of Nora Roberts books (I like to get my books off the shelves myself like an honest woman, but this experience convinced me of the superiority of placing holds), I grabbed volume 6 here, the library not owning 3-5.

These are such fun books. They manage to balance the conventions of detective stories with a historical setting that doesn't have detectives or modern policing in a way that's fun and effective and not at all tedious. There are some blatantly exposition-y passages but I didn't mind them; it's all directly related to the plot and it's ancient Rome so maybe I'm just more willing to give it a pass in general. The main character (and narrator) makes me laugh, he's such a perfect grouchy, cynical Roman.

More historical mystery: the Max Liebermann series was the first thing I wrote about on this blog! I see in that post I wrote:

I liked them, and would have kept going for probably another couple of books if this were 2014 and there were another couple of books in the series.

GUYS IT'S 2014 RIGHT NOW

I remember when I got to the end of the available books that the stories were starting to feel same-y, and I'm pleased to report that taking a couple of years off helps address that problem. Death and the Maiden has a high-level-government-conspiracy thing going on as well as a cameo by Mahler (admittedly easier to achieve when you're writing a novel) and the SVU-level psychoanalysis I noted in that first post. I didn't really follow the conspiracy plot very well, and I'm not sure that the book was all that successful on the whole, but I did like being back with the characters, so this series and I can part amicably until the next time I stumble across a new volume.

And finally, which it's only THE GREATEST SERIES OF ALL TIME. You and Dr. Huang can draw your own conclusions from the fact that I, the compulsive completist, stopped reading these two from the end expressly because I didn't want to be done with them. However, as I had picked up the above series I decided it was time to finally read the last two Aubrey/Maturin books. The Hundred Days was a nice reminder of how much I love these books, even if, in itself, I didn't think was the finest installment of the series. I have to go back to the library for Blue at the Mizzen, but in the meantime I'm re-reading Desolation Island which is one of the ones I own (the first couple chapters with Jack on land just kill me).

I suppose there's also the published chapters of 21, but I don't know how I feel about those. (Basically, they published what Patrick O'Brian had written of the latest book at the time of his death, if you don't know what I'm talking about.) But a few chapters, without an actual book, and without any sort of revisions, isn't all that appealing to me. I don't get much out of fragments. But then I'm sure my completist impulse will compel me to check them out anyway.

Proud to share reading tastes with Ron Swanson

I hope you're all feeling the joy of warmer weather; I've been reading outside quite a bit this long weekend, it's madness.



* Each of these books I read in about a day. I'm telling you, I'm having this crazy-awesome reading moment.

Love and cynicism in a cautiously optimistic place

I have sprinted through two books in the last five days, and it feels good.

The Exiles Return is a book I first became aware of through Persephone but appears to have been published last year by Picador ("appears" = this library copy was published by Picador with a copyright date of 2013) (I am like Sherlock Holmes with the deduction). The Persephone description is really (too?) detailed, but what it shares with the Picador edition is its emphasis on the historical place of the book, the circumstances in which it was written and the historical situation it depicts.

This isn't all that surprising. Exiles is a posthumously published novel about 1950s Vienna, written by a woman with personal and family experience of that city at that time. Early in the book, a character returning to Vienna for the first time after the war arrives by train and is shocked by what he sees:

Formerly, there had been a long and high, cavernous, glazed-in hall into which the trains used to glide; it was old-fashioned, dingy, and yet somehow sumptuously dignified like the well-worn attire of a high-born elderly spinster who has clothed herself once and for all in her best and scorned to change her style. But now there was just -- nothing: an open space where the bombed wreckage of the old station had been cleared away; stacks of building material, steel girders and concrete mixers for the new modern station under construction. Adler experienced a violent sense of shock. It was his first actual contact with the fact to which he had hitherto not given much thought: that not everything would look the same -- or be the same -- as it had looked and been when he left it. I shall have to learn the lesson of the Western Station, he though, and this phrase, repeated silently many times in the coming months, summed up and symbolised for him the situations and experiences he would be having to deal with in the course of his attempt at repatriation.

 Given that it's Vienna, the baggage here isn't just the Second World War, but also Nazism and the Anschluss, as well as the end of Austria-Hungary. The descriptions and blurbs are right: the book does capture a uniquely complex time and place well. There are some passages and incidents -- like the one above -- that really bring the setting alive. Interestingly, I felt that the overtly "historical" aspect of the book slid to the background as it went on (although it never really goes away, of course; it's the setting and creates some of the conditions for the denouement). Again, I don't really like this kind of strawman hypothetical, but I think this is the difference between someone writing a novel about a situation they lived through rather than sitting down to write a historical novel about an Important Time: the latter sort of book would probably keep historically-significant set pieces at the center.

