How is one to feel about a protagonist who frequently displays signs of elitism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia, finds himself worryingly attracted toHow is one to feel about a protagonist who frequently displays signs of elitism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia, finds himself worryingly attracted to young girls, has no goal in life except to make himself useful to damsels in distress, and drinks away his career and marriage, ending up a mere shadow of his former self? Is one supposed to regard him as a tragic hero? Is one to sympathise with him? And if one does sympathise with him, is that because of the way he was written, or rather because we are aware that he is a thinly veiled version of the author himself, a giant of early-twentieth American literature?
Those were some of the questions I pondered after reading Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald's last finished novel, and possibly his most autobiographical one. Set in France and Italy in the 1920s, it tells the story of two wealthy American expats, Dick and Nicole Diver (largely based on the author and his wife Zelda), who seem to others the most glamorous couple ever, 'as fine-looking a couple as could be found in Paris', but are finding their private lives increasingly less glamorous. We first see the couple through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, a young and naive American actress holidaying in Europe. Rosemary falls madly in love with suave Dick, but also admires angelic Nicole. After about 130 pages during which Rosemary hangs out with the Divers and nearly embarks on an affair with Dick, the narrative stops and goes back in time to tell the story of Dick and Nicole's marriage, which is considerably more complicated than Rosemary realises. Nicole, it turns out, has a history of mental illness, and Dick is both her husband and the doctor treating her -- a recipe for disaster, obviously.
Being a tale of needy people, broken relationships, loss of purpose and wasted potential, Tender Is the Night is quite a depressing read, and one's appreciation of it largely depends on one's tolerance for that kind of thing. If you like your books bleak and tragic, chances are you'll appreciate Tender Is the Night. If not, you might want to steer clear of it.
I generally love a good tragedy, but I confess I wasn't overly impressed with Tender Is the Night. For a book which has garnered so many rave reviews, I found it remarkably flawed. Fitzgerald himself seems to have somewhat agreed with me. Despite referring to Tender Is the Night as his masterpiece and being shocked by its lack of critical and commercial success, he began reconstructing it a few years before his death, placing the flashback chapters at the beginning and making all the textual alterations required by this change. However, he died before he could finish the project, or perhaps he abandoned the project as not worth completing (no one seems to know for sure). A friend of his, Malcolm Cowley, then completed the revision, and for years this was the standard edition of the book. However, the Cowley version has fallen into scholarly disfavour (or so Penguin informs me), and several publishers, Penguin included, now use the first edition, the one that Fitzgerald thought needed revision. Apparently, there are no fewer than seventeen versions of the novel extant, which says much about how satisfied Fitzgerald was with his own work. My guess? Not very much.
I read a version based on the first edition of the book, and to be honest, I can see why Fitzgerald felt it needed some work. Tender Is the Night felt very disjointed to me. To a certain extent, this was because of the aforementioned non-linear structure, which felt a bit jarring to me. However, as far as I'm concerned, that is not the book's only problem, nor even its biggest one. What most annoyed me was the way in which the perspective keeps shifting. Fitzgerald uses an omniscient narrator in Tender Is the Night, but not consistently so; the story is always written from a certain character's perspective. Sometimes the perspective is Rosemary's, sometimes it's Dick or Nicole's; even the minor characters have stretches of the story told from their perspectives, often on the same page as a main character's perspective. To me, these shifts in point of view often felt haphazard, not to mention a little jarring. I didn't think they were particularly effective, either, as they hardly build on each other and don't provide any information that couldn't be gleaned from a 'regular' omniscient narrator. I may be in a minority here, but I think the book would have benefited from a more consistent approach to perspective.
The story itself is a bit haphazard, as well. It occasionally drags, it has little plot, and there are quite a few scenes and storylines which don't really go anywhere. Among several other seemingly unlikely scenes, the book contains a murder, a shooting and a duel, none of which is fully integrated into the story, and none of which is given proper significance. Scenes are introduced and then left so randomly that you have to wonder why Fitzgerald bothered to include them at all. At the risk of being unkind and judgemental, I guess that's what being an alcoholic will do for an author: it gives you wild ideas, but prevents you from carrying them out properly.
Which brings me to the characterisation. I'll probably get a lot of flak for this, but I felt that Fitzgerald's vaunted characterisation was a bit 'off' in this novel. Many of the minor characters are sketchily drawn, whereas the main characters are described well (sometimes brilliantly so), but never properly explained. While Fitzgerald does a good (and occasionally excellent) job of sharing his protagonists' feelings, he hardly ever bothers to explain their motivations. This particularly bothered me in the parts written from Dick Diver's point of view, as Dick is supposed to be a psychiatrist. By rights, he should be analysing people actions and motivations all the time, and asking lots of questions. However, Dick hardly ever asks questions. He does not even ask himself questions. He never wonders why he is so drawn to young girls, or what it is in him that causes him to need to be their saviour. He just observes other people in a way of which any intelligent person (trained psychologist or not) would be capable, and then describes their behaviour in a few felicitous phrases. For this and other reasons, I didn't buy Dick Diver as a psychiatrist. Fitzgerald may have read up on psychology (and undoubtedly learned a lot from the doctors who treated his own wife), but I never found his alter ego convincing as a psychiatrist, let alone a brilliant psychiatrist. To me, Dick has 'writer' written all over him.
