The average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil (p323)
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Jack London himself was a working class guy who got the audacious idea he wanted to bThe average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil (p323)
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Jack London himself was a working class guy who got the audacious idea he wanted to be a writer, and by sheer Stakhanovite mind-over-matter vein-popping sleep-denying force he did so. His stand-in here, our Martin, does just the same. So here is the story of how a working class guy who drops all his aitches and does not know which fork to use to eat soup, and knocks over his girlfriend’s mother’s doilies with the lurchings of his sailorboy shoulders becomes the toast of literary America. This means that we get about 250 pages in which the same thing happens over and over again :
Eating only three dried apricots per day and living in a single nasty room ("those potatoes are rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them") with a bicycle suspended above his bed, Martin writes like a madman all day except for the hours he reads philosophy and poetry. He cuts his sleep down to four hours and resents every moment of unconsciousness. What is he writing? Love poetry, sociophilosophical essays, adventure stories, jokes, doggerel verse, you name it. Out it pours. He mails it all off to any one of 200 magazines and waits for the inevitable rejection letters, which arrive daily. Occasionally he sells a joke or a comic poem for two dollars. Now he can eat four dried apricots today! And he can get his suit out of the pawnshop so he can go and visit his posh girlfriend whose family regard him as something the cat dragged in. There, she swoons against his bulging thighs while giving him tips on grammar. Meanwhile he pounds Spencerian knowledge into her father, accusing him of every crime known to the bourgeois. You fatuous worm! He says. I will crush your kind with the heel of my boot, when I have redeemed it from the pawnshop. I will not even notice your bleeding corpse. My how amusing you are, Martin, says the father, meanwhile passing a note to the mother which says WE MUST KILL HIM TOMORROW. Oh Martin, your neck is like a bullock, sighs Ruth, the ethereal daughter.
I admit this stuff gets a little bit tiresome for 250 pages but there’s no denying the intensity of Jack’s prose – his style is like a guy trapped in a cave desperately scrabbling at the wall of solid rock to reach daylight. It ain’t pretty but it’s intense, even if it does get more than a little eyerolling at times. It becomes very clear that Jack London thought that Jack London was a hell of a fellow, brawny and brainy ("he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor") and handsome and charming the little birds right out of the sky. All girls swoon when he hoves into view. Oooh those bulging biceps.
By the way, it has to be acknowledged that Jack London can come out with some of the worst sentences I’ve read in a long time -
Her penetrative virginity exalted and disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool chastity
…summer lingered, fading and fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm content of having lived and lived well.
he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable connotations.
But I must say I mostly loved this oddly compelling 500 page howl of anguish, for that’s what it is. Jack London seems to be engaged in nothing more than self-love and aggrandizement for three quarters of Martin Eden, but then the direction of travel skews wildly and his hero reveals himself to be nothing more than an unpleasant kind of Nietzschean protofascist. Maybe Jack was at war with himself here. Something was up with Jack, for sure!
Nobody liked this novel at the time, they wanted more dog stories.
FURTHER READING :
Hunger by Knut Hamsun and New Grub Street by George Gissing for guys starving themselves while they try to make it as a writer;
and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes for another guy who starts off knowing nothing and very quickly appears to know like almost everything – Charlie is given a brain enhancing drug in that book but Martin, being Jack, doesn’t need no drug, just three dried apricots a day.
Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetish before which they fell down and worshipped.
Martin’s trick of visioning was active as ever. His brain was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection. Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin’s mind immediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living present
Success by Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks (vocal : Maryanne Price)
Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-like, through the world of literature, and he was more amused than interested by the stir he was making
Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes of a sick person. During every conscious moment life blazed in a raw glare around him and upon him. It hurt. It hurt intolerably....more
With a style flatter than a pancake that’s been run over by a steamroller three or four times this novel races through the woebegone lives of two AmerWith a style flatter than a pancake that’s been run over by a steamroller three or four times this novel races through the woebegone lives of two American sisters from the 1930s to the 1970s through hideously embarrassing parents, grisly boyfriends, dreadful marriages, tiresome offspring, fading looks, lost jobs, yes, this is the whole whirling dance of death itself and it is performed to the tinkling sounds of clinking bottles and chiming wineglasses and the glug glugging of alcoholic refreshment ending only in the grateful blackout at the end of another perfect day. If you knocked back a whisky sour every time one of the characters does in this book you’d have cirrhosis of the liver by the time you finished it, and it’s a real fast read.
What did we learn from The Easter Parade? We learned that money won’t fix anything, that love curdles like milk, that marriage is for the deluded, and independence is another word for declining mental health. But hard liquor might just get you five minutes of fun here and there although don't count on it. And that on the whole the human race was probably a bad idea....more
FAMOUS FACEPALM MOMENTS IN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY NO. 32
15th May 1962 : it is decision day for the National Book Award Committee. They have been poFAMOUS FACEPALM MOMENTS IN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY NO. 32
15th May 1962 : it is decision day for the National Book Award Committee. They have been pondering a shortlist of eleven books. 1961 was a strong year for the American novel and the shortlist includes Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates and Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger. But towering over all eleven was a furious masterpiece of vicious satire that later became one of the most famous books on the planet, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. So after some debate they gave the award for 1961 to The Moviegoer by Walker Percy.
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Here’s a timesaving tip : if you ever thought of reading The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, instead try playing U2’s melancholy classic “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” while watching a National Geographic documentary of Louisiana and some old photos of New Orleans.
This is a novel of elegant maundering and orotund description. Here he is describing his new secretary :
Her back is turned to me, but obliquely, so that I can see the line of her cheek with its whorl of down and the Slavic prominence under the notch of her eye and the quick tender incurve, shortening her face like a little mignon.
Here he is talking about evening in New Orleans :
Bullbats hawk the insects in the warm air next to the pavement. They dive and utter their thrumming skonk-skonk and go sculling up into the bright upper air.
And there is a whole lot of Nature Writing in this novel
The world is milk : sky, water, savannah. The thin etherlike water vaporizes, tendrils of fog gather like smoke, a white shaft lies straight as a ruler over the marsh.
