Bookish Quotes #6

"I think books are like people in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them."
     ~ Emma Thompson

"Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers."
     ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

     I recently re-read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca for the Cornwall Challenge I have taken on for 2011.  The novel is one of my all time favorites as you will know if you've viewed our post "If I am caught with amnesia".  I read the novel first as an adolescent and can't begin to count the number of times I've read it since.  "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again", the famous first line draws me in over and over again.

     First published in 1938, the story of the unnamed second wife and her husband, Maxim de Winter, whose lives are over-shadowed by the very much dead first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, and the evil housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, has captivated readers for over seventy years.  Part Gothic suspense, part murder mystery, the novel is an engaging page turner.  For those, if any, who haven't read it, Wikipedia has an excellent plot summary.  This is not intended to be a review but more of an homage to this lasting work.
     The novel has inspired many other books, including Mrs. de Winter by Susan Hill and Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beauman.
     Here's a bit of info I found on Rebecca:  "One edition of the book was used as a code source.  Sentences would be made using single words in the book, referred to by page number, line and position in the line.  One copy was kept at Rommel's headquarters and the other was carried by German Abwehr agents infiltrated in Cairo after crossing Egypt by car...The code was never used, however, because the radio section of the HQ was captured in a skirmish and hence the Germans suspected that the code was compromised."  Wow!  How many novels can claim that!
     Inevitably, the novel has been adapted for film.  The first instance was Alfred Hitchcock's version starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.  It has also been adapted for television and stage.
     Few novels have inspired music but, of course, this one has.  Here's a clip (with lyrics) of Meg and Dia (Dia Frampton who was the runner-up on The Voice recently) singing "Rebecca", inspired by the du Maurier novel.  Enjoy!




- Frances

Waxing Poetic: William Carlos Williams

 

     William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine.Williams most famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things". He advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions, and try to see the world as it is. Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.Here are several of his short poems that exemplify his method.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Poem
As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

The Paris Wife - Paula McLain

     I am a Hemingway fan, so The Paris Wife called to me.  I couldn't resist hearing from the woman of whom Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, said, "I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her."  He did love others, however, as any Hemingway follower knows.  He married three times after he and Hadley divorced.  So, the story is set before it even begins:  the marriage will fall apart.  It says much for Paula McLain's research and writing that the novel, written in Hadley's voice, is touching and captivating none the less.
    The novel provides insight into Hadley Richardson's childhood.  She was raised by a domineering woman (like Ernest) and a passive father who committed suicide (as did Ernest's later on).  She was 28 when she met Hemingway who was eight years younger.  She was quiet and unsure and was drawn to the self-assured Ernest who was determined to produce a new kind of literature.  As Hadley says, "I had never met anyone so vibrant or alive.  He moved like light.  He never stopped moving - or thinking, or dreaming, apparently."  But we also see the vulnerable Hemingway through Hadley's eyes- the wounded soldier who couldn't sleep without a light and who still heard silkworms over his head at night, the result of a night spent in a silkworm factory in the war.  They fall in love and Hadley becomes the constant support for the needy young artist.
     They marry and move to Paris, the hub of culture in the 1920's, and are drawn into the world of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Henry James and many others.  It is a hard drinking, fast living world where mistresses and wives often lived in the same apartment.  Hadley was unprepared for this world and says, "But some of us, a very few in the end, bet on marriage against the odds."
     They live in meager apartments, one in which the sounds of sailors and whores floats upstairs through their windows and another over a sawmill where the air is filled with sawdust.  They struggle with the lack of money and Ernest's attempts at writing.  Hadley remains very much in the background, playing the supporting role to Ernest.  The famous story of how Hadley lost all of Ernest's manuscripts on a train is told through her eyes and her guilt over the loss and Ernest's anger over it and her subsequent unplanned pregnancy begin the decline in the marriage.
     While Hadley adjusts to impending motherhood she says, " Marriage could be such deadly terrain.  In Paris, you couldn't really turn around without seeing the result of lovers' bad decisions.  An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliche, but no one seemed to mind.  As long as your were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.  What was really unacceptable were bourgeois values, wanting something small and staid and predictable, like one true love, or a child."  She is told by Ezra Pound "mark my words, this baby will change everything.  They always do.  Just bear that in mind and be very careful."
     The stage is set.  Shortly after the birth of their son, who they call Bumby, Pauline Pfiffer walks onto the scene wearing "a coat made of hundreds of chinchilla skins sewn painfully together."  She's chic, works for Vogue, and sets her sights on Hemingway.  After the fact, Hadley warns herself, "Keep watch for the girl who will come along and change everything."  As the marriage devolves into its inevitable end, the reader can't help but feel for Hadley as she struggles to hold on to her sense of self and the remains of the marriage.
     The novel is well-researched, elegantly written, and provides insight into the first Mrs. Hemingway.  For Hemingway's voice, read A Moveable Feast, where he speaks of Hadley and the broken marriage with tenderness and regret.