It's a pity I kept finding such flaws, because Tender Is the Night obviously had the potential to be amazing. It has all the right ingredients: interesting (albeit snobbish and bored) characters, powerful themes, evocative (albeit frequently vague) writing, you name it. And the story certainly doesn't lack in pathos. It is quite harrowing to watch Dick Diver, a supposedly brilliant and popular man who never lives up to his potential and is increasingly torn asunder by money, alcoholism and his failed marriage to a mentally ill woman, go to pieces, becoming, in his own words, 'the Black Death' ('I don't seem to bring people happiness any more'). The fact that this was Fitzgerald writing about himself, about his own frustrations and shattered dreams, adds considerable poignancy to the reading experience. Even so, Tender Is the Night ended up leaving me fairly cold, as I simply didn't care for Dick enough to be genuinely moved by his descent into failure. While others may find Dick a swell guy, I myself found his complacency and lack of purpose grating, his alcoholism exasperating, and his brilliance skin-deep. I seem to be alone in this opinion, but I stand by it.
In summary, then, I enjoyed and admired aspects of Tender Is the Night, but I don't think they add up to a great whole. While I appreciate Fitzgerald's brutal honesty and the masterful way in which he evokes mutual dependence, isolation and frustration, I can't shake off the feeling that the book could have been much better than it ended up being. And this pains me, as I hate wasted potential as much as Fitzgerald himself seems to have done. As it is, Tender Is the Night is in my opinion not just a book about wasted potential, but an example of wasted potential. It is fitting, I suppose, but no less disappointing for that.
3.5 stars, rounded down to three because I really didn't like it as much as many of the books I have given four stars lately. ...more
One of the things I like best about the great nineteenth-century Russian authors is how they can have their characters say outrageously grandiose thinOne of the things I like best about the great nineteenth-century Russian authors is how they can have their characters say outrageously grandiose things without making them sound ridiculous. Such are their characters' passions and romantic ideals that they get away with statements which in Western European or American literature would draw a guffaw from the reader. Take, for instance, this violent outburst by Andrei Kovrin, the schizophrenic hero of Chekhov's story 'The Black Monk':
'I was going out of my mind, I had megalomania, but I was bright and cheerful, even happy. I was interesting and original. Now I've grown more rational and stable, but I'm just like everyone else, a nobody. Life bores me... Oh, how cruelly you've treated me! I did have hallucinations, but did they harm anyone? Who did they harm, that's what I'd like to know!'
Personally, I love that kind of stuff when it fits into the story, but I can see how a less romantically inclined reader might roll his eyes and go, 'Yeah, you tell 'em, buddy. Right on.' Russian characters have that effect on some people.
Of course, Kovrin is not just any character. He's an academic on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Advised by a doctor to take a break, he travels to the Crimea to visit an old friend, but doesn't actually stop working. Soon he gets so overworked that he begins to see and have ardent discussions with a black monk others can't see. A gothic and somewhat haunting tale exploring the relationship between genius and insanity ensues. Both Kovrin and his friend Pesotsky are manic, but Pesotsky's mania takes a more socially acceptable form than Kovrin's. Chekhov (who had hallucinations about a black monk himself and, like his hero, died at a young age because he kept working while suffering from TB) leaves it up to his reader to decide which of the various kinds of madness depicted in the story is worse. With its expert characterisation and oppressive mood, 'The Black Monk' is a good story, intense and compelling and quintessentially Russian. It's Chekhov at his best, and Chekhov at his best will never get old.
The second story in the volume, 'Peasants', is equally grim but more realistic. It centres on a man who, suffering from bad health and no longer able to support his family, travels from Moscow to the countryside village where he grew up, only to find that his parents have too much on their minds to look after him and his family -- a hard-drinking son, a slutty daughter-in-law, taxes to pay, and so on. And of course the local council is to blame for everything, because it wouldn't do to blame the vodka, would it? 'Peasants' paints a bleak picture of a society torn asunder by poverty and alcoholism. It rings true, and probably was -- Chekhov was a dcctor, and as such met many poor people. I don't think it's Chekhov's best story, but it's very readable, albeit depressing. Then again, I don't think anyone reads Russian literature for the cheer it brings to people's lives....more
Did you know they had lotteries back in the late eighteenth century? And did you know that lottery tickets cost so much back then that not-so-wealthy Did you know they had lotteries back in the late eighteenth century? And did you know that lottery tickets cost so much back then that not-so-wealthy people had to sell a cow in order to be able to afford a ticket? Neither did I, until I read Maria Edgeworth's 'The Lottery', a short story published as a booklet in the Phoenix 60p series.