All that being said... and I am not confident of this judgment so let me know what you think if you've read this book... I'm not sure this is all that great a novel. I mean it's fine, I liked it. But the plotlines in the second half were a little meh for me, and I'm not sure Marie-Theres in particular ever really made all that much sense to me as a character. Maybe there's a reason why all the summaries of this book stress the historical side. Or maybe I just read it too fast. (Eee, that's a possibility this time! *flexes muscles*)

In which my childhood is not ruined

Anne of Green Gables, y'all. Like so many other girls my age, I was obsessed with Anne of Green Gables when I was 10ish. I read all the book in the series multiple times; I don't think I ever owned them but I knew right where to find them in the library. My Victorian dollhouse Playmobil figures were always Anne and Gilbert and family, acting out incredibly dramatic scenes.

I didn't have this puppy, so I would use masking tape to make a house floorplan on my bedroom floor.

When I got to the end of the series, I would start over; at one point I remember feeling vaguely like maybe I should read something else, but ANNE was all I wanted to read, so ONE MORE TIME. That's just the kind of groove I get into now with 30 Rock on Netflix so, as they say in Quebec, plus ça change.

For all that, I discovered in conversation with some friends this winter that I had mostly forgotten what the books were about. I mean, I recognized various incidents ("oh yeaaaah...") but I couldn't have summarized anything to save my life. So when I saw this very attractive Oxford Children's Classics edition:

the book magpie strikes again

I thought I should re-read it. Not without some trepidation! You may remember that my re-reading of Nancy Drew was rather disappointing. And in general, what are the odds that a book for little girls published in 1908 wouldn't be embarrassing in 2014?

Actually, as it turns out, the book holds up pretty well! A lot of that has to do with one of Anne's key characteristics: that she is a whiz kid at school. There's no conflict about this in the book; I hate hypotheticals like this, but if it were a historical novel being written today, would the author have refrained from making "Anne is made to feel unfeminine for being smart" a major plot point? As I was reading, I both recognized that this is why I identified so intensely with Anne and also that this book, with its glorification of studying to win top marks, really shaped the way I approached my schoolwork as a kid.

And, not unrelatedly, Gilbert is still such. a. dish.*

Let's review, shall we? Gilbert Blythe (SIGH sigh sigh) is a boy who teases Anne about the color of her hair and she not only schools him good at the moment, she swears eternal hatred. Anne and Gilbert battle it out to be the top student in school on every assignment, exam, etc. Gilbert is clearly attracted to this girl who is so able and willing to fight back. Anne is mostly contemptuous, but by the end of the book they agree to be friends.

Amen amen, my fellow Ameriwomen, you can put away your tired "ooo, Disney princes gave me unrealistic expectations" meme, because that right there is kryptonite. Oh, you mean the most handsome boy in school will only love me more if I whoop him on spelling tests? I CAN DO THAT. And definitely, an antagonistic relationship like that will resolve in mutual respect and eventual love. Oh yes; Gilbert Blythe (SIGH sigh sigh) remains my one and only fictional crush.


* I've never seen the Canadian TV movie (series?), mind you. It seemed relevant to mention that at this particular moment.

"Quartet in Autumn" has an ugly cover, so no pictures for you

Fair warning: you should not read this book if you are having a "boo hoo, I'm going to die alone in a box under an overpass" moment. But otherwise you should definitely find a copy and read it. It's short.

I've only read three of Barbara Pym's books but I have a blog and no one can stop me from saying that Quartet in Autumn feels supremely Pymmian. The four main characters are all odd and unattractive; elderly people working admittedly useless and unskilled jobs, with very little apparently in their lives. The four don't really seem to have or want much of a relationship beyond their occupation of the same office, and when the two women retire not only is it uncertain what they will do with their time it is also unclear whether there is any relationship beyond the work relationship that can continue.

One of the threads in the book involves a well-meaning but frustrated social worker who finds visiting one of the retired women very unrewarding indeed. Lonely old dears might be cranky at first but they're truly grateful for the attention... eventually... right? The humor in Quartet in Autumn is less pronounced than in Excellent Women or Glass of Blessings but it's here, mostly making the point that sometimes a crusty exterior serves to hide an equally crusty interior.

