A Modern Middlemarch

In the country all was dead still. Little stars shone high up, little stars spread far away in the floodwaters, a firmament below. Everywhere the vastness and terror of the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief while by the day, but which returns, and will remain at last eternal, holding everything in its silence and its living gloom.

Sons and Lovers is the unease you feel at night, the light in the morning when you set off for work, and the still and quiet moments with your family. It is the way you question the path you are taking and where you wanted your life to go anyway. It is the mud stuck to your shoe, the wind tangling your hair and the salt on your lips.

Even with all the reading and thinking and discussing of Sons and Lovers that have made up a big part of my life over this last week, this is a novel that defies explanation. It is a gut novel, a spirit novel (and those are my favourite).

To try to make my point, here is a list of things this novel is said to be:

• A record of working class life
• An exercise in self-analysis and psychoanalytic theory
• A depiction of positive/negative roles for twentieth century men and women
• A critique of industrial capitalism and the transition between the agricultural past and the industrial future
• Realism

Honestly, it is all of these things, but it is none of them too. No one thing gets to the heart of it. When I was reading, I kept thinking that I felt like I was reading a very English novel – it is pastoral, natural, and really the sort of novel that was defined by the nineteenth century. It begins like Middlemarch: Spanning history and geography, social drama and conflict.

What makes Sons and Lovers a modern novel, or more modern than a George Eliot novel, is the content, the time. The world is changing. The traditions are there, the writing on nature is where D. H. Lawrence is his most beautiful. But the bulk of the book is borne out of the twentieth century tribulations of a young creative soul from a working class background. (Hello, Joyce, secretly appearing in all my posts.)

The most interesting parts of this book were the conflicts between different kinds of love – familial, soulful, romantic, passionate, friendship. Paul, the second son, has a relationship with his mother that you could compare to the attachment of a young child. He has no desire to live with any woman other than her.

Lawrence describes the two of them sitting together:

They were both very happy so, and both unconscious of it. These times, that meant so much, and which were real living, they almost ignored.

The mother/son bond is something that critics highlight as an autobiographical element. From reading around a bit, it seems that whilst Lawrence considered the book a tragedy in the classical sense, he was offended by the (inevitable) Oedipal comparisons. I think most of his female characters were quite one-dimensional except for Mrs Morel. He writes the women in the book to be a bit like men, but with absences. A lot of the book was exploring what defines women and men; how are they different and how do they live together.

“Here’s the sea-coast morning, big and permanent and beautiful. There is she, fretting, always unsatisfied, and temporary as a bubble of foam. What does she mean to me, after all?

Yes, sometimes the writing was obvious and a lot of the time I felt like rolling my eyes. Yes, I really think Lawrence was capable of writing women as well-rounded as men and I really wish he had done. Yes, a lot of the time this book made me feel sad.

However. Sons and Lovers, you were such an unexpected joy.

Edit: I read this with o, whose writing is as impeccable as her literary taste. Here is a link to her excellent review of Sons and Lovers.

Thoughtful Reading

So often when I pick up a book, I expect to finish it having learnt something. I anticipate starting at the beginning of a story, following its thread and eventually saying goodbye. Is this a Western idea? Is it the majority? There is a tendency to want a book to be more than ink and paper. Hazel in The Fault in Our Stars becomes obsessed with the idea that the characters in her favourite novel would have gone on to live their lives after the final page.

What if we don’t think of books and stories in this way? Or, more to the point, how do we read books that don’t follow this pattern? Last month I read Thousand Cranes by a Japanese writer called Yasunari Kawabata. Reading it made me realise the expectations I have about reading, because the story didn’t conform to them. Not in a crazy Ulysses way, I might add, just in an unsettling, slightly dissatisfying way. The lack of satisfaction wasn’t the book’s fault either – it just wasn’t written to be read the way I read. People collided and parted, formed relationships, led seemingly normal lives, but there was an air of impenetrability to the text: Personal history wasn’t explained and daily life was shielded by a culture so different to my own that I needed an interpreter.