Edgeworth, of course, was a contemporary and favourite author of Jane Austen's, who commended Edgeworth's Belinda in Northanger Abbey and sent the Irish-born author a (presumably autographed) copy of Emma upon its publication. Being an Austen fan, I naturally had to check out Edgeworth, whose Castle Rackrent, The Absentee and Belinda are considered minor classics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
'The Lottery' is about a likeable couple, Maurice and Ellen Robinson, who are talked into buying a lottery ticket by Mrs Dolly, Maurice's live-in aunt, and really do have to sell a cow to do so. Much to their surprise, they win five thousand pounds. Ellen wishes to save the money and go on living as they always have, but Maurice and Dolly spend lavishly. Needless to say, it doesn't end well. This is, after all, a morality tale, and a fairly unsubtle one at that.
I have to say I was surprised at the tone of the story, which seems incredibly modern for something that was written in 1799. Sure, five thousand pounds isn't the fortune it once was, and rich people are more likely to have fancy cars than horse-drawn carriages these days, but other than that, the story doesn't seem to have dated at all. Both the language and the subject matter are entirely recognisable to us, denizens of the twenty-first century, give or take a few 'prays' and 'forsooths'. And of course the moral (don't gamble!) is as pertinent today as it was two centuries ago.
'The Lottery' is a straightforward story, well told but not a great masterpiece. There is some fine comedy at the expense of Mrs Dolly, who likes her brandy, but like many eighteenth-century stories, 'The Lottery' is slightly too moralistic and self-righteous for its own good. Still, it's a perfectly agreeable introduction to Maria Edgeworth's work, and having read it, I look forward to reading her more famous books....more
A few years ago, Mark Haddon had a global hit on his hands with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a book written from the perspectiveA few years ago, Mark Haddon had a global hit on his hands with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a book written from the perspective of an autistic teenage boy. While I enjoyed The Curious Incident, I found it somewhat overrated, mostly because I didn't buy the teenage protagonist. Now Matthew Kneale (who wrote one of my favourite books of the last few years, English Passengers) has a shot at writing a book from a child's point of view, and as far as I'm concerned, he does a better job of it than Haddon.
When We Were Romans tells the story of Lawrence, a nine-year-old English boy whose father may or may not have committed heinous crimes against his family. When the story opens, Lawrence's mother, convinced that her ex-husband is stalking her, packs her two children into her little car and drives all the way to Rome, where she was happy before she got married. In Rome, Lawrence, his Mum, his little sister Jemima and his hamster stay with a succession of his mother's friends, and gradually a story emerges that is rather different from what it seems at first. It's a well-observed and well-told tale that seems mildly underwhelming at first but steadily works its way to a dramatic climax. The ending feels a little rushed, but it's still a reasonably powerful story that gets under your skin and stays with you for a bit.
When We Were Romans once again showcases Kneale's tremendous talent for inhabiting different characters. In English Passengers, he told his story from about twenty vastly different perspectives and largely got away with it. In When We Were Romans he sticks to one point of view, but it's a tricky one -- a child's. Kneale does a great job describing the journey through Lawrence's mind. His Lawrence is a creative and precocious child who is just a little too young to understand the world around him but nevertheless feels tremendously responsible and tries to look after his increasingly confused mother as best he can. Lawrence has many endearing traits, such as comparing everyone he meets to an animal and lapsing into little asides on outer space and Roman emperors. He's not too good to be true, though. Like all children, he has whims and tantrums. He nags, whines, envies his little sister and often feels unfairly treated, all in ways which ring very true to me. At times, Kneale goes a tad too far in his attempts to make Lawrence a credible child narrator (his erratic spelling and syntax are a bit much for my taste; I'm convinced a child as intelligent as Lawrence wouldn't spell one word in three different ways within one paragraph), but still, he comes up with a convincing child's point of view. More so than Haddon, whose Christopher was, in my opinion, far too self-conscious for his own good.
When We Were Romans isn't as ambitious and impressive as English Passengers, but it's more proof that Kneale really knows how to get into his characters' heads. Those who like good characterisation, the child's perspective and original family drama will love it....more
Great Expectations is one of my favourite Dickens novels. It's big but not overly drawn out; it's dark but full of brilliantly funny touches; and the Great Expectations is one of my favourite Dickens novels. It's big but not overly drawn out; it's dark but full of brilliantly funny touches; and the characters are tremendously memorable without ever slipping into the grotesque. In short, it's one of the best things Dickens ever wrote. His contemporaries might not have agreed, but hey, what did they know?