There are a couple of other characteristically-Pym elements to this book. First, I think I commented in another Pym review that she portrays how badly plotted life can be, and here, instead of characters being pushed together by circumstances or discovering their feelings for one another, opportunities get hinted at and missed, and people are not particularly sorry for having stuck to the knowns. Secondly, the whole thing ends on a genuine, organic note of hope despite there not being much concrete foundation for it. I'm not an author (clearly) but I can see where it's easy to create a hopeful ending by, say, giving your character some cash or tickets to Paris or a new romantic interest. Pym gives her characters very little -- arguably in this book she takes away some of what the characters had in the beginning -- and yet she ends with new hope by allowing the characters a change in perspective. Or I wonder if it would be more accurate to say that the characters derive hope from a rediscovery of their own ability to choose. I'm thinking of this little Christian/Catholic book recommended by a friend, Interior Freedom, which discusses the idea that even if one is dissatisfied or unhappy with a situation, one can be at peace with it by freely choosing to endure it (obviously that's not a novel idea but this is the book I thought of off the bat). I wonder if that would be a better characterization of the way Pym's characters end up with a sense of a new beginning or if I'm refining it too much; it might fit with the Anglo-Catholic theme that runs through her books.

Quartet in Autumn is about old people and is mostly about how their problems are not easy to solve. It's not a sexy exciting book about sexy exciting people by any means. But they're not kidding on the back cover when they call it a masterpiece, and you'll be glad you read it. You'll also want to go open a retirement account, cultivate your relationships with your nieces and nephews, and otherwise figure out what you want life to be like when you're old.

I'm not convinced anything in this post makes sense

I'm sitting here having something of an omg moment, because there are so many things in the world and in my life that I want to (help) accomplish and yet I do so very little and, hello, exhibit A, there are two emails I've been avoiding in my inbox for two weeks now. And that's reminded me of something I could do to avoid those for a wee bit longer.

Welcome to this blog post, about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

I really liked this book. More specifically I was in awe of and delighted by it. From about halfway through I tried to put together my reaction and here's the best I came up with: say you're visiting an art museum for the first time. You're on vacation, or it's Sunday, or whatever, and it was free, so you're sort of drifting merrily through the galleries. Pictures pictures pictures: landscapes, ladies, naked ladies, landscapes, Dutch interiors, shoopdedoo. And then as you're casting your eye lazily across one wall, a picture jumps out at you. This, you think, this is the real thing. I've looked at all these other pictures that are superficially doing the same stuff: but this one works. This is the piece of art all those other paintings are trying to be.

You know you like my pretentious analogies, don't lie

I haven't read many (any?) other books about Jewish-Americans or golems or comic books or whatnot but somehow this book felt like it got something that other books I've read missed. It just clicked for me in a way I wouldn't necessarily have predicted. And it was darn entertaining too. I don't think it's changed my life or anything, and maybe I won't remember it at all in a few years, but man! It hit me the right way this time.

So lemme tell you a little story about this book. I bought it for £2 used with the express intention of getting rid of it when I was done. I actually finished it when I was staying in a hotel, and when I saw a bookshelf in the lobby with miscellaneous books on it, I got super excited about this perfect chance to pass the book on, indirectly, to someone else. So excited that I got rid of the book before I'd made any notes about favorite passages or copied out any quotes.

*~*~so genius~*~*

But, to cycle back around to the start of this post, I think one of the reasons I liked this book so much was the character of Josef Kavalier. Of all the characters, he was the one I was most interested in (and really, he's the main character, so that's good). During the Second World War, he gains a sort of notoriety among his fellow soldiers because he never opens his mail, and when someone confronts him about it he (I think, see above) responds that... he just didn't open it. He couldn't quite deal with it, so he didn't. So, uh, I don't think it says anything good about me and my psyche that I do that sometimes too, but it was a detail that I liked.

Frenchy Frenchy French

I know this is annoying and pretentious, but here's me having read a best-seller and my major takeaway is, Golly, what does it Say about Us as a Society that The Elegance of the Hedgehog was so popular?

I disliked the two main characters. One is a concierge in a hoity-toity building; plain and from a humble background, she has taught herself a lot about culture, philosophy, literature, music, but feels compelled to hide it under a stereotypical "stupid old woman" surface for the comfort of her wealthy employers. The other is a young teenager, also highly intelligent, who hides her brilliance in order to be left alone by her vapid, elitist family and peers. They're both really bitter about leading lives of deception, and scornful of the people they're deceiving. This all seems pretty pointless to me. At least the concierge is pursuing her interests though. The teenager is planning to commit suicide and burn down her flat in a big Gesture, and is keeping notebooks of profound thoughts to leave behind her in the meantime. So, massively selfish as well.