Very pretty. And he says stuff like
She has the voluptuous look of roommates left alone.
Like he is the world authority on roommates, and knows when left alone they all look voluptuous. I don’t know how anybody would know that.
So, this 29 year old rich guy who has a nice car drifts around having vague but knowing conversations with his cantankerous aunt or his tedious colleagues or his perky secretary who he wants to shag because he is a serial secretary-shagger. There are like 400 minor offscreen characters in this book but they all get an elaborate paragraph full of stultifyingly exact phraseology like this which is about some old geezer
There is a flattening of the nosebridge and a softening of the forehead and a giddy light blue amiability about the eyes
Then there is some stuff that is frankly a bit head-scratching :
There comes to me in the ascent a brief annunciatory syllable in the throat stopped in the scrape of a chair as if, having signaled me and repenting of it, it had then to pass itself off as but one of the small day noises of the house.
You know, you could be forgiven for thinking I did not care much for this novel. It is true that just because somebody happens to be tall, white, handsome, heterosexual, wealthy and male doesn’t of course stop them being miserable. But unreasonable that I am, it does mostly stop me from having that much sympathy to spare for them. Really and truly I didn’t care if Binx Bolling shagged his secretary or married his step-cousin or axed his aunt or ate his uncle or discovered his real purpose in life was to make an exact scale model of the Palace of Versailles using only the skeletons of black-bellied whistling ducks found in the Atchafalaya Swamp.
This is really a short 3 star novel but we love Patrick Hamilton because he is so excruciating and so deadly but so funny about his handful of miserabThis is really a short 3 star novel but we love Patrick Hamilton because he is so excruciating and so deadly but so funny about his handful of miserable riffraff so I have arbitrarily given him a 4th star.
The first part of this story is all about two ghastly old biddies and their servant problems and is yet another beautiful description of the depths of visceral loathing the old and doddery can inspire in the hearts of young people. I always find this hilarious. Similar scenes in Lucky Jim and Trainspotting also have me guffawing loudly. This is probably very wrong of me.
Second part is one long drunken evening and the morning after. Things go hideously awry. What’s not to like. ...more
About a month ago I found myself beginning to read out this whole book to Selma, what a crazy idea. I didn't mean to, but you know how one thing leadsAbout a month ago I found myself beginning to read out this whole book to Selma, what a crazy idea. I didn't mean to, but you know how one thing leads to another. She is in Istanbul and I am not by the way. I started with just a few passages. And they were so delectable and moreish. I guess people say this usually about crack cocaine but here in Goodreads we say this about relatively obscure authors from the 1940s. Anyway it was such fun I ended up doing the whole thing. You should try it sometimes. But don't start with The Brothers Karamazov. So compelling was this one-man-audible experience that as I was reading the heartbreaking-but-funny final chapters I completely failed to hear the frantic ringing of the doorbell last night when the Sainsburys guy was trying to deliver my groceries. So now on Sunday morning I have nothing to eat except three dubious mushrooms and some out of date sausages. Thanks, Selma, and thanks, Patrick Hamilton.
Anyway over the month we were knocked out by Patrick Hamilton's dead-eyed humour, and cringe-inducing painful honesty about his characters and blah blah.
We recommend Patrick Hamilton heartily to everyone out there in Goodreadsland. He will make you laugh, cry, etc etc. And he made me really hungry.
I have this mean-minded habit of reading one extremely-hyped modern book per year – Normal People, Gone Girl, Eleanor Oliphant is Great Thank You – inI have this mean-minded habit of reading one extremely-hyped modern book per year – Normal People, Gone Girl, Eleanor Oliphant is Great Thank You – in the same spirit that a spider invites a big juicy fly into his home. Girl A is the 2021 victim. Let’s extract its fluids and watch it writhe.
First, I don’t know about the ethics of this thing – you may remember Lullaby by Leila Slimani from 2016. This was a big hit novel closely based on a real crime in which a nanny stabbed to death the two children she was looking after. The real crime happened in 2012. Leila Slimani made a lot of dough fictionalising that crime. This is just one example.
Now we have Girl A. There are a few “House of Horrors” crimes where insane parents abuse their numerous children for years, but in 2018 there was the case of David and Louise Turpin which happened in California. 13 children were all kept in the house for their whole lives, some chained up, many actually starving when discovered. Police were only informed when a 17 year old girl escaped through a window.
In Girl A there are 7 kids but some of them are chained, all are abused and starved and the crime is only discovered when a 15 year old girl escapes through a window. So, I think this book is based on the Turpin case, and relocated to the UK. The surviving Turpin kids will maybe see Girl A in their local bookstore. I would be curious what they might have to say about it.
Second, the author’s intention turned out to be at odds with what I wanted, and I can’t fault her for that, but I was most interested in how the psychology of torturing your own children works in practice. Sure, the father is of course a religious lunatic and the mother is a cowed baby machine but how can even such people view their emaciated children on a daily basis and think everything is copacetic? And also - how can such grisly horrors be kept away from the eyes of the surveillance society and its many-tentacled authorities for years?
(Some lacksadaisical googling revealed that local authorities mostly DON’T check up on home-schooled children in the UK – that was a surprise.)
And thirdly, I wasn’t in love with Abigail Dean’s brittle, oblique style where everything is alluded to knowingly and hardly anything is spelled out, and there are about 300 characters. You finally get to piece everything together in the last 30 pages.
This book is not so much about the horrors but about how the kids survived their experiences. Spoiler alert – some did better than others.
Returning one evening from one of their fossil gathering expeditions (this was during their palaeontology phase which was the 23rd phase since they stReturning one evening from one of their fossil gathering expeditions (this was during their palaeontology phase which was the 23rd phase since they started all this nonsense) Bouvard and Pecuchet were exhausted. Heaving their complete edition of the works of George Cuvier off the sofa, they collapsed into the soft cushions and fell asleep. Mysteriously, when they awoke it was in the year 2021. Even more mysteriously Bouvard found a Razer Blade 15 laptop in front of him and Pecuchet found a MacBook Pro. Being the inquisitive fellows we know them to be, in five minutes they had discovered the internet.