     The book jacket contains a blurb by singer Mary Chapin Carpenter who wrote the song "Mrs. Hemingway":  "After nearly a century, there is a reason that the Lost Generation and Paris in the 1920's still fascinate.  It was a unique intersection of time and place, people and inspiration, romance and intrigue, betrayal and tragedy.  The Paris Wife brings that era to life through the eyes of Hadley Richardson Hemingway, who steps out of the shadows as the first wife of Ernest, and into the reader's mind, as beautiful and as luminous as those extraordinary days in Paris after the Great War."  You can listen to Mary Chapin Carpenter perform the song here.





- Frances

The Summer We Read Gatsby - Danielle Ganek

     Yes, I was lured by the title.  How could I resist The Summer We Read Gatsby?  However, the novel has very little to do with Gatsby.   
      In the novel by Danielle Ganek, two half-sisters, raised on separate continents, must come to a decision about Fool's House, the cottage in the Hamptons named for the Jasper Johns painting and left jointly to them by their aunt.  One wants to keep it but the other is aware that they can't afford to do so.  They come together for the first time in seven years to decide what to do with the property and to "seek the thing of utmost value" their aunt's will indicates that they will find in the house.
     The summer begins with an invitation to a Gatsby themed party given by one of the sisters former boyfriends.  The book has a special significance in their relationship.  Both girls had read the novel the last summer they spent with their aunt.
     When a painting over the mantle disappears, they believe that it might be the item that they seek.  Another possibility is a copy of The Great Gatsby that might be a first edition.  In the end, their adventures lead them to accept each others differences and truly become sisters - the thing of value their aunt had hoped they would find.
    The jacket blurb claims, "The Summer We Read Gatsby is filled with fabulous parties, romantic, entanglements, and a cast of eccentric characters."  The novel fulfills this promise, but I found the characters flat and the dialog contrived.
     Did it really have much to do with Gatsby?  No.  Was I disappointed?  Yes.  But if you are looking for a
quick summer read this might be for you.

~ Frances   

Bookish Quotes #5

"I was born with a reading list I will never finish."
     ~ Maud Casey

"I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900."
     ~ Nick Hornby

Waxing Poetic: They All Want to Play Hamlet by Carl Sandburg

 

     As promised, this is part 2 of our Carl Sandburg spotlight. We divided it into two parts mostly because we couldn't decide which of the two poems to include. The following poem isn't one of his best known or even his best, but it is one of our favorites.

They All Want to Play Hamlet 

They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia lying with dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers--O flowers, flowers slung by a dancing girl--in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad and to stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then to say over slow and over slow wise, keen, beautiful words asking the heart that's breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls and calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.

     Aside from reminding us of Shakespeare's Hamlet, this poem never fails to remind us of one of our all-time favorite literary TV series, Slings & Arrows. If you're not familiar with this show about a theatre festival, we highly recommend it and will even provide a clip for you. 