Difficult reading, it seems, is not only composed of long, old, European texts. A challenging book (and Thousand Cranes is only a hundred or so pages) for me, turned out to be something that asked more questions than it answered. So I read a few books that aren’t Classics – teen fiction and more modern books. Side note: If you find yourself even a little bit tempted to read Heft by Liz Moore then do it, because it is excellent. Don’t, however, read Skios by Michael Frayn because it doesn’t deliver the Wodehouse-ian capers it promises.

This afternoon, huddled under a blanket and only occasionally braving to stretch a slippered foot into a beam of sunlight, I read Cloud Atlas thoughtfully, eagerly, and not pressured by its unconventional structure. This book is so clever, so inspiring, a real humanist feat of joy: The word and its history is huge, whereas people are small but never insignificant. 

Here is one of my favourite parts:

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be tomorrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.

Perhaps if I hadn’t started reading thoughtfully I would have missed out.

I’ll come back to you, classics list, I’m just coming back the long way round.

Queer, Sultry Summers

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

This morning I felt like reading The Bell Jar. The opening line has stayed with me, stuck in my mind, ever since I first read it standing in a book shop. I don’t know when or where (I would guess I must have been about fourteen, I could be wrong), but I haven’t read a book that has as memorable a first line since.

I suppose I read The Bell Jar three or four times as a teenager and I loved it for Esther’s voice. I loved the way she opened up, right down to her bones. When I read the book again this morning, I was struck by the tiny details I remembered as clearly as if I’d read it yesterday: the caviar and chicken slices, the author eating his salad with his fingers, the sheath dress, the clear vodka, the pocketbooks, the scene about ‘water-repellant coats’, the swimming, the interpreter.

I love the story she reads about the fig tree – each fig represents an opportunity, but instead of enjoying one, any of them, they wrinkle and rot before her eyes. Beneath the surface, particularly during the first half of the book, haven’t we all felt like Esther? Her fear about the future, her inability to pick one thing to be is something I think about too – and I don’t think I am the only one!

This is a book to grow up with, I read it completely differently to how I read it as a teenager and have enjoyed it all the more. It is nice on this quiet Tuesday to have something so unique yet so familiar to think about.

A Single Green Light, Minute and Far Away

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.

This is everything that is amazing about The Great Gatsby. I first read it in high school and haven’t picked it up since, but I always remembered how this one little light could come to represent all hope, nostalgia, melancholy and loss all at once. How remarkable is that?

Nick Carraway compares Gatsby’s dream of Daisy from across the dock to the Dutch sailors that sailed towards the New World. A dream that was close enough to see but completely unattainable. I love the comparison between Gatsby’s all-consuming quest for wealth and status with the explorers. They saw some green, virgin earth but that only existed in their minds: The land had a history all of its own, just like Daisy has in the years Gatsby has been away creating himself. You can’t colonise innocently, just like you can’t achieve dreams that reinvent the past. Gatsby managed to reinvent himself, but he could never undo his own history.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. […] No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

Whist the force of Gatsby’s dreams is at times superhuman, Fitzgerald’s book is based around the incredibly human trait of never being satisfied and how that fits into the American ideal if you work had you can achieve anything.

The book is very firmly of the twenties but is timeless all the same. You can be seduced by these amazing parties which on the outside are dazzling and the people are witty with cocktails in hand, but getting closer it turns out nobody is really enjoying themselves. They are all racing, all the time, against each other to get more – to say more, to see more, to have more. No amount of glitter can hide the ugliness underneath. Is history on a loop? Did we ever learn from Gatsby?

I really enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby again because I had the luxury or reading with the intention of looking for the green light. The story was as good as I remembered from all those years ago but I had forgotten how slim a book it is. Surely a testament to Fitzgerald’s writing: He  says exactly enough in exactly the right words.