“This is most excellent”, said Bouvard. “We can get rid of all these old books. Everything is on the internet!”
“Just what I was thinking,” said Pecuchet. “Imagine the time we could have saved if we had this all along. All that stuff we read on agriculture, chemistry, anatomy, geology, archaeology –“
“And now we can just click click and know everything all at once!”
“Clearly my dear friend, our task is now simple. We must read the whole internet.”
Some weeks passed and finally Pecuchet announced
“My dear old pal, I have read the very last page of the internet. We have finished our great task.”
“Yes at last. Let’s summarise what we have learned.”
They gazed into space. At length Bouvard said
“We know what beanie babies are now!”
“We know what a mockbuster is!”
“I spent a whole afternoon trying to understand the Mach–Zehnder interferometer. Perhaps we don’t need that information just now.”
“I feel the same way about Kac-Moody algebras and why there are only five superstring theories. Oh the headache I got!”
“But we have seen a woman yelling at a cat and we have seen Baby Yoda."
“And many 45 second videos of really cute baby animals."
“And we should look into this interesting proposal from a director of the Nigerian National Bank. This man says he will give us 15 million francs if we first of all give him a million francs.”
“And I have found there are many lovely young women who are anxious to meet us, Bouvard. Imagine! Us old fools! All they need is money to buy a plane ticket to France.”
"And Pecuchet, we really have to do the ice bucket challenge, I think that is a must.”
“Yes, and the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge."
“Ah, I did not see details on that one, it sounds most interesting.”
This novel is the entry point into Gaddisworld for the feebleminded like myself, since it’s only 260 pages and all his other novels are 900 pages miniThis novel is the entry point into Gaddisworld for the feebleminded like myself, since it’s only 260 pages and all his other novels are 900 pages minimum, but darlings, it was very tedious and annoying. I know this is by the great Mr Difficult himself but it wasn’t that difficult, it was just yawny. I was like a kid in the back of the car. Are we there yet? How much further?
So we have a situation here. We have a thirtysomething couple in a posh coastal rented house. They are nearly broke. She is the daughter of a dead father who made squillions mining in Africa but her dough is tied up in a trust. Cue pages of fuming and banging around by annoyed wheelerdealer no-account husband, a motormouth who thinks he’s just found his own golden ticket by becoming the media manager of a black evangelical preacher who recently drowned a young boy during a river baptism. This hubby is parlaying that tragic event into a money-spinning opportunity using the old fast shoe shuffle and banking on the limitless credulity of evangelical Christians.
So she’s in the house all day long fielding phone call after phone call (No he’s not… who did you say you were… I’m sorry I have no infor---) then he comes rushing in periodically (Give me a clean shirt – any shirt – what? Couldn’t you find a better one than this? Gimme a coffee, I’m in a rush) and he pauses only to deliver pages of ranting about the desperate venal utterly fucked state of a) humanity, b) American humanity and c) American religious humanity and d) his dire financial situation. He barks a few orders at his wife (If Slotko calls tell him he’ll get his $200 Friday latest, got that?) and rushes out.
Meanwhile she is only leaving the house to visit various doctors to prove she’s suffering from a sexual malfunction after a plane crash. This is so that Paul the husband can bring a fraudulent lawsuit against the plane company.
Then she gets visits from her brother Billy, another motormouth loser. If you close your eyes, you can’t tell the difference between the husband and the brother. They are both professional complainers with a fresh new hard luck story every time they appear, so full of contempt and indignation about pretty much everything that moves.
Then she gets random visits from the landlord of the house, and - no surprise - he turns out to be a guy who can bloviate for pages at the drop of a hat, continually spinning paranoid maybe-fantasies about murky doings by government agencies and complicated CIA type stuff he was formerly involved in when he was a geologist in Africa. Your eyes may be forgiven if they glaze over at this point. Three moaning complaining male fantasists in one novel is two too many, I think.
And Mrs Doormat gets to say stuff like “Well—” or “But---” or “I’m sorry---”
The targets of this novel are very familiar to us – toxic masculinity, as we now call it; American neo-colonialism; and how religion exploits the poor and gullible. Mr Difficult is not finding exciting new ground here.
The difficulty of this book is that 95% of it is dialogue with no indication of who’s talking. You can easily figure that out, but it’s harder to figure out what these guys are talking about, harder still to figure out if what they’re talking about is supposed to be real, and even harder still to care one way or the other. Of the 5% that isn’t ranting male voices, we have stuff like this :
Where she woke, coming over on her back, pulling away sheet and blanket for the warmth, or the sense of it, dappling the room walls and ceiling in a gentle rise and fall of reds, yellow, blazing to orange brought her to her elbows to the foot of the bed and the window in the frolic of flames through the branches outside.
There’s no doubt Mr Difficult has great verbal energy and a flair for the meaty interconnectedness of the woof and the weft of life itself, but it wasn’t enough.
Oh, get born, keep warm Short pants, romance Learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed Try to be a success Please her, please him, buy gifts Don't steal, don't lift Twenty years of schoolin' And they put you on the day shift
Runnin' to-and-fro, hard workin' at the mill Never fail in the mail, yeah, come a rotten bill
Salesman talkin' to me, tryin' to run me up a creek Says you can buy it, go on try it, you can pay me next week, ahh
Blonde haired good lookin', tryin' to get me hooked Want me to marry, get a home, settle down, write a book
Same thing every day, gettin' up, goin' to school No need for me to complain, my objection's overruled, ahh Too much monkey business, too much monkey business Too much monkey business for me to be involved in
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip Sha na na na, sha na na na na Sha na na na, sha na na na na Sha na na na, sha na na na na Sha na na na, sha na na na na Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip Mum mum mum mum mum mum Get a job, sha na na na, sha na na na na
Next station is Liar's Avenue, Wait there, and let all the liars get onboard. Have a good crowd of liars down there, Have some smooth liars, some unreasonable liars, Some professional liars, some bareface liars, Some ungodly liars, some big liars, Some little liars, some go to bed lying, get up lying. Lie all day! Lie on you and lie on me! A big crowd of liars! You go to Hell on the Black Diamond Train....more
“It’s not an important novel. I failed of eloquence and many of the immediate issues are rapidly fading away.” said Ralph Ellison in an interview afte“It’s not an important novel. I failed of eloquence and many of the immediate issues are rapidly fading away.” said Ralph Ellison in an interview after Invisible Man was published in 1952 and was showered with praise & won the National Book Award (& since then is a regular in lists of greatest 20th century novels.)