Since there have been problems viewing this first video in the UK, we've added this one:



And while we're at it, here's the theme from series 1:

The School of Essential Ingredients - Erica Bauermeister

     The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister is the story of a cooking class that meets once a month on Monday night in the restaurant owned by Lillian.  The eight students who attend the class come with varying skills and expectations.  Lillian tells them:

     "The first question people always ask me is what are the essential ingredients...I might as well tell you, there isn't a list and I've never had one.  Nor do I hand out recipes.  All I can say is that you will leave with what you need to."

     Lillian teaches them awareness of the aromas, flavors, and textures of the foods they create.  As the classes progress, the students lives are transformed by the lessons learned in the kitchen.  Lillian teaches them as much about life and love as she does about cooking.
     The novel is a verbal feast:  elegantly and sensually crafted.  It weaves the magic in language that Lillian weaves with food.
     As a book addict, I was intrigued by Lillian's childhood.  Her love of cooking and food was sparked by her mother's withdrawal from life:

     "Lillian had been four years old when her father left them, and her mother, stunned, had slid into books like a seal into water...In the new life, Lillian's mother's face became a series of book covers, held in place where eyes, nose, or mouth might normally appear.  Lillian soon learned that book covers could forecast moods much like facial expressions, for Lillian's mother swan deeply into the books she read, until the personality of the protagonist surrounded her like a perfume applied by an indiscriminate hand."

     The novel is a quick and enticing read. 

- Frances

The Go-Between - L. P. Hartley

     L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between begins with the famous first line: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
     The novel is the reminiscence of Leo Colston who looks back on his childhood and the events of the summer of 1900. The discovery of a battered red collar box containing mementos and a diary from the fateful summer prompt the telling of the story.
     Leo spends the summer of his thirteenth birthday in Norfolk at Brandham Hall, the home of school friend Marcus Maudsley. Leo is from a lower class than the Maudsleys and is out of place. The family attempts to make him feel at home, and Marian, Marcus's older sister, takes him to a nearby town to buy him clothes suitable for the heat of summer. Leo's mother had been unable to afford new summer clothes for him, and he had suffered through the heat.
     The excessive heat of the summer is a continuing theme, and Leo becomes obsessed with it, constantly checking the temperature on the outdoor thermometer. Leo' situation heats up when Marcus falls ill and Leo is left on his own. He is soon recruited as a go-between, carrying messages between Marian and a local farmer, Ted Burgess. Leo is unaware of the nature of their relationship and the contents of the letters he carries. He relishes the errands because he believes they elevate him to a position of importance.
     With the arrival of Viscount Hugh Trimingham, who's family formerly lived in Brandham Hall, Leo learns that Marian is meant to marry the Viscount. As he becomes more and more aware of the relationship between Marian and Ted Burgess, Leo begins to balk at his duties as "the postman." He is torn because he is fond of all three, Marian especially.
     Ultimately, Leo's role as the messenger has disastrous consequences. The events have a traumatic and long-lasting effect on Leo. He becomes an emotionally detached adult and is never able to develop intimate relationships. The story has an additional twist. As the elderly Leo looks back on the events of that summer, he becomes curious and returns to Norfolk to confront the elderly Marian. She persuades him to act as the go-between one final time.
     This is a romantic, nostalgic novel. It explores the themes of childhood innocence and its loss, family, class, and gender distinctions.

     A film version was released in 1971 starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates. It is an excellent adaptation and remains faithful to the novel.

- Frances

Abandoned Books

     There have been several posts on other book blogs (see here) lately about abandoned books - books you just can't finish. I normally don't give up on a book. I put so much effort into choosing them that I'm almost certain to like them.
     If you've read any of our posts or our lists of books read in 2010, you'll know that I've recently become a fan of Iris Murdoch. I've read The Sea, The Sea, The Book and the Brotherhood, The Sandcastle, and The Bell, to name a few. Last week, I started reading The Red and the Green, which is about Irish rebellion. I made it to page 180, but I couldn't read another page! Unlike her other books, this focuses on political issues to the point that they detracted from the emphasis on characters and relationships that she explores so well in her other works.
     Maybe I'll pick it up again someday.  I'd love to hear from anyone who has read The Red and The Green and enjoyed it.