The Weekend When My Boyfriend Decided I Have Emotional Problems

I have had the best and most awful weekend. As previously mentioned I spent quite a bit of time on Friday weeping about Jean Valjean. A completely legitimate activity, I’m sure you’d agree. On Saturday evening, Apocalypse Now was on TV, which I accidentally also cried at. This is much less legitimate, but I will try to excuse myself on the grounds that (a) I haven’t seen it before and (b) I’m clearly still very upset about Jean Valjean.

But then came Sunday and I read this:

And I felt ALL OF THE THINGS. I started off laughing out loud, quoting bits, being impressed at witty dialogue. Then I moved onto bawling. Yes, I knew it was coming – cancer teens falling in love is always going to end in tears. So many tears. And then I spent the next four hours watching John Green videos on youtube and now I must proclaim that John Green makes me feel like a teenage girl about how much I love him.

I read this in a few hours, it is clever, powerful, emotional and thought provoking about situations I don’t spend much time thinking about. Here are some snippets that (hopefully) might be interesting:

• The Fault in Our Stars has a fictional epigram like The Great Gatsby
• There is a hamster called Sisyphus (check your Greek mythology – I didn’t have to, my brother explained it)
• The title is taken from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings”. This is interesting by itself as usually when people talk about a fault in the stars, they mean it as though there is some predestined flaw that prevents something from happening. Obviously the words with the rest of the sentence mean something else altogether.

So yes, this is a book technically for teenagers. However, when I was a teenager I found books with this irreverent, witty, Dawsons Creek style eloquent chatter unrealistic and a bit intimidating. I wanted to know about things and be able to talk about them profoundly and have original thoughts but instead, along with pretty much all real teenagers I was jumbled up and shy and read a lot of books. Luckily for me, I’m not a teenager anymore, I’m fully fledged into my mid twenties and whilst I am still shy, I can get my words out. (Plus I now have the option of writing them down and putting them on the Internet.) My point is that I enjoyed John Green’s punchy style because I know teenagers don’t really talk like that but I also know that they’d kill to be able to. If this kind of dialogue and typing in capitals when EXCITED  irritates you (an understandable opinion, but not one I share) then you probably won’t enjoy this book, even with its aforementioned cleverness and importance.

On a slight side note, if you were a teenager like I was and have retained a massive part of your introvertedness then I would also recommend Susan Cain’s Quiet. I read it towards the end of last year after reading Lucy’s excellent review and it is brilliant. I’m not sure why I never got around to writing about it in a separate post – perhaps I will. It is all about how introverts are sidelined in business and school environments because of our culture’s exaggerated worshipping of the gift of the gab. It is thoughtful, rang true and has encouraged me to be a tiny bit braver.

I won’t lie, I’m about to leave the house and I fully intend to come back with another John Green book. So as to not completely lose the tone of Charlotte Reads Classics let me assure you that I am currently reading The Great Gatsby (albeit because John Green mentioned it in one of the million videos I watched yesterday) and still have a post about Ethan Frome to write.

There will be classics again, I promise!

When the Beating of Your Heart Matches the Beating of the Drums

Let us understand one another. Are we weeping for all innocents, all martyrs, all children, whether low-born or of high estate? Then I weep with you. But, as I said, we must then go back far beyond ’93 and Louis XVII. I will weep with you for the children of kings if you will weep with me for the children of the people.

The culmination of all my reading in 2013 ended at midnight, when I finished Les Misérables. I won’t lie, I was openly weeping. Finishing this book has managed to be both the highlight and biggest loss of January. Yes, there is always great satisfaction in completing such an iconic (and long) classic but I am devastated because book that hasn’t left my side in all this time is over.

Reading Hugo for the first time reminds me of Tolstoy because of the underlying philosophy that seeps through the story. From this book (and Anna Karenina) I think that their ideas are quite similar: The best you can do in life is to love other people and God, and being good and being happy are the same thing. Levin’s spiritual awakening is not unlike Valjean’s early encounter with the Bishop. This philosophy, whether it concerns the muzhiks or French peasants, at its simplest level should extend to politics. The suffering of the wretched all comes down to the government or the King not loving the people. This contrast of law and love is excellently and unpreachingly drawn between Jean Valjean and Javert. Both men are doing what is right, but one stands for human kindness, the other for duty.