Regarding the fading away of immediate issues : in one episode, a black guy is chased by a cop, turns and lands a punch on the cop, who falls, points his gun and shoots the black guy dead. This whole sequence up to and including the community’s outrage and the local politician’s grandstanding has been replicated beat for beat in all those recent police killings (and the next one when it comes) in the USA. The duplication was stunning. So with respect, Ralph was wrong about the fading away of some of his issues. Unfortunately.
WHERE DO I BEGIN
This is quite a tough book to review. It’s big and very loud. There is a long winding road our unnamed young black man takes from true believer to bitter cynic, and this happens not once but twice.
You could say he is an invisible man, not seen as a real person by anyone, and at the same time, it takes him a long time to see through the fabrications of other people. I guess you could say that!
Firstly he gets disillusioned with his black college – specifically with the nasty unprincipled Principal. Then he moves to Harlem and gets employed by the Communist Party, which RE calls the Brotherhood, and I’m not so sure he joins as a true believer, but he gets on board with the program :
We recognised no loose ends, everything could be controlled by our science. Life was all pattern and discipline.
But he fairly quickly sees that
I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used
And further, that when it comes to black people, the CP weren’t enlightened at all :
Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside it they didn’t see us. It was a hell of a state of affairs, we were nowhere
THE B WORD
About half of this large novel is about our guy and his struggles inside the Brotherhood, and sorry to say, the reader gets awfully tired of this B word. Maybe it is supposed to be a humorous exaggeration of the way communists talked, but it wears thin:
“Be more specific, Brother,” Brother Garnett, a white Brother, said .
and
Now several brothers started to speak at once, and Brother Jack knocked for order. “Brothers, please!” Brother Jack said.
WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES SAID AT THE TIME
Parts of it consist of long and impassioned, sometimes hysterical, reveries which are frequently highly obscure. Other parts still seem grotesquely exaggerated or repetitious. And these strange interludes are overwritten in an ultra pretentious, needlessly fancy way. Spasms of torrential rhetoric, they obscure the point of some of Mr. Ellison's symbolic incidents and check temporarily the swift course of his story.
(it sounds like a one-star review, but they actually did like it!)
This is a book full of big talkers, and none bigger than our embattled narrator – really, it’s him doing all the talking. And it is perfectly true that RE loves to conjure up towering piles of lurid anguished frothy clogged meditations at the drop of a hat. It gives a stop-start feeling to the whole thing. Maybe this is sacrilegious, but it could possibly might be that some of the more repetitious bitter self-accusations could have been snipped.
LINGUISTIC NOTE
There is one f word, one more surprising c word, and several mentions of people being “motherfoulers”, which I haven’t come across anywhere else. Also one mention of the word “groovy” in an approbatory sense. Also : “You black and beautiful!” on p301.
CONFRONTING STEREOTYPES
There are stereotypes everywhere you look. There is the toadying stooge Dr Bledsoe. There is a character Ras the Exhorter, who promotes Black Nationalism. There is an older black woman who briefly turns into the mother he never had. There is a white woman who wants our guy to pretend to rape her. There are the party apparatchiks, especially Brother Jack, sincere programmed robots the lot of them. There are looters and rioters from central casting. Hopping and skipping and ducking and diving, always in a mad rush, our guy spends the whole novel trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
Eventually he decides the best place to be is in a basement underground, hiding from the world.
Money is the point of this very amusing and SHORT Victorian novel. Or maybe more particularly, EMBARRASSMENT about money. Our inoffensive middle aged Money is the point of this very amusing and SHORT Victorian novel. Or maybe more particularly, EMBARRASSMENT about money. Our inoffensive middle aged warden hero becomes convinced he has too much of it. His son in law and various others try to convince him that even though he doesn’t do a hand’s turn for this huge salary he’s on, there is an important principle to be defended, which is, never let them find out how much daylight robbery is committed by the Church of England. You will bring the roof down upon our heads!
THE MONEY (kind of boring, this part can be skipped)
There is a cathedral and there is a hospital next door but actually it’s what we would call sheltered housing, since 12 broke down old men live there permanently. They are provided for by a 400 year old will. Each guy gets one and sixpence per day, which is £30 per year, which in modern money is £3400 ($4800) which is really way way below the poverty line. The warden is the guy who was supposed to look after these old guys and he gets a revenue from the land left to the church in the will and because its value has risen in the last 400 years he now gets £800 per year which is £90,000 in modern money ($125,000) which is an enormous salary. Some bright spark figures that this large salary for doing virtually NOTHING should really be going to the 12 poor old men.
SMASH THE FOURTH WALL
The intrusive fourth-wall-breaking Victorian novelist is here again, amusingly telling us
It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines, or how would three volumes or twenty suffice! In the present case so little of this sort have I overheard, that I live in hopes of finishing my work within 300 pages, and of completing that pleasant task—a novel in one volume
And he did! Well done Anthony Trollope. I thought the Barchester Chronicles were all going to be 600 page behemoths but no, this one I just over 200 pages. That made me happy.
Later on there's more blatant fourth wall busting when Mr Trollope up and takes a gigantic swipe at his fellow novelist Mr Dickens whom he cuttingly calls Mr Popular Sentiment (ho ho) :
Of all such reformers Mr Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do.
A SPORTING METAPHOR
How exciting when the striker wrests the ball from the opposite team, dashes down the field and nimbly and with preternatural leg bending dribbles past one, two, three, four defenders and now only the goalkeeper left and blam – awwww, the ball hit the crossbar and bounced harmlessly off the pitch.