- Frances

Bookish Quotes #4

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
     ~ Anna Quindlen

"Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in themselves."
     ~ Anne Fadiman

Waxing Poetic: Dreams in the Dusk by Carl Sandburg

 

     Most people are more familiar with Carl Sandburg's poems "Chicago" and "Fog." This is one of his lesser known poems and my favorite.

Dreams in the Dusk

Dreams in the dusk,
Only dreams closing the day
And with the day’s close going back
To the gray things, the dark things,
The far, deep things of dreamland.

Dreams, only dreams in the dusk,
Only the old remembered pictures
Of lost days when the day’s loss
Wrote in tears the heart’s loss.

Tears and loss and broken dreams
May find your heart at dusk.

     A few years ago, we visited Flat Rock, North Carolina where Sandburg lived in the later years of his life. The Carl Sandburg Home is called Connemara and is a National Historic Site. He lived there with his wife, Lillian (whom he called Paula).

     The house is in a peaceful setting overlooking a pond. I can imagine him sitting on the porch and composing this poem as night fell.

     "Paula" Sandburg also raised goats on Connemara. They are still there today (not the same ones!) and are very photogenic.

     We have more pictures of the Connemara Farm for you to see on Flickr.

Note: this is part 1 of a two-part spotlight on Carl Sandburg. Look for part 2 next week!

Library Loot!

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Marg and Claire that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

     This is our first Library Loot post! We decided to start this week as we have a rather ambitious selection.

 

Howard's End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home by Susan Hill

I have heard a lot about this book. The blurb on the back reads: "Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, in order to get to know her own collection again." For the past year, I have been trying to make a dent in my collection of unread books. Besides, I'm a sucker for books about books. ~ Frances

Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation by Noel Riley Fitch

If you've viewed our Challenge page, you'll know that we're doing the One, Two, Theme! Challenge. For one of my themes, I've chosen Literary Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Sylvia Beach owned a bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare & Co., where she sold and often lent books to many American expatriates including Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. During these decades, Paris was the cultural capital of the world. I hope this book provides flavorful background to my reading of these authors for the challenge. ~ Frances

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

I've never read Gaskell! It's time I remedied this situation. ~ Frances

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

I read Garden Spells and enjoyed it. I thought I would give this book a try. ~ Frances

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

I saw this online and was captivated. It's a story about eight people who gather once a month for a cooking class in a restaurant: "The students have come to learn the art behind Lillian's soulful dishes, but it soon becomes clear that each seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen. One by one they are transformed by the aromas, flavors, and textures of what they create..." ~ Frances

Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes

We have both read this before many years ago. It is Grimes's best mystery, by far. After re-reading Hotel Paradise, we may read the sequel, Cold Flat Junction. ~ Frances & Rose

The Bodley Head Fitzgerald Vol. V

Again, this is for my One, Two, Theme! Challenge. It is a collection of short stories by Fitzgerald publishes by The Bodley Head. It includes "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," "Winter Dreams," "The Ice Palace," "The Rich Boy," and "The Last of the Belles." ~ Frances

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

This has a great first line! How can you pass that up? I've been wanting to read this book since I saw the film with Alan Bates and Julie Christie. I found a copy just this week! ~ Frances

The Bodley Head Saki

Yet another collection published by The Bodley Head. I am currently revisiting Saki's short stories, which I haven't read since high school. Most of what I have read has included Saki's recurring character Clovis. "Tobermory" and "Esme" are particular favorites. This collection also features stories with Reginald. ~ Rose

Early Dramas of Friedrich von Schiller Vol. V

This collection includes Intrigue and Love (also known as Luise Miller), some Wallenstein, and The Piccolomini. I had not heard of Schiller until very recently when he was described to me as "Germany's answer to Shakespeare." I'll find out for myself just how true that statement is. As of now, I am reading Luise Miller, which is similar to Romeo and Juliet. I envy any of you who find yourselves at the Donmar Warehouse this summer to see Felicity Jones and Alex Kingston in a new translation of Luise Miller. 