A brief timeline of my reading experience would go as such:

• Part I Fantine: This is really good, even the bit about the Bishop. Excited.
• Part II Cosette: This is Anna Karenina style good. This book is amazing! Why do people not like it?
• Part III Marius: I don’t like him, more Jean Valjean please.
• Part IV The Idyll in the Rue Plumet and the Epic of the Rue Saint-Denis: Well, quite good but this is dragging on a bit.
• Part V Jean Valjean: I CAN’T STOP CRYING

What makes Les Misérables so great? Jean Valjean. In my humble opinion, he is the greatest character in any book I’ve ever read and is definitely the benchmark for all literary greatness. Seriously, you should read this book just for Jean Valjean, an ex-convict whose journey takes him to represent the best values of humanity. I’m way too close to the end of the book to write about him properly because I just want to write in capitals and gush relentlessly. HE IS THE BEST MAN. During twenty or so years he overcame his hatred for the society that refused to see past his so-called crimes. His character is an amazing feat of writing, with a perfect ending.

The only aspect of this book, really, that prevents it from becoming an absolute favourite is that there is so much in it slowing down the action – when I really really really needed to know what was happening to Jean Valjean I found it hard to read twenty pages on Paris’ sewer system. The topical essay style sidelines were interesting, but the highlight for me was definitely the plot. Well, the plot involving Jean Valjean anyway.

Yesterday evening I went to see the film and I really enjoyed it. Sadly I had to leave for the cinema with thirty-three pages left unread but luckily I had pretty much read all the plot in the film. I love the songs from the musical (although a lot of the singing was far from perfect) but the main things that stood out were that the film was very beautifully shot and very well cast. However, despite being a good few hours long it was so shallow, compared to the terrifying depths of Hugo’s novel.

Hats off to Hugh Jackman, who was totally what I wanted Jean Valjean to be.

I’ll just say it again: He’s so good, you should really read about him.

Clarissa, Or, The True Story of My Reading in 2012

Merry Christmas! I hope it was wonderful for everyone. Mine was a very relaxing couple of days with family and I enjoyed it immensely.

As Christmas seems a concluding event to the year, it seemed especially satisfying that on Boxing Day I finished reading Clarissa. Yes, ours had been a year long affair, but like her family I neglected her terribly in the summer months. Now it is all over I feel quite sad but luckily I have the sense of achievement for comfort. Clarissa is an excellent read. Yes, really. If you want to be convinced to buy it, this is o’s post that convinced me.

Very well read.

When I started reading it back in January I was overwhelmed. The language was tricky and dense and despite my enthusiasm not a lot was going on in terms of plot. I read a few pages here and there until April, when I put the book down. And it stayed down. From time to time I would look at it sitting on my bookshelf and feel a bit guilty, but I started my War Books project so I wasn’t inspired to pick it back up. I knew that to finish it, I would have to read nothing but Clarissa until the bitter end and I wasn’t in the mood. Then came November and the awareness that I would have to start now or never if I didn’t want to be dragging my old reads into the new year. Funnily enough, I had managed to stop at just the moment Clarissa gets exciting. (Clever, me.) I made my schedule and stuck to it – actually I beat it slightly – and here we are.

Clarissa has got to be the ultimate classic: One of the very first European novels and one of Jane Austen’s favourite writers. I’m not quite sure why it is so neglected. Yes, it is incredibly long but that doesn’t stop us reading War and Peace or Les Misérables. Rather amusingly, in the Author’s Note at the end Richardson justifies the length of the novel by claiming that the details are what makes the story realistic and enjoyable, therefore why would you complain about getting a complete picture? (Incidentally on the Jane Austen note, there is a clergyman who is sent to check up on Clarissa who I’m sure must have been a basis for Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice.)