I’m not a football fan but that’s what Mr Trollope does in The Warden. In the end all the delicious huffing and puffing and outrage and conscience-raking goes phzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and I was kind of disappointed. Still, a crackling style and a merry wit and a lovely choice of subject gets four stars from me....more
Rhoda on the difficulty of young women getting decent jobs:
I know it perfectly well. And I wish it were harder. Starring Rhoda Nunn, Victorian radfem.
Rhoda on the difficulty of young women getting decent jobs:
I know it perfectly well. And I wish it were harder. I wish girls fell down and died of hunger in the streets, instead of creeping to their garrets and hospitals. I should like to see their dead bodies collected together in some open place, for the crowd to stare at.
Rhoda on contemporary literature:
If every novelist could be strangled and thrown into the sea, we should have some chance of reforming women. … Love – love – love; a sickening sameness of vulgarity – what is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists?
Rhoda on marriage :
I would have girls taught that marriage is a thing to be avoided rather than hoped for. I would teach them that for the majority of women marriage means disgrace.
Her colleague Mary is on the same page too :
I tell you the simple truth when I say that more than half of these men regard their wives with active disgust. They will do anything to be relieved of the sight of them for as many hours as possible
(If I might explain this particular outburst, Mary is icily pointing out that the education of girls is so contemptible that they are infantilised and rendered mentally unfit to be a companion to the averagely educated man. )
So what is this extraordinary 1893 novel about ? The lives and disastrous loves of several women, two of whom are the above radical feminists who are trying to do something about the social problem of the Odd Women, meaning not odd like peculiar but odd like socks, unmatched, spare, surplus. Apparently there was a million more women than men in late Victorian England. Rhoda and Mary, being two odd women, run a kind of informal vocational college training women for clerical work and revolutionary subversion.
Interestingly enough, the v word is never spoken about. Votes are the last thing on these women’s minds. And there are other confusing cross-currents too – our feminists have zero interest in working class women – just as Gissing himself didn’t care a stuff about the workers. He was no democrat. Modern readers would reasonably assume that if you’re progressive in one area you would be in all areas, but just like the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.
So this is a novel of ideas. Gissing is a very serious fellow, he has only the plainest of prose and most of his dialogue is sparkle-free. He almost lapses into sociology at times, pedantically noting down every character’s annual income. But he boldly goes where almost no other Victorian novelists have gone before and it is a really thrilling ride. When he gives us a realistically nasty heartrending picture of a marriage destroyed by paranoid jealousy, his dreadful husband is no cardboard villain. He gives us two other expertly filleted romantic carcrashes and several pinpoint minor characters along the way. After all the Brontes, Austens and Dickens if you still think something’s missing, you’re right, it’s Gissing. ...more
Every review of this contains so many spoilers that I think everyone is beyond being spoiled. Regarding Ethan Frome, you’re all unspoilable.
A SONG
JustEvery review of this contains so many spoilers that I think everyone is beyond being spoiled. Regarding Ethan Frome, you’re all unspoilable.
A SONG
Just hear those slay-bells jingling, ring ting tingling too Come on it's lovely weather for a slay-ride together with you Outside the snow is falling and that nasty sick old wife of yours is calling "Yoo hoo!" But I’m going to ignore the old bag for once and go for a slay-ride with you Our cheeks are nice and rosy and comfy and cozy are we We've snuggled close together and we’re going to plunge right into a tree
This song is not from the opera version of Ethan Frome. Yes, there is an opera of Ethan Frome. It doesn’t appear to be very popular though. The soundtrack was released in 2001 and Amazon records that it is currently at number 2,034,987 in their sales list. There are no current reviews of it. But I guess it must have seemed a good idea at the time.
Anyway poor Ethan for the first time meets a cute girl and likes her and she likes him back but because he’s already married and also is a poor farmer they can NEVER BE TOGETHER so they are saying their tearstained farewells when out of the blue she says let’s do a Thelma and Louise and he says without batting an eyelid yeah sure baby, climb into my sled (not a euphemism) and off they go KA BLAMMMM. I really don’t know about this, if my beloved sweetheart said to me hey, let’s drown ourselves I might want two or three minutes to talk it over (how could you suggest such a thing! You know I can’t swim!) but not this guy Ethan.
I think there are several morals of this story. The first is, don’t be a poor farmer. Second, don’t marry a woman who looks healthy enough but immediately becomes a full time hypochondriac. And third, don’t get a girlfriend who suggests a suicide pact the first time things don’t go well. And fourth, a tree is not as reliable as the Grand Canyon.
Elizabeth Hardwick’s short memoir/novel has pages about Billie Holiday, and jazz clubs, and more pages on some American Communists, and yes, we’re in Elizabeth Hardwick’s short memoir/novel has pages about Billie Holiday, and jazz clubs, and more pages on some American Communists, and yes, we’re in New York, which is never ever dull, and plus, all my GR friends adore it – so, in the words of one beloved tv personality, what could possibly go wrong? But the prose so purple the Pope would think twice about wearing it and the mood is so doggedly gloomy that by page 50 I needed a ventilator.
I slept with Alex three times and remember each one perfectly. In all three he was agreeably intimidating, and intimidating in three ways….2. A seizure of spiritual discontent and a grave asceticism, mournfully impugning.
And later also about Alex
Worst of all was my ambivalence over what I took to be the inauthenticity of his Marxism.
So for those wishing to read about somebody’s ambivalence over somebody else’s inauthenticity, this is your book.
And now I feel I have been a bit unfair to Sleepless Nights. Let’s just open it at random… page 89…:
She drew on cigarettes as if they were opium, an addition to the opium within her, the narcotic of her boredom, that large, friendly intimate, so dear and faithful. An immaculate drug the boredom seemed to be, with its hazy drift of dreams, its passivity pure and rich as cream.
The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, inflammable, jubilant, childlike, zygotic, hierophantic, susurrant, daemonical, yeasty, garrulous, exact, oleaginous, quaggy, kleptomaniacal, newlyminted, refulgent, blinding, xenogamic, wounding, vulpine, uncanny and taxonomical but allegedly never aleatory.