The central question in Great Expectations is what it means to be a gentleman -- whether the word refers to a man of money and manners or rather, more literally, to a man who is gentle and caring (I think we can all guess the answer to that). The protagonist, the poor orphan Pip (son of 'Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana, wife of the above'), initially believes the former, so when an unknown benefactor gives him a fortune with which to turn himself into a gentleman, he focuses on the outer trappings of the lifestyle and begins to despise the life he used to lead -- including his relatives, who are still leading it. For a while, he turns into an unbearable snob, but ultimately his better self prevails, and he ends up being a moral hero after Dickens' own heart. And the reader's, presumably.
As a story about status anxiety, Great Expectations is nearly unsurpassed. Dickens draws with great skill and psychological depth Pip's embarrassment at his lowly background, his shame of home and the lack of confidence it inspires in him. His snobbery, while unpleasant, is made understandable, and his sense of guilt at it makes up for much of it. Yet there's more to Great Expectations than a (still very relevant) wish for a cultural make-over. It's also a detective story, in that Pip has to find out where his unexpected fortune actually came from, and who the girl he loves, the stunningly beautiful but haughty Estella, actually is. Dickens ably weaves the psychological drama and the detective story together into an intense and compelling tale. For most of the book, the tone is rather dark, but there are brilliant flashes of humour in unnecessary (but highly entertaining) details and, of course, the characterisation. Melodramatic but impressive Miss Havisham is justifiably the most famous character of the book, but there are other inspired creations, such as the tough-as-nails attorney, Mr Jaggers, and his clerk, Mr Wemmick, who is two entirely different persons when he is at work and when he is at home with his Aged Parent. Furthermore, the novel boasts Joe Gargery, Pip's first father figure, whose speech patterns are just brilliant; the menacing convict whom Pip helps; and Estella, who is a living argument for why mentally unstable persons who have been greatly disappointed in life should not be allowed to raise children. They are all exquisitely drawn, and every bit as memorable as Pip's journey through Victorian society. Together they make Great Expectations an absolute classic -- one of the best novels to have come out of the Victorian era, I think. I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could, but since I can't, four will have to do. ...more
Wild Swans may well be the most depressing book I've ever read. Don't let that keep you from giving it a try, though, for by some strange mechanism, iWild Swans may well be the most depressing book I've ever read. Don't let that keep you from giving it a try, though, for by some strange mechanism, it also ranks among the most uplifting books I've read, chronicling as it does a courage, resilience and will to survive which are nothing short of riveting. I could sum the book up by saying it's the greatest ode to courage and resilience ever written, or that it's one of those rare books which make you despair of humanity and then go a long way towards restoring your faith in it, but no, I'm not going to leave it at that. I'm going to do this book justice, because damn it, it deserves it.
For those of you who missed the hype back in the early 1990s, Wild Swans is the true history of three generations of women living through the horrible nightmare that is modern Chinese history. One is the author herself, now a naturalised British citizen. The second is her mother, an earnest Communist who raised a large family at a time which was extremely bad for family life. The third is her grandmother, who was married off as a concubine to a warlord as a girl and lived to see her family suffer for this unfortunate connection again and again. Using these three extraordinary lives as her main focus, Jung Chang tells the history of China's even more extraordinary twentieth century, from the late Qing Dynasty in the first decade of the century to the relatively free 1980s, a period comprising the Republican era, the battle between the Kwomintang and the Communists, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It's gripping stuff even for those who know their Chinese history, and it blew me away when I first read it halfway through my Chinese degree, making me wonder (for the first time but not the last) whether I really wanted to devote the rest of my life to China. It took me two more years to decide that I did not, but this book, whose memory has always stayed with me, played a large part in that decision. To this day, I vividly remember the horror I experienced when I read the long section about the Cultural Revolution. It brought alive the terror of that particular episode of Chinese history better than any other book I'd read, and it shocked me to my core.
While Wild Swans is largely about the three women mentioned above, the most interesting person in the book (I hesitate to call him a character as he was obviously a very real person) is the author's father, a high-ranking cadre who genuinely believed in the Communist ideals and strove all his life to implement them in daily life. At first, he is infuriating in his refusal to grant his wife and children the privileges to which they are entitled as his relatives (on the grounds that to do so would amount to nepotism and corruption, which is precisely what the Communists are supposed to be trying to eradicate), but as the story progresses, you realise that there is something quite heroic about Mr Chang -- that he is, in his daughter's words, 'a moral man living in a land that [is] a moral void'. By the time the Cultural Revolution rolls around the corner, you feel such admiration for him that you'd personally drag him away from the humiliations and beatings he receives for sticking to his guns if you could, to prevent him having to experience that loss of faith and dreams which is bound to follow. His is a tragedy with a capital T, and it's harrowing -- one of the most painful things I've read, and then some.