I wasn’t sure I would warm to Clarissa herself in the early stages because she’s so virtuous. I completely did, though. I fell for her hook line and sinker. I don’t want to spoil the plot for anyone still ploughing through it, but what other end could there have been for her? And for Lovelace? The way the family separates and takes sides is so convincing and so much more interesting from only getting it through odd perspectives. I took sides too – I was always pleased when I turned the page and the next letter was one from Miss Howe or Mr Belford. The presence of Richardson at all was slightly mystifying because it really, honestly felt like I was reading real letters. Perhaps an obvious comment to make, but the characters are like Tolstoy’s – genuine people who change and adapt over time.

For a lot of this book I was only looking forward to finishing: I was counting pages and scheduling time. However, when I realised I was onto the final ten pages, I was gutted. I was so sad that something I had been carrying around and thinking about all year was leaving me. Read Clarissa for its characters and richness, for it’s often surprising plot, for its family drama, for its place in history, for its descriptions of a world far removed yet not so dissimilar from our own.

Just make sure you read it.

Wait, Are You Dickens?

This is the most readable thousand page novel I’ve read. Not the best, but the quickest and the most indulgent: The Quincunx is seriously gripping with a serious plot. I freely admit that I am more interested in atmosphere than action so The Quincunx was a refreshing change… because it has the most complicated mystery plot of any book I’ve ever read before and I’ve never found a family tree of characters quite so crucial.

Yes, every review mentions Dickens and Wilkie Collins but how do you talk about a Victorian novel with a vast array of characters and a damn good mystery without claiming the author was influenced by either? I loved that Palliser had clearly wanted to include a huge spectrum of Victorian society into this book – aristocrats, merchants, traders, sewer divers (yes, really), servants in great houses, laundry women and an unusual band of misfits living in a half built neighbourhood. The parts of the book that really grabbed me were surprisingly mundane – as poverty hits John and his mother have to wake up each morning worrying about how to get food for the day and shelter for night. I think a really good writer can make the simplest of details interesting and this section of the story reminded me of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

I loved it, even though John as a child was exasperating and his mother is just so stupid, right up until the end. Don’t worry – I’m remembering not to put any hint of spoilers in. The ending is not unlike the ending of Great Expectations or The French Lieutenant’s Woman in that it can be read as ambiguous or just plain unsatisfying. To be honest, the bigger problem I had towards the end of the book is that there were just too many twists and turns and important details saved until the very end. Don’t get me wrong the plot is hard to follow at the best of times, but the last hundred or so pages threw me off completely.

In spite of this I still really enjoyed the book and was more than happy to have invested so much time in reading it. In fact, if I didn’t have so many other books to read not to mention a pressing Clarissa schedule, I probably would have started it again from the beginning. There is so much in it that I haven’t even mentioned the book’s mathematical layout, the lost story within a story or the mystery itself! Not a classic per say, but definitely an interesting read in comparison to some well known and loved authors.

I Have Been a Waif for Twenty Years

And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe – I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!

Always, always, always read your favourite books more than once. I fell in love with Wuthering Heights as a teenager because it was wild. A passionate, emotional book that every stroppy teenager can’t fail to identify with. As an adult – it is so much better. Everything that was difficult the first time (mainly who was related to who, and how) was simple, which meant I could pay attention to parts previously hidden.

I think the biggest thing about Wuthering Heights is confusion at its reputation for being a love story. Yes, Catherine and Heathcliff have no ordinary connection but I can’t help thinking that people who list them as a great couple must be mad! I had forgotten quite how horrible Heathcliff is and that really the book is about the very worst of human emotions: Jealousy, betrayal, revenge. What I really enjoyed during this particular read was the cathartic nature of younger Catherine and Hareton’s relationship. I found it much more touching than I did the first time.