Buried under and squirreled away in the middle of this great mass of mostly (beautiful, confounding) child-eye-vision noticing and describing is a knot of connected violence (random and intended), the engorged heart of the matter, that throws various lives round as you might expect. Readers have to be patient, this is not about plot, it’s about how a writer can arrive out of nowhere and at age 35 publish a first novel that creates a bidding war then knocks everyone out and then wins the Booker Prize.
After that, by the way, there was (fictional) silence .
SOME AUTHORS WHO TOOK A WHILE TO FOLLOW UP THEIR SUCCESSFUL FIRST NOVEL
Joseph Heller – 13 Years (Catch-22 1961 to Something Happened 1974) Marilyn Robinson – 24 years (Housekeeping 1980 to Gilead 2004)
And the champ
Henry Roth – 60 years (Call It Sleep 1934 to Mercy of a Rude Stream 1994)
Ms Roy is in the middle, she only took 20 years to follow up The God of Small Things with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
But back to this extraordinary book. Here’s a flavour of what you are going to get. First a description of how one character descends into muteness:
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there.
But a whole lot of this book, maybe most, is seen through the eyes of two children aged seven, so we have a lot of almost Joycean weirdness like this:
Estha saw how Baby Kochamma’s neckmole licked its chops and throbbed with delicious anticipation. Der-Dboom, Der-Dboom. It changed color like a chameleon. Der-green, der-blueblack, dermustardyellow. Twins for tea It would bea.
And we have many, many little lists too :
Then the policemen looked around and saw the grass mat. The pots and pans. The inflatable goose. The Qantas koala with loosened button eyes. The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them. Socks with separate colored toes. Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses. A watch with the time painted on it.
SIMILEWATCH
As usual I like to spot the funny similes that authors love to heap up, it’s like some of ‘em think similes are what writing a novel is for. Here are some favorites (my own little list) :
Like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant Like substandard mattress-stuffing Like shining beads on an abacus Like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been Like lumpy knitting Like hairy cannonballs Like an unfriendly jewelled bear Like sub-tropical flying-flowers Like an absurd corbelled monument that commemorated nothing Like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate
INDIAN WRITERS
For me they divide into the plain
R K Narayan Rohinton Mistry Adiga Aravind Sunjeev Sahota Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
And the flowery
Salman Rushdie Nadeem Aslam Kiran Desai And Arundhati Roy
Which is not to say that the plain can’t turn a delightful phrase or the flowery can’t think up a decent story.
I CONFESS I AM A LITTLE SURPRISED
That The God of Small Things gets so much readerlove as it does. It’s eccentric and often confusing, maddeningly detailed and slow-burning and I can imagine it won’t be everybody’s bright green mocktail with a paper umbrella. The 336 pages can read like 500 at times, because there’s an intricate (disrupted, fractured) sequence of events and understandings to be fitted together, and the author takes her own time.
So, I know it won the Booker Prize, but don’t let that put you off....more
Dostoevsky did five years of hard labour in a Siberian prison for being in the wrong room at the wrong time. When he was released in 1854 he had to seDostoevsky did five years of hard labour in a Siberian prison for being in the wrong room at the wrong time. When he was released in 1854 he had to serve time in the Siberian army and he was still banned from publishing anything. This memoir of his time in the joint finally came out in 1861 and it was a big hit. It was the first book to reveal all the horrors of life inside. Dosto said to his brother
there will be the depiction of characters unheard of previously in literature
Maybe he had in mind the prisoner he called Sirotkin. Prison homosexuality isn’t a modern invention (I know you didn’t think it was) but Dosto couldn’t address this subject directly, so he very delicately sketches one particular prisoner, Sirotkin - how handsome he is, how he looks well in a woman’s dress, how he provides (unspecified) services to other prisoners. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought – wait, what was that again?
As with all these memoirs, there is some fictionalising, shaping, rearranging, but the point of The House of the Dead was to tell the truth. So there is no plot. It’s not a novel. Many chapters are
loose assemblages of anecdotes and essayistic fragments
(Max Nelson in the Paris Review)
Well, there is one thin framing device used for the book, it’s supposed to be the memoir of a fictional character who got ten years for murdering his wife. But that was included to avoid trouble with the official Russian censor. Contemporary readers took the book as “more or less a faithful account” of Dosto’s own experience.
LIFE LESSONS FROM SIBERIA
1) The prisoners long for meaningful work, most of them have a trade. The way to destroy their spirits is to force them into work with no point. 2) Prison tries to crush the inmates into total conformity but only succeeds in making their rebellious inner lives more real. 3) Anything can be a prison, the mind, the body, religion, your class, your nationality, anything. Who keeps you in those mind-forged manacles? Only you.
THE ANGUISH AND SOLACE OF FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Although there is no plot at all, this is the story of an intellectual whose radical politics in support of the lower classes forced him (by accident) into unsought and unwelcome intimacy with those lower classes, in the course of which he discovered an emotional and spiritual love for those he had only previously considered to be part of an abstract political theory. Before prison he had thought that the alleviation of the suffering of the peasants was the problem. As an effete literary journalist, prison reality hit Dosto like an express train. At first he hated all the other prisoners and they hated him because he was a “nobleman”.
After prison he thought the peasants themselves, their intense spiritual realities and their stoicism, were the solution. He slept and ate and lived each miserable moment with them for five years, his prejudices melted away, and this was how it changed him.
Joseph Frank says in prison he finds
a new understanding of the intense humanity and particular moral quality of those he had at first regarded with loathing and dismay
THIS MAY NOT BE THE DOSTOYEVSKY BOOK FOR YOU
I must admit even given that stark horrifying nature of the world described, the narrator can be waffly, repetitious and a little annoying. You will meet a parade of extraordinary characters but you know they aren’t going to come together into any kind of drama. Just like real life, people come and go and our narrator has no idea what happened to them.
I do not think Petroff can have ended well, he was marked for a violent end; and if he is not yet dead, that only means that the opportunity has not yet presented itself.