~ Rose

Hook, Line, and Sinker! (Great First Lines)

     I'm currently re-reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (for my Cornwall challenge) and reading for the first time The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. These two books have two of the most memorable first lines in literature:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." ~ Rebecca

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." ~ The Go-Between

     Isn't it odd how some first lines stay with you forever? First lines really do play an important part in any novel or short story. When well crafted, they pull you into the fictional world immediately. They are certainly not the deciding factor in whether or not I will finish a novel, but a glance at the first line of a book is often what triggers a purchase or a library check-out. Here are a few other personal favorites (feel free to share yours!):

"Call me Ishmael." ~ Moby Dick by Herman Melville

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." ~ Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen


"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story." ~ Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." ~ I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

"The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child." ~ The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on." ~ Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"All children, except one, grow up." ~ Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." ~ The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation." ~ The Secret History by Donna Tartt

     First lines also provide great fodder for book trivia. In the Neil Simon film Max Dugan Returns, Brian (Donald Sutherland) quizzes Nora (Marsha Mason), an English teacher, to see if she can name the novel from the first line. She guesses James Joyce's Ulysses before he finishes the line, "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."


- Frances

One, Two, Theme! Reading Challenge

     We have decided to add yet another challenge to our plate this year! We are a few months late starting this year-long challenge, but there's always time to read more books.

     For this challenge, we've picked several themes. For the first theme, you read one book; the second has two but one must be non-fiction; the third has three; and on and on. Here are our themes and some of the books we plan to read:

Frances ~
1)     Books About Books
      Howard's End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home - Susan Hill

2)     Left-Handedness (Including Books by Left-Handed Authors)

3)     Trains
      The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia - Paul Theroux
      Travels with My Aunt - Graham Greene

4)     Cornwall
      Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
      Frenchman's Creek - Daphne du Maurier
     
5)     Literary France (1920s-1930s)
      Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties - Noel Riley Fitch
    
      
Rose ~
1)     Physics
      The Science of Doctor Who - Paul Parsons

2)     Australia
       The History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey

3)     Scandinavia
       D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths - Ingri d'Aulaire

4)     The Art of Wit
       The Bodley Head - Saki
       Wodehouse
       The Fine Art of Political Wit - Leon A. Harris

"If I am found with amnesia..."

     We came across a quote from Guy Gavriel Kay, the author of Song of Arbonne and Tigana, describing a wonderful gimmick that every book lover should enjoy.

"My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, "If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read..." And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out what happens next...the feeling that keeps you up half the night, the feeling that comes before the plot's been learned."

     This made us start thinking about books that we would not want to have missed reading. Ours are not for the suspense factor that Kay's brother sought but for the sheer experience of reading them. Here are our lists:

Frances ~
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - I read this when I was 12 and home from school with the flu.  Perhaps this heightened my perception of the novel at the time but it has remained a favorite.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë -  This one I read at age 12 or 13 as well when I was particularly susceptible to wild romance on the moors.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - I've read it over and over but I never tire of it.  I've even dreamt I went to Manderley!

The Complete Works of Shakespeare -If I could only list one book, this tome would be the one.  I know I'm cheating by including the complete works, but what can I say?  This one volume contains the essential knowledge of people, love, and life.  I wouldn't want to navigate the recovery from amnesia without it!

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy - I love Thomas Hardy but this is my favorite of his novels.  Gabriel Oak rivals Mr. Rochester as my biggest literary crush!

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne - I think I was the only one in my eleventh grade English class who loved this book.  I have read it many time since just for pleasure (I know!).  This is my favorite Hawthorne.