I just really love Wuthering Heights. I can’t write about it in any way that does it justice because it is one of my everything books. It has fantastical depths and unrestrained brilliance and it never leaves you. When I was reading it, I felt like I was Lockwood too – looking in on this tiny rural society. Just read it . And then read it again.

I had an excellent Saturday – spent walking from Haworth to Top Withens, a ruin said to have inspired Emily Brontë when she was writing Wuthering Heights. Luckily, despite being absolutely FREEZING, not only did it not rain, there were even sporadic bouts of sunshine. The walk started in Haworth village and was a seven mile round trip across open moors like this:

Top Withens is next to that tiny tree in the distance!

I visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum again but didn’t take any photos because I couldn’t beat the amazingly atmospheric mist that had descended when I went last year.

I am reading Shirley by Charlotte Brontë at the moment, although I haven’t read enough yet to talk about it. I think in terms of Brontë-love The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is still my favourite, closely – very closely – followed by Wuthering Heights.

Further reading: I love this Guardian review.

A Return to War With Pat Barker

The other day I realized – this is going to sound really mad – what I really think, deep down, is that the dead are only dead for the duration. When it’s over they’ll all come back and it’ll be just the same as it was before.                      – Toby’s Room

Lessons learned from reading Toby’s Room and Life Class by Pat Barker: read them in the right order. I didn’t. So a word to the wise: Life Class comes first. The two books combined follow a group of art students from 1912 until 1917. As in Regeneration there is a mix of medicine and art, this time focusing on Henry Tonks’ medical drawings of facially wounded soldiers. I enjoyed the two books together, much more than I liked each one separately. There are quite a range of topics covered in the two books but the parts I found most interesting were clashes between the changing attitudes between the younger generation and their parents.

A few Sundays ago I went to see Pat Barker speak at the Imperial War Museum and I’ve tried to remember all the interesting parts!

On History

Barker was always drawn to the First World War because she was brought up by her grandparents. Her Grandfather had a bayonet wound which although she thought was something every Grandfather had is actually very rare, only accounting for about 3% of injuries. She would see this wound every weekend whilst he was washing before going to the British Legion social club. She said it wasn’t pretty, or smoothly healed like a scar from an operation might be. It made such a big impact on her when she was young because he would never speak about it: “best way to get an author inspired – keep silent”.

She was asked about why she writes about real people, and whether it was difficult to speak for them. She replied that using real people as in her novels meant that she had to be as accurate as possible and not say anything damaging to their reputation. Incidentally her favourite character is a real person too – Dr. Rivers.

The best part of writing about real people is how they react to her fictional characters. For example, in Regeneration everyone in the hospital (including Sassoon and Owen) idolised Rivers and the work he was doing to treat psychological war wounds. Therefore she needed Billy Prior to be the fictional difficult patient. He was a way to force Rivers to expose parts of his personality and psychology that he wouldn’t normally reveal.

On Feminism

Someone asked Barker whether she was still the gritty northern feminist that wrote her earlier novels like Union Street. The answer was yes – but only as far as she ever was. She said that because she was originally published by Virago this persona was slightly enforced. She would call herself a feminist but her feminism doesn’t exclude men – hence the focus on male characters in her writing today.

On Writing

Her philosophy is to just ‘keep on going until the end’ because there is no point polishing and polishing a couple of paragraphs if you don’t have anything else to work on. What I found most interesting was something she said about writing a vivid atmosphere. She started by explaining that the Author has to act as the reader’s five senses. Furthermore, when you are writing more often than not you are in the mind of one of your characters. To give a sense of place you should pick out the one detail that your character would notice. The example she gave was that a couple with infertility problems might go into a house and immediately notice a toy lying under a sofa. The challenge is to work out what your character would see.

Had I never read a Pat Barker book I would have been won over – she came across as clever, interesting and secretly shy. The only downside is that she says she doesn’t read WWI fiction: I was hoping to get some recommendations for my reading list, but alas I will just have to read more of her books instead.