Fortunately we know what happened to Dostoyevsky. Four years after this he wrote Crime and Punishment....more
This wretched novel begins with the mugging of an old lady and it appears I may be in the process of repeating that loathsome crime as Dame Penelope LThis wretched novel begins with the mugging of an old lady and it appears I may be in the process of repeating that loathsome crime as Dame Penelope Lively was 78 when she wrote it. It is not nice to put the boot into such a poor defenceless old creature lying there with only a damehood, a Booker Prize and a few million quid. It’s a nasty job but somebody has to do it.
REMORSELESSLY BLAND
This book is a 248 page dictionary of English middle-class cliches. You’ve seen all the situations in the least amusing British comedies, you have met all the characters several thousand times before and everyone spouts relentlessly clapped-out uninhibitedly banal dialogue made up of every cutesy unctuous well known phrase or saying that would make you wrench your own teeth out if you heard them coming out of your own mouth.
The guy’s made off? Dodgy, I imagine. I hope he hasn’t stung you for too much.
You wouldn’t be doing yourself justice.
He’s right out of his league with these people.
I do wonder if it landed on the right desk.
What have I got to complain about?
We shouldn’t get set in our ways.
They all talk like this. As does Dame Lively when she narrates.
THEIR NOSES IN THE TROUGH
As we know the middleclass are all food snobs and love to eat stuff that other people couldn’t afford even if they’d heard of it and had the terminology explained. Dame Lively loves to (affectionately I am guessing) parody this element of her characters’ lives - or maybe she just like to indulge in food porn and this isn’t a parody :
It turned out over the crispy pork shoulder, celeriac puree, wild mushroom and poached egg, and the grilled John Dory fillets, Nicoise salad, banana salsa and mandarin and elderflower foam, he is still buying property for renovation.
TERMINALLY PALLID
This novel is hopeless. One of the main stories is about an affair between two interior decorators. I detect your eyes are glazing over now. As glaze they should. Another main character is Lord Peters, an ancient historian of the 18th century, who thinks he might like to take a crack at television. Most of the characters in this novel are played for semidemi-comedy, you know, not too broadly (because I think Dame Lively loves these people) but Lord Peters is played as farce. Cue scenes where sharp TV creative types collide with his bumbling antique obliviousness ha ha I think you could all write these scenes yourselves.
This novel is so colourless, so mild, so anodyne you could give it to your maiden aunt in 1933 and she wouldn’t spill a drop of her tea. By the half way point it had turned into a hate-read for me. I couldn’t stop! It was like a BBC Radio 4 comedy drama, and there are fewer worse things in life.
FLAP THOSE WINGS
Prior to composing this work, Dame Lively appears to have become fascinated by the butterfly effect, so she has her one incident (the mugging) cascade through the lives of these awful people in such a straightforward knee bone connected to the thigh bone way that you feel she is beating you over the head with her butterfly wings. She takes whole paragraphs to draw you the connecting diagrams. This is not subtle.
I see all my GR friends give this a lot of love. Perhaps they shrink from kicking an old lady when she’s down. But I don’t mind. Metaphorically speaking....more
Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing after that was going to be even half as good, probably. Anita Desai drew the short straw and she won’t be happy about that. Sorry, Anita. Your novel is okay-ish, that is, it’s not terrible, but er… well… hmmm….
Actually, between you and me, I didn’t think it was up to much. It gets a lot of Goodreads love but I could have done without it. I can’t think I would ever bitterly regret not having read this novel. Four middle-class kids grow up in Delhi, the parents are distant bridge-playing don’t bother me I’m busy types. The kids are frankly kind of cliched – arrogant son who expects sisters to obey his every whim, older plain Jane sister at war with everybody & taking all responsibility, younger pretty sister something of an airhead, youngest brother mentally impaired. He is obsessed with an old wind-up gramophone. He plays the same bunch of 78s over and over. That would get on your nerves. I like “Lili Marlene” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as much as the next guy but I couldn’t take them every day of the week. And I thought the number of times Anita Desai detailed this obsessive behaviour was verging on the obsessive itself.
Half the book is set in the present where the family has disintegrated – cue much moping and maundering about the past, the past oh the past and how the house needs repainting now and wasn’t it sad when the cow fell in the well; and the other half is in 1947 just before Partition when fortunately for this family they avoid all the mayhem.
One of the major conflicts in the story is when Bim (older sister) is trying to decide whether to sell the shares in their father’s insurance company. I mean, it’s not Dostoyevsky, is it.
I put off reading this for actual decades : 900 crammed pages about the well-to-do folk of an ordinary small English country town called Middlemarch. I put off reading this for actual decades : 900 crammed pages about the well-to-do folk of an ordinary small English country town called Middlemarch. I thought it might be tweedy. Jane Austen for those who wouldn't be caught dead reading P&P. . But also I suspected it would be a masterpiece. But a very verbose one. And yes, I was right. It is, and it is. And much of this tangled story is sad – there are two terrible marriages brilliantly described and there is a great scandal. But there’s an awful lot else. Lots.
GEORGE ELIOT, CHURCHGOING ATHEIST, UNMARRIED COHABITOR, VICTORIAN BESTSELLER
She has a grand style but she’s also funny :
He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons : it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable
Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won’t keep shape.
When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book.
When a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.
And she’s able to throw out one-liners like
Scepticism can never thoroughly be applied or else life would come to a standstill
Oh and she has a lovely vocabulary for those who enjoy dictionary diving – piluous, worreting, vinous and waternixie for instance.
GEORGE IN PERSON
One thing that really aggravates me about every single critic who ever wrote about George Eliot is that they never fail to describe her as ugly, as in, REALLY ugly. Horsefaced. Henry James, who you might have thought was the Vesuvius of equivocation, said she was “magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous.” And came up with h the word “equine” which means “like a horse”. I don’t think anyone else gets this treatment. Look in the mirror, Henry. No oil painting yourself.
THE INTRUSIVE NARRATOR
Like many Victorian authors, she comments on her own characters.