The back of my edition has a quote from the Guardian: "Resistance is futile... You might as well buy it before someone recommends it for your book group. Its charm will make you say yes." Ignoring that half-hearted last sentence, that's a pretty hilariously lackluster endorsement, and sums up my expectation going in and my reaction after the fact. I guess book club members identify with bitter geniuses who feel compelled to hide their brilliance; and not only do they identify with them, they find them "charming". Well, they are French.

Believe it or not, I didn't actually hate this book. It's not bad, it's just... meh. It is extremely French in its obsession with the "oughts" of social position and particularly with the idea that great culture only belongs to one kind of person. Lordy, the French. I did find it blazingly predictable that Japanese culture is held out as pure, beautiful, and generally perfect. Sadly, this stereotype is not in any way subverted. Save us, Japan!

It's dangerous to write a book in which your characters are supposed to be super-intelligent and having profound thoughts about culture on every page, but actually this one pulls it off. There were several points where I did, truly, feel enriched by the observations of these characters. For example, here is the teenager on grammar:

Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain Beauty... when you are applying the rules of grammar skilfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language... I get completely carried away just knowing there are words of all different natures, and that you have to know them in order to be able to infer their potential usage and compatibility.

And the concierge on "Dido's Lament" by Purcell:

In my opinion, the most beautiful music for the human voice on earth. It is beyond beautiful, it is sublime, because of the incredibly dense succession of sounds, as if each were linked to the next by an invisible force and, while each one remains distinct, they all melt into one another, at the edge of the human voice, verging on an animal cry. But there is a beauty in these sounds that no animal cry can ever attain, a beauty born of the subversion of phonetic articulation and the transgression of the careful verbal language that ordinarily creates distinct sounds.

I liked this book if for no other reason than that it reminded me to go listen to this piece again; and if people have discovered various works of art or music because of this book then it deserves every copy it sold.

One more:

To those who have not understood that the enchantment of language comes from such nuances, I shall address the following prayer: beware of commas.

The ending I found shocking and predictable all at once, and while I never did come to like the characters, I think I came around to something like sympathy, so there's that. All in all, I think this is a book worth reading if the opportunity comes around. And if my (hypothetical) book club picked it, I wouldn't decide to be "out of town" for the relevant dates.

I wrote this whole post about two long novels and now I have to come up with a title?! It just never ends

Once upon a time a million years ago, Alice and I were at a bookstore where I was buying a volume or two of Trollope, and she asked me something to the effect of "should I try this author." (I know, I ought to cherish every word from her mouth but it was a long time ago and I can't remember how it was phrased.)

Trollope is an author I enjoy but generally do not recommend. I can appreciate that people could very much not like him and be entirely right. I can pass over his political chapters without letting them get me down, and his ludicrous bourgeois-ness is a bit endearing to me; but I know that these things would be poison to others, and probably they're right. But I like him, so I read his books.

V. comfortable

The Small House at Allington is the exception I would make. I do think Small House at Allington is worth anyone's time. It's a very unusual plot, almost your standard Victorian-novel love story turned inside out. (Note that I will be discussing the plot and its outcomes below.)

Lily Dale is the heroine, and she gets jilted. Her engagement to Adolphus Crosbie almost starts the novel, and then Trollope tells how Crosbie's head gets turned, how he is lured away from Lily, and follows his pride and ambition into marital ruin. Lily's childhood friend John, who has always been in love with her but is something of a late-bloomer*, goes after Crosbie and avenges her. Everyone rallies around Lily and her very public humiliation.

But here's the thing that strikes me: the novel does not end with a wedding for Lily. John has stepped up and become the knight in shining armor, but he does not get the girl. I thought this was just breathtakingly unexpected.

John, rejected, counseled by a neighbor

It doesn't end there, though: in the next novel (and last of the series), John becomes even more of a hero, and Lily sees Crosbie (now widowed) and refuses his return. And yet the novel (and series) ends with Lily rejecting John yet again. Trollope tells us Lily will probably always be an old maid (nice of him to give the romantics an out). Once again: astonishing. I wouldn't be able, as an author, to resist putting John and Lily together. Lily is a really lively, likable person (she shades into being annoyingly perky, very lifelike), and John has clearly grown up so much. But Trollope shows quite masterfully the way particular circumstances can prevent a match that's perfect on paper from being possible.

