Readings

In the absence of television, I've been on a pretty good reading tear over the last year, including all the major Hardy novels, Eliot's Silas Marner and Middlemarch, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, James' The Golden Bowl, Bellow's Herzog, Coetzee's Disgrace and Banville's The Sea. I read most of James' The Bostonians but abandoned it, read a bit of Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and dumped it, read a couple of chapters of Ohara's Appointment in Samara and hit the eject.

A winner:
I'd say Middlemarch is the greatest novel I've ever read. What amazed me most was the insight into the varieties of emotion and conscience, particularly coming from a Victorian woman. How, in the buttoned-up, sewn-up Victorian world, did she develop this knowledge? It's almost miraculous, and it's exhilirating and inspiring (as a writer) to read. And I totally buy the wisdom of the book, which I suppose could strike some readers as an unwelcome intrusion by the author. Her aphoristic moments work because they're true but not truisms.

A loser:
The Golden Bowl. I finally did it, I plucked up my courage and read an entire James novel - and the hardest one, at that. For me it was an experience utterly devoid of pleasure or purpose. The contrast with Eliot is so dramatic. Eliot's characters are so true, while James' characters are pure fantasy. What is the point of the endless psychological portraits of psyches whose terrestrial counterparts have never and will never exist? James is certainly tireless in going over and over and over the innermost thoughts of his characters, but it just beats me over the head, because these characters, with their idealisms and elaborate moralizing schemes, are pure figments of James' imagination. Just one more point on this, and then I go: where's the sex? If these are the innermost thoughts of men and women in love, why does no one ever want to fuck anyone else? If the era James was writing in forced this on him (and there is much more visceral passion in Hardy, say, than in James), that doesn't excuse him for being boring.

Random thoughts:

Anna Karenina: Meh. I don't see what's so fascinating about Anna. Her lover's an okay character, but I never quite believe the mix of adoring commitment to Anna, which costs him so much, and a self-interested streak. I don't see him caring quite so much for her and for himself at the same time. I found the regular breaks for set pieces like the horse race or working in the field or hunting entertaining to a degree, but also arbirtary, perhaps an artifact of serial publication. I didn't like the way they broke up the flow of the story. Finally, the whole conversion sequence was just a pure slog for a happy unbeliever like myself. I am so many worlds away from the folks who were actually convinced by Tolstoy's "logic" and went to live with him on his commune that I felt like an intruder as I read those last chapters, like I do when I'm paid to sing in church.

Silas Marner: Almost bizarrely bad compared to Middlemarch. File under What Was She Thinking.

Herzog: I'd read the first bits years ago and enjoyed them and always wanted to finish the novel. When I did, I found it kind of a bore. A lot of it has gone out of my head, but I remember feeling that Herzog himself never quite engaged me, that I never cared one way or the other.

Disgrace: Why would anyone do this to himself on purpose? I had no answer, yet I kept reading. A reader Waiting for Godot.

The Sea: I look forward to reading more Banville. The novel had many moments of real poetry, while the plot was pleasantly heartfelt.

The Bostonians was full of telegraphed plot twists (see Golden Bowl! Oh my lord, I forgot that horrible element) and utterly unbearable in its snide attitude toward feminism. It would take a tone deaf reader to miss James' derisive treatment of this set of beliefs and to say he was simply lampooning a funny set of people or was hard on both sides. Not that people with PhDs and professor's salaries haven't done it. Couldn't make it through. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha was a stunt and I could only take 10 minutes of it. Appointment in Samara left this awful taste in my mouth of juvenile American literary machismo that has made me slightly nauseous at the sight of any American authors 1870-1970.

I don't have anything intelligent to say about Hardy. I love to read him. He's a wonderful story teller with generally excellent pacing. The poetic, living charge he gives to landscape had me enjoying an aspect of literary scene painting I've never had any taste for in the past. I love his philosophical uncertainty, his fearfulness and the transluscent veil of hope he throws over it. While the plots can get operatic, some people are operatic - I believe his characters and care about them. I'm fascinated by the scenes of rural life, which unlike in Anna Karenina are integral to the characters and the stories.