Rose ~

Green Darkness by Anya Seton - Outside of children's books, this is the only book I remember reading by flashlight. I stayed up most of the night trying to find out how the characters' past lives fit with their present. For that alone, it would be an interesting read with amnesia.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James - Frances says, "Rose would not be Rose without this book." I think she's right. I've read it countless times and currently own four copies. If I owned one book, this would be the one.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White - As if I needed another reason to love Arthur and Merlin!

English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee - I don't think this is a very well-known book, but it sympathizes with anyone who has been in the back of beyond.

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino - This book captures every child's dream of living in the trees, but is not in the least a children's book.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy - This is the only Hardy I have read so far, but I imagine it will be my favorite Hardy for some time to come.

Bookish Quotes #3

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us."
     ~ Thomas Carlyle

"'Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are' is true enough but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread."
     ~ François Muriac

Waxing Poetic: Marginalia by Billy Collins

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

     This poem would appeal to anyone who has found notes in the margins and items tucked in pages of used books. Not only does this connect you to the book's previous readers but it can give you insight into their lives, for better or for worse. We've found some very interesting things over the years: $5 in a book about pregnancy (while pregnant); an invitation to "Baise-Moi: An art show in a porno shop"; and someone practicing their closing for a love letter, apparently (it was between "yours with love" or "your fawn"). This makes it sound like we've been reading VERY trashy books, but the latter margin notes were in Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund.

     Can you beat these?

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

     Donna Tartt’s talent at weaving a story is proven in her ability to craft a compelling murder-mystery of 500+ pages even though the reader knows from the beginning who is murdered and who the killers are.

     The novel is set in a small, elite Vermont college in the 1980’s, but it has a dreamlike quality that makes it seem timeless.  The narrator, Richard Papen, leaves his unhappy life with his working-class family in Plano, California to attend Hampden College.  He wants to continue his study of Classical Greek but is told that the classics professor, Julian Morrow, has accepted his five student limit.  Richard becomes obsessed with the aloof, arrogant, highbrow intellectuals who study Greek.  He observes them as they move around campus, oddly dressed (mostly in black) and in a world of their own.  Eventually, he manages to capture their attention when he helps them solve a question of Greek grammar while they are studying in the library.  With advice from them on how to impress Julian, he is admitted into the Classics program.

     The characters are wonderfully detailed and their relationships are complex.  The students are immersed in the world of the classics and out of touch with the modern world.  There is a priceless scene in which Henry, a linguistic genius and very much the leader of the group, is shocked to learn that man has walked on the moon.  The other members of the group are just as unusual:  a pair of fraternal twins, Charles and Camilla, orphans who are ethereal and charming but very secretive; Francis, whose aunt’s abandoned house in the country becomes a sanctuary for the group; and Edmund, known as Bunny, who is dyslexic, loud, older, and a bit of a misfit in this bunch of intellectuals.  Richard fabricates a history for himself including an elite private school background and a father with oil money (his real father owns a gas station) in order to blend in with the group.  Julian is an eccentric, elusive man who, perhaps, does not know how strong an influence his is on his pupils.  

       One day in class, he lectures on Bacchanalian ritual:

Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?  It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one.  Beauty is terror.  Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.  And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?  To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of or moral selves?... One is quite, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways.  But how glorious to release them in a single burst!  To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!

As a result, the group (excluding Bunny and Richard) set out to recreate the ecstasy of a Bacchanalian ritual.  A horrible turn of events results in the murder a local farmer. 

       This secret binds them together and also divides them when Bunny, informed of the events begins to behave erratically and the others fear being betrayed.  Richard is drawn into the inner circle and made privy to its secret.  The reader, like Richard will find it hard not to like and sympathize with these characters in spite of what he knows. He becomes aware of Henry’s ‘plan’ and becomes a part of it, ultimately being present when Bunny is murdered.

       The story focuses on how this murder haunts and eventually destroys them but it is as much about friendship and the human longing to be accepted.    I loved this book.  I was captivated from the first page and found it hard to put down in spite of the fact that I’m not fan of murder mysteries.  This book is so much more!