Yet for all the personal struggles described in the book (and there are many of them), the main struggling character of Wild Swans is China itself. Chang does a great job chronicling what J.G. Ballard called 'the brain-death of a nation', sharing historical facts in a way non-sinologists will understand and showing the cruelty and mercilessness inherent in the Chinese -- or should that be humanity in general? She does a marvellous job describing the panic and unpredictability of the early Cultural Revolution, when absolutely everybody could be denounced at the drop of a hat, and when pettiness and lust for power reigned. Along the road, she provides fascinating insights into Mao Zedong's selfishness and megalomania, and into the hypocrisy and incongruity of the movements he set in motion, which brutalised human relationships like nothing else ever has. And all these atrocities she juxtaposes with the integrity and courage of her parents and grandmother, who get through it all with some hope and optimism left intact. It's a riveting story, and Chang tells it well.
If I have any complaints about Wild Swans, they concern the first few chapters and the romanisation of names. The early parts of the book, which deal with events the author did not witness herself, feel a bit aloof and lifeless. (It gets better once Chang starts telling about her parents, and once she reaches the part of the story to which she herself was privy (the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution), the book becomes quite unputdownable.) As for the romanisation, I wish the publisher had hired an editor skilled in Pinyin, as Chang's spelling of Chinese names is all over the place (something non-sinologists won't notice, but which is an eyesore to me). These are minor flaws, though, which hardly detract from the overall quality of the book. Wild Swans is an intensely compelling read -- moving, unsettling and unforgettable. It should be compulsory reading for everyone remotely interested in China, or in history in general. ...more
This is going to be the shortest review I've written on this site in a while. The reason I'm going to keep it short is because no description could poThis is going to be the shortest review I've written on this site in a while. The reason I'm going to keep it short is because no description could possibly do justice to this quintessentially English coming-of-age story which ranks among the most pleasant surprises I've had, book-wise. A summary would make it sound slight, trite and predictable, all of which it is, and would not reflect the fact that it's also funny as hell, charismatic, deliciously eccentric, Austenesque and so utterly charming that I quite literally had sore cheeks after reading it because I couldn't stop smiling at the delightful nonsense the incomparable Cassandra Mortmain spilled out on the pages. I'm not exaggerating here -- this book will charm the pants off you, especially if you happen to have two X chromosomes and a bad case of Anglophilia. It's what would happen if an early-twentieth-century Jane Austen were to grow up in a dilapidated castle and get into financial trouble, and that's all I'm going say about it, except that I want to be Cassandra Mortmain when I grow down. Only I think I'll write my book on a computer rather than sitting in the kitchen sink, because it would be so much more comfortable, thank you very much.
Is there a 'natural' state to which children revert when there are no parents around to keep an eye on them, and if so, are we allowed to judge and inIs there a 'natural' state to which children revert when there are no parents around to keep an eye on them, and if so, are we allowed to judge and intervene if that 'natural state' goes against society's ideas of what is natural and acceptable? That is the question raised (but not answered) in The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan's 1978 debut as a novelist. The 138-page novella is about four children who, following the deaths of their parents, decide to go on living together as if nothing had ever happened, so as not to be separated or put into an orphanage. Needless to say, this gives them rather more freedom than they're used to, and so they embark on some unusual paths...
Like many early McEwan stories, The Cement Garden is fascinating but not for the faint of heart. Those willing to immerse themselves in a bath of teenage lust, ennui, contrariness and cruelty will find it a gripping read; those who are easily put off by anything remotely twisted are likely to find it quite repulsive. Personally, I'm in the former camp. I can see why people would be disgusted by this book, but I found it quite mesmerising myself. In a weird way, it is both hyperrealistic and completely unrealistic, like a dark fairytale set in our own world but not completely part of it. Like the children it so vividly describes, it veers from rude and aloof to shockingly tender and intimate. The rude scenes are brilliantly honest and well-observed, while the intimate scenes (which are of an incestuous nature) are so hauntingly tender that they're actually quite beautiful and, well, understandable. So who are we to say that this particular kind of intimacy is wrong? It is, obviously, but in the strange universe McEwan creates here, it somehow feels right. That's a mark of genius, I think, even if it will leave conservative readers with a vile taste in their mouths. I doubt McEwan will ever write anything like this again, but as a jaw-dropping debut, it is quite unsurpassed, I think....more
Imagine, if you will, a sixty-plus lady dressed in minks who really wishes to lead a grand life but doesn't have the means to do so. A lady who wears Imagine, if you will, a sixty-plus lady dressed in minks who really wishes to lead a grand life but doesn't have the means to do so. A lady who wears silk dresses even in the rain, would rather go hungry than go without scent, and is convinced everything will be all right as long as one remains ultra-feminine and has plenty of charm. A lady who is so unbelievably selfish and greedy that she is actually offended when relatives in whom she has never shown much interest but from whom she has been sponging for years leave most of their money to their daughter rather than to her. That lady is Dolly, the eponymous 'heroine' of Anita Brookner's 1993 novel, whose life is narrated by her 18-year-old niece Jane. Jane dislikes Dolly, who seems rather contemptuous of her. At the same time, however, she is fascinated by her aunt, and like her mother and grandmother before her feels a sense of obligation towards Dolly which leads her to be rather more generous to her than most other 18-year-olds in her position would be. The mutually dependent love-hate relationship between these two very different women is the main subject of Dolly, which is basically an exploration of themes such as loneliness, family and family obligations. And love, for against the odds Jane and Dolly come to appreciate each other in the end, each in her own aloof, detached way.