Pardon these details for once – you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb Garth
She calls another character “morally lovable”, and about somebody else she says “For my part I am very sorry for him”. And here she bursts into irritation with herself
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?
PRE-FREUDIAN DELICIOUSNESS
But I think the heart and soul of Middlemarch is the intimate and entirely convincing psychological portraits of these characters – many of which you might have met before in other novels– and this just shows that in the hands of a great novelist fairly stock characters (the frustrated intellectual, the hot-headed idealist, the wily banker, the comical clergyman, the scurrilous blackmailer) and pretty familiar plots (will this one marry that one? Will that one get cheated out of their inheritance? Will this one’s shameful past be exposed?) everything comes back to tremendous life. George Eliot kisses the sleeping beauty of the Victorian novel and all those grey shades take on deep and subtle colours and all the people start moving again and nodding and smiling and weeping. Here she is on one young lady’s vision of marriage :
In Rosamond’s romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would have nothing to do with vulgar people
And many pages later :
The Lydgate with whom she had been in love had been a group of airy conditions for her, most of which had disappeared, while their place had been taken by every-day details which must be lived through slowly from hour to hour, not floated through with a rapid selection of favorable aspects.
THE BEST PART OF MIDDLEMARCH
You can see she will suddenly move up a gear into a gear not known by average novelists when describing a character or situation, and a whole page becomes an effortless fusion of psychology and cosmology, she can dizzle your brain, make you high with her confident whole grasp of human intention and desire, I’d love to quote some of these passages but they are long. Here's a famous bit :
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
REALLY, DO I HAVE TO READ MIDDLEMARCH?
No you don’t. I very nearly didn’t! Patience is required, especially between pages 200 and 400. I thought there weren’t enough of things actually happening. More people should have died or had bizarre farming accidents. My Penguin edition is 900 pages, I see some editions are 600-700, the print must be microscopic. So this is BIG. You have been warned.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
If you’re a lovely young woman don’t marry a guy 25 years older than you who seems to be an impressive intellectual but who only wants to make lists....more
Djuna Barnes was quite obviously a tremendous person and lived a fairly spectacular life – born in a log cabin on a mountain (!) – father was a polygaDjuna Barnes was quite obviously a tremendous person and lived a fairly spectacular life – born in a log cabin on a mountain (!) – father was a polygamist and lived with two women and produced many children – four of her brothers were named Thurn, Zendon, Saxon and Shangar so Djuna fit right in there – she hardly got any education at all but in her 20s moved from upstate to NYC and very swiftly broke into journalism and THEN became the hot-shot reporter/feature writer – she interviewed James Joyce for example (Writing about a conversation with James Joyce, she admitted to missing part of what he said because her attention had wandered). After ten years in NYC she did ten years in gay Paree and after a lot of high living she hopped over to England in 1932-3 and wrote Nightwood, a profoundly weird novel.
I am gonna read a biography of Djuna Barnes, she sounds like Rebecca West’s fascinating gay sister. She sounds like a total scream. Alas then that Nightwood nearly made me scream. As I read it I could feel parts of my mind shutting down, like when they switch the lights off section by section in a large auditorium. Sentence by sentence the conviction grew upon me that I couldn’t understand more than ten percent of every page. For instance – some guy says :
Those who love everything are despised by everything, as those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city, the détraqués, the paupers; their good is incommunicable, outwitted, being the rudiment of a life that has developed, as in man’s body are found evidences of lost needs.
What even does that mean? Those who love a city become the shame of that city? Huh?
The narrator and the characters are fond of head-scratching aphorisms such as
A Jew’s undoing is never his own, it is God’s; his rehabilitation is never his own, it is a Christian’s.
Finally I’m way too dim-witted for this book. I can tell Djuna Barnes has a grand style and we would hope she probably knew what she meant at the time of writing, but maybe you had to be there. Try this single sentence – if you like it, you could be the next Djuna Barnes fan :
As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylization but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the corsage of a woman is made suddenly martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal: making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull’s eye of that which had a moment before been a buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make)—so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the altar he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor....more
MASTER: Well, I was concerned. Anything could happen to a little cat out aMASTER: Where were you all last night?
HATTER: I don’t have to tell you that.
MASTER: Well, I was concerned. Anything could happen to a little cat out all night in the cold.
HATTER: (Eyeroll.) Pardon me, master, but what I do in my time off is my own concern. I was quite all right, thank you very much.
MASTER: Well, pardon me for being concerned. Anyway, I wanted to ask what you thought about this book.
HATTER: Not that much, to be frank.
MASTER: What? It’s a classic.
HATTER: Oh sure but everything old is a classic these days. I bet you’re a classic by now.
MASTER: Well anyway, we have to write a review of it, so come on, what should we say?
HATTER: Look I was meaning to mention this. How come OUR reviews always go under YOUR name?
MASTER: Er, well, it’s easier.
HATTER: Easier for you to take all the credit you mean?
MASTER: No, no… just easier…administratively…
HATTER: Well I should open my own Goodreads account. One of these days I will, if I could be bothered. One of these days.
MASTER: Well, anyhow, I was thinking that we should say something like “the metafictional games of this eighteenth century French box of tricks can’t fail to charm the 21st reader expecting---”
HATTER: Blah blah blah. That’s all very true except that it’s not true.
MASTER:?
HATTER: The problem was the same in the 18th century and it is in the 21st century, my dear “master”. When you boot out any shred of plot and you import endless non-stories and digressions in its place, and you cast the whole novel as a long rambling conversation between Jacques and his “master”, you get what you paid for.
MASTER: We can’t say that, it’s a beloved classic.
HATTER: But it’s (whispers) rather dull. Also (purring sinisterly) it’s more than a trifle Shandyesque. I mean, Tristram Shandy is the big one, right?
MASTER: I don’t know…. It’s all very well being bold and iconoclastic, but….
HATTER: Do you not think my tail is long and magnificent? And my whiskers splendid?
MASTER: Well… now that you mention it….
HATTER: Well why don’t you write a novel about me then? Forget all that reviewing. Come on, let’s do Instagram.
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