I've read that Trollope wanted his novels to reflect the "unevenness" of real life, and in Lily's story I think he really knocks it out of the park. The introduction in my edition of Last Chronicle of Barset made me angry on this point:

The suggestion that Lily will not marry John because she is frightened of sex seems so obvious to us...

Dumbass! (ahem.) This is on a par with saying that if a woman won't go out with you she must be a lesbian. Although Lily can see how much John has matured, she stills remembers him as her awkward childhood friend. He's "like a brother" as she herself says many times. And in spite of Victorian novels' assertions that one kind of affection can transform into another easily enough, in this case it can't, very understandably. On top of this, John himself and every one of their relatives and mutual friends pesters Lily directly and indirectly, constantly, about what a great match it would be. Lily isn't puffed up with pride, but she isn't passive and submissive enough to go along with this when her heart isn't in it. Moreover, she's never really given a chance to change the way she feels because she's constantly having to give a decision and/or ward off well-meaning advisors. Meanwhile, while John is a good guy by this point in his life, he still is hanging around with dubious people and, as I said, being something of a pest. So to boil down Lily's fate to a fear of sex is just ridiculous. Aaaaaand it kind of says a lot about you if that's your "obvious" interpretation, Mr Introduction Writer.

Cat gif break

There's a lot else in these two hefty novels besides John and Lily, and I enjoyed all that stuff too for the most part; but this particular storyline I thought was especially noteworthy, particularly since Trollope seems, very often, to be just writing to entertain.


*the word Trollope uses is hobbledehoy. If you want to see the word hobbledehoy used over and over and over read this book.

Let's have a book on a Saturday; why not

Who can resist a Persephone book? Not me, obviously. In my jetlagged state I bought myself a handful of books (yes I know), including this one: High Wages, by Dorothy Whipple.

The inside cover is the important cover

If you've looked into Persephone Books at all, you'll quickly realize that Dorothy Whipple is a kind of crown jewel of their lineup. A female author popular in her own day but overlooked more recently, she and her work are great examples of the value of republishing the kind of titles Persephone does.

Although I have previously fallen victim to Proserpinian charms, I had not bought anything by Dorothy Whipple, so when I decided that, yes, I definitely needed something grey-covered right now, I thought it was as good a time as any to give her a spin.

High Wages is a great read: entertaining, interesting, and not entirely predictable. It's a story about an ambitious and hard-working young woman who gets some -- but not all -- of the things she wants. The romantic side of the story is in some ways a little bland and unconventional -- one romantic interest is the posh and popular Golden Boy of the town, the other is bookish and sensitive -- but the way it plays out is, I thought, not conventional at all. This is not a book that ends with an unambiguous romantic triumph by any means.

Jane, the main character, is a shop girl with a particular genius for women's clothes, so the story follows her from working in a well-established shop for an insecure and stubbornly old-fashioned businessman to opening her own shop, filled with modern ready-made clothing. There's a lot that's interesting here, in relation to the history of women's clothing as well as women's work (more on this note below). By the end of the novel, though, Jane is questioning the way her life has been devoted to women's clothes: is this all so important, really? Granted, she has a lot else on her mind by then to make her feel a little weary, and she doesn't suddenly become some sort of anti-fashion radical or anything (thank goodness), but I thought this little note of ambivalence was great. It's just an example of how Whipple is able to portray a thoughtful character, not to mention the way people change their thinking over time in subtle and sometimes imperceptible ways.

This is an unmistakably feminist novel which succeeds nevertheless in not beating the reader over the head with feminism (a point which is nicely made in the introduction). Whipple is maybe a touch more subtle than Winifred Holtby but both authors successfully show rather than tell what's wrong. Jane is not only mistreated by her employer, but she encounters some really gross salesmen when she sets up on her own. Just as in another novel you might be really angry along with the main character when someone insults her, here you can just feel the ickyness of some of the situations Jane gets into.

My only minor complaint was that the writing seemed a little "simple" and straightforward at times, like being told a bedtime story. But then I read it when I was jetlagged so maybe it was just my ability to process language that was simplified...

Overall, it was a very enjoyable book and absolutely cram-packed with period detail, some more intentional than others. If you want a good representation of some of the new ideas about love and sex between the wars, here you go. This is another one for my theoretical list of books that could be assigned to a class.

Oh crap, there's only one image in this post. Uh, uh, uh.... Amy, help me!