Anita Brookner (who won the 1984 Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac, which I hope to read soon) has a style and psychological insight rather reminiscent of Henry James and Edith Wharton, a comparison further reinforced by the timeless, old-fashioned quality of her prose. Her portrait of a stolid upper-middle-class English family with a crass and provocative hanger-on gets off to a slow start, but gradually gains power and finishes strongly (although I could have done without the aside on the American feminists towards the end). I'd say it's a three-and-a-half star book rather than a four-star one, but in the absence of half stars I'll give it the benefit of the doubt -- mostly for its merciless portrayal of Dolly, who has to be one of the most selfish (yet alluring) characters in the history of fiction. Becky Sharp, eat your heart out!...more
I must have missed something. Either that, or some wicked hypnotist has tricked the world (and quite a few of my friends, it would seem) into believinI must have missed something. Either that, or some wicked hypnotist has tricked the world (and quite a few of my friends, it would seem) into believing that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a great novel. How did this happen? One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a great novel. In fact, I'm not even sure it qualifies as a novel at all. Rather it reads like a 450-page outline for a novel which accidentally got published instead of the finished product. Oops.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not disputing that Marquez has an imaginative mind. He does, unquestionably. Nor am I disputing that he knows how to come up with an interesting story. He obviously does, or this wouldn't be the hugely popular book it is. As far as I'm concerned, though, he forgot to put the finishing touches to his story. In his rush to get the bare bones on paper, he forgot to add the things which bring a story alive. Such as, you know, dialogue. Emotions. Motivations. Character arcs. Pretty basic things, really. By focusing on the external side of things, and by never allowing his characters to speak for themselves (the dialogue in the book amounts to about five pages, if that), Marquez keeps his reader from getting to know his characters, and from understanding why they do the things they do. The lack of characterisation is such that the story basically reads like an unchronological chronicle of deeds and events that go on for ever without any attempt at an explanation or psychological depth. And yes, they're interesting events, I'll grant you that, but they're told with such emotional detachment that I honestly didn't care for any of the characters who experienced them. I kept waiting for Marquez to focus on one character long enough to make me care about what happened to him or her, but he never did, choosing instead to introduce new characters (more Aurelianos... sigh) and move on. I wish to all the gods of fiction he had left out some twenty Aurelianos and focused on the remaining four instead. With three-dimensional characters rather than two-dimensional ones, this could have been a fabulous book. As it is, it's just a shell.
If I had to give a one-word response to the big, sprawling monster of a faux-Victorian novel that is The Crimson Petal and the White, it would be 'WOWIf I had to give a one-word response to the big, sprawling monster of a faux-Victorian novel that is The Crimson Petal and the White, it would be 'WOW'. (With capitals. Yes.) At 895 pages, it's a big book, and it's not without its flaws, but such is the quality of the writing, the characterisation and the staggering amount of research that went into it that I was enthralled from beginning to end and stayed up until 4am on a weekday night to be able to read the last four hundred pages. I don't regret the sleep I lost that night; if anything, I regret that there weren't four hundred more pages to stay up for. That's how much I liked the book.
So what's it all about? Well, it's hard to sum up an 895-page story in a few lines, but basically it's about an intelligent prostitute who lives in 1870s London, wheedles her way into a rich man's life and ends up changing several lives, not least her own. She's an appealing (albeit emotionally scarred and manipulative) heroine, and she's portrayed in admirable detail. So are all the other characters, who make up one of the finest casts since the heyday of Dickens. Randy gentlemen, cross-dressing prostitutes, society-obsessed ladies with brain tumours, would-be parsons tormented by sexual fantasies, love-starved children who grow up in the servants' quarters because their mothers can't be reminded of their existence, guards who spend all the days of their lives reciting news of deathly disasters, well-bred ladies who risk expulsion from polite society to help fallen women... they're all here, and they're drawn in shockingly intimate detail. All their thoughts, dreams and fantasies are spilled out on the pages, and for the most part they're riveting. Similar candour is employed in the descriptions of actions and places. Not content with simply providing lush descriptions of Victorian splendours (although he certainly does that, too), Michel Faber gives his book a distinctly modern feel by describing things no Victorian novelist in his right mind would ever have mentioned, such as, well, sex. The Crimson Petal and the White is full of highly inelegant sex scenes, liberally sprinkled with four-letter words. In addition, it features painstakingly detailed descriptions of unmentionable things like the heroine's skin disease, the sounds, sights and smells of London's red-light district, the vaginal douches with which prostitutes tried to prevent pregnancy, the look and smell of used chamber pots, a farting concert, and so on. This may sound off-putting, but the descriptions are so vivid and so, well, interesting that they greatly add to the authenticity and local colour of the book, presenting a truly kaleidoscopic view of London in the 1870s. The result is a rich and fascinating story which is at turns utterly Victorian and thoroughly modern, dirty and elegant, highbrow and lowbrow, disgusting and engrossing. It certainly isn't for the faint of heart, but in its own daring way, it's spectacular. I would even go so far as to call it mesmerising.