- Frances

The Finishing School - Muriel Spark

 

     Set in a finishing school called College Sunrise, currently located in Switzerland but whose location changes from year to year, Muriel Spark's The Finishing School is a comic novel that reminded me of her early novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
     A married couple, Rowland and Nina Mahler, run the school while Rowland works (or mostly doesn't work) on a novel.  The school is small, unorthodox, and has exorbitant tuition.The student body consists of a group of affluent teens, including a princess of a possibly fictitious country, whose parents seem to want to get them off their hands.
     Among their nine students is Chris, a 17-year old who is writing an historical novel about Mary Queen of Scots and already has publishers interested in the work-in-progress.  Rowland immediately develops an intense jealousy of Chris and his novel.  His thoughts stray to wishing the boy would "die peacefully in his sleep."  He visualizes himself pouring green paint on Chris's bright red hair as he writes and watching it pour over the novel.  Chris is aware of Rowland's jealousy and enrolls a fellow student to keep his computer, discs, and printed pages of the novel locked away while Rowland continuously attempts to find and destroy it.
     Meanwhile, school is in session but the teachers own lives occupy them as much as teaching the students.  Rowland teaches creative writing and spends class time recording observations of Chris.  He tells Nina, "I've changed my mind about the book I'm writing.  It won't be a novel.  It will be a life study of a real person, Chris."  Nina secretly plots to leave Rowland at the end of the term but continues to teach her etiquette class (she calls it 'comme it faut'), instructing the students in how to properly eat an artichoke, the chances that a man inviting a girl to attend Ascot will be a crook, and the hazards of being too well-mannered.  Through it all the students and teachers get entangled with each other, the visiting lecturers, neighbors, and the hired help.
     The tension between Rowland and Chris intensifies and comes to a head when a publisher comes to see Chris about publishing his novel and agrees to also publish Rowland's The School Observed.  Things deteriorate from there and come to a surprising ending.
   The novel explores the themes of jealousy, ambition, and attraction.  Spark has a gift for creating eccentric but believable characters and these are briefly but vividly drawn.  It was a quick and humorous read.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but not as much a The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.


Favorite Lines:  (from Nina's 'comme il faut' class)
"First, if you, as a U.N. employee, are chased by an elephant stand still and wave a white handkerchief.  This confuses the elephant's legs."

     
- Frances

Bookish Quotes #2

"We read to know we are not alone."
     ~ C.S. Lewis

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
     ~ Jean Rhys

Waxing Poetic: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne

 

     John Donne is my favorite poet, and this is one of my favorite of his poems. It was written in 1611 to his wife, Anne More Donne, to comfort her while he was away in France on government business and she remained at home in England. The poem argues that he and his wife will remain together spiritually even though they are apart physically. It contains one of Donne's most famous metaphors: he compares his relationship with his wife to that of the two legs of a drawing compass. The poem was not published until 1633, two years after Donne's death in a poetry collection entitled Songs and Sonnets.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

"The breath goes now," and some say

"No";

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harm and fears;

Men reckon what it did and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent,

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined

That ourselves know not what it is,

Inter-assurèd of the mind,

Care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth if the other do,

And though it in the center sit,

Yet, when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like the other foot obliquely run:

Thy firmness draws my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

     If you are a fan of Donne's poetry, you might enjoy the novel The Calligrapher by Edward Docx. It is the story of a British calligrapher (one of the few left who earn a living at it) who has been commissioned to transcribe the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne for a rich American client. As he works on the commission, he finds that the poems begin to illuminate his own experiences. The novel is witty and clever, like Donne's poems. I thought it was a great read with an unexpected ending.

     If you're into the lives of poets, you might enjoy The Lady and the Poet by Maeve Haran. It tells of Donne's courtship of his wife, Anne. They married against her father's wishes and those of his employer's (her uncle by marriage). As a result, he lost his job and was imprisoned for a brief time.

 - Frances