As for its shortcomings, well, I guess you could say the book is a bit jarring at times. Faber has an interesting tendency to introduce characters, devote many words to them, and then suddenly and quite randomly to kill them off or otherwise lose sight of them, thus making you wonder what their point was in the first place. In a way, the sudden deaths/disappearances are as realistic as the descriptions of the chamber pots and vaginal douches (after all, death does creep up on us very suddenly, and people do really vanish from our lives like that, don't they?), but it's an uncommon device in literature, and it's a bit jarring at times, especially since it's so thoroughly un-Victorian. Aren't storylines usually tied up neatly in Victorian novels?
Which brings me to the ending. Much has been written about the ending of The Crimson Petal and the White, which is as jarring and un-Victorian as they come. There is no 'Reader, I married him' here, much less a summary of what happened to the main characters after the final curtain. Instead, the story comes to an abrupt halt, leaving the main characters in medias res. Like many readers, I was initially put off by the ending, thinking that the narrator's sudden 'But now it's time to let me go' was a paltry reward for staying with him for nearly nine hundred pages. However, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the ending. After all, what could be more fitting in a book which is largely about fantasies than to leave the reader on a note which has him fantasising about what might have happened to the characters, weighing the pros and cons of each scenario? I definitely agree that Faber should have ended the story on a less abrupt note, but I've forgiven him for the openness of the ending. It works for me, even if many other people hate it.
As for conjectures about the ending... My guess is that Sugar and Sophie end up building a new life for themselves in Australia. What do you think, those of you who have read the book? ...more
Having recently seen and loved the magnificent film adaptation, I decided to reread Atonement, which quite impressed me when it was first published. AHaving recently seen and loved the magnificent film adaptation, I decided to reread Atonement, which quite impressed me when it was first published. And guess what? It was an even more rewarding experience the second time around. Knowing what was coming -- knowing the plot twist at the end -- helped me focus on the quality of the writing rather than on the development of the story, and as always, McEwan's prose completely sucked me in. He is, quite simply, one of the most talented authors alive, and he uses his gift to great effect here.
I'm not really going to go into the plot here, because the less the first-time reader knows about the book, the better. Suffice it to say that it is about an imaginative thirteen-year-old who witnesses a few things she doesn't understand, draws the wrong conclusions and ends up ruining the lives of two people near and dear to her. The first half of the book deals with the event itself and the hours leading up to it; the second half deals with her attempts to, well, deal with it -- atone for it, so to speak.
As always, McEwan excels at setting the scene. His description of a hot summer afternoon in a 1935 English country house is lush and sumptuous, his evocation of a young soldier's struggle to reach home after the disastrous 1940 battle of Dunkirk is haunting, and his look into the horrors of a war-time London hospital is gruesome in all its detail. Amazingly, McEwan manages to find beauty even in the most horrific scenes, which is one of the things which set him apart as a writer. As usual, though, it's the psychological stuff that is really outstanding. McEwan has a knack for taking his readers deep into his characters' minds, letting them share their most intimate, most uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. Sometimes these thoughts are a little disturbing (those of you who have read his earlier works will know what I mean), but usually they have the effect of completely drawing the reader into the story. The latter is definitely the case in Atonement. By presenting the story from different perspectives and vantage points, McEwan provides the reader with a complete and engrossing view of a life-changing event and its aftermath. All the different perspectives ring true, and together they tell a marvellous tale of perception, loyalty, anger, secrets, lost love, shame, guilt, obsession with the past and -- yes -- atonement. And about writing, for more than anything else, Atonement is about the difference between fiction and reality, the power of the imagination and the human urge to write and rewrite history -- to write destiny and play God.
I've heard quite a few people say that they found the first half of the novel too slow and ponderous, wondering why McEwan felt the need to devote nearly two hundred pages to the events of a single day. Personally, I found that part of the book to be utterly brilliant in its rich, Woolf-like glory. As far as I'm concerned, the atmosphere of the first half is superbly drawn, with each character down to the most minor one being well realised and the tensions and suspense at work almost being made tangible. For me, it is the second half of the book which has problems (albeit minor ones), in that I found the jumps in time and perspective jarring and the (otherwise fascinating) chapter about Robbie's adventures in France somewhat unreal. Of course, there are good reasons for the slightly unreal quality of the Dunkirk chapter (which the film captured just brilliantly), but still, it didn't quite work for me; it felt a bit out of place. Thankfully, though, the rest of the book worked just wonderfully for me. Like other McEwan books, it left me with a haunting question -- 'What if...?'
As for McEwan's impressive insight into the mind of a thirteen-year-old girl, which other reviewers have called scary, I think that has everything to do with Briony's being a writer. She is hardly your average thirteen-year-old (I think even McEwan would have a hard time coming up with one of those!); rather she is a writer (a good one), and that, of course, is something McEwan knows all about. As a fellow writer, I greatly enjoyed seeing the world through Briony's eyes, and hope her author will live to her old age and write as many good books as he has her doing. ...more
I'm torn on this book. On the one hand, I loved the story, which is, as another reviewer put it, 'the greatest, most incestuous Greek epic since the II'm torn on this book. On the one hand, I loved the story, which is, as another reviewer put it, 'the greatest, most incestuous Greek epic since the Iliad'. On the other hand, I had serious problems with some of the writing. I haven't seen my quibbles mentioned anywhere else, so I guess I'm alone on them. Or am I?
In a nutshell, Middlesex is the story of Cal, a Greek American who was born a hermaphrodite and raised as a girl before finally realising he was boy as a teenager. In about five hundred occasionally brilliant pages, Cal traces back his family history (which is rife with inbreeding) to see how he came to be the sort of almost-male he is. In so doing, he not only paints a loving picture of the memorable and colourful Stephanides clan, whose men have rather special ways of wooing women, but of a changing world, all the way from the Greek part of early-twentieth-century Turkey through mid-twentieth-century Detroit to post-Wall Berlin. What with its focus on different conflicts in different eras, the book is quite epic in scope. Yet it is also quite personal, with the social and racial conflicts played out in the world at large reflecting the much more private conflict that is going on within Cal. Both the epic and the intimate aspects of the novel are funny, poignant and tragic, and for that Jeffrey Eugenides deserves applause. Lots of it.
But. But. But.
I have to admit to finding Eugenides an awfully inconsistent writer. While he undeniably has a flair for story-telling, he also has a mad tendency to change tenses and perspectives, to the point where it actually quite took me out of the story. I dislike stories which switch back and forth between past tense and present tense within a matter of paragraphs at the best of times; if these stories also come equipped with narrators who constantly switch points of view, I get annoyed. And this is exactly what happens in Middlesex. Not only is Cal an omniscient first-person narrator who shares with the reader details from older relatives' lives which he has no way of knowing, but he also has a maddening tendency to randomly refer to himself in the third person, which results in sudden bursts of 'Calliope this' and 'Calliope that' in what is essentially a first-person narrative. To a certain extent, I can see why Cal would do this, looking back from a distance at a person he used to be but no longer is, but still, I found it annoying, so much so that I occasionally found myself wanting to scream at the narrator to drop all that third-person shit and stick with the first person, for God's sake. I don't like feeling like shouting at narrators, so that's where one star went. The other one I deducted for the weak ending, which felt rather rushed to me after the perfectly lavish set-up. Is it me, or would Middlesex have been a better book with slightly more information on what happened to Cal between the ages of 17 and 41? With an actual, you know, ending and all that?
I'll stop complaining here to end on a positive note. Despite my quibbles, I enjoyed most of Middlesex -- especially the first half, which is superb. I quite like Eugenides' brand of modern mythology, so I think I'll give The Virgin Suicides a shot, too. I rather liked the film, so I'm actually quite surprised I haven't read the book yet... ...more
The Inheritance of Loss may well be the most depressing work of fiction I've read since reading The Mists of Avalon in the early nineties. Nobody actuThe Inheritance of Loss may well be the most depressing work of fiction I've read since reading The Mists of Avalon in the early nineties. Nobody actually dies in it (at least, none of the major characters does), but it has a pervasive sense of loneliness, hopelessness and self-hatred which is quite sobering.
Set in a North Indian village close to Nepal, Kiran Desai's novel tells the intertwined stories of five people: a snobbish former judge who is more British than the British themselves and can't get over the fact that India is not British any more; his orphaned and sadly neglected teenage granddaughter Sai; Sai's Nepali tutor-cum-love interest Gyan, who gets caught up in the Nepali struggle for independence and has to choose between his ideals and the girl he loves; the judge's impoverished cook, who tries to make the best of a very bad situation but is not getting very far; and the cook's son, Biju, who is trying to make a living in far-away New York. The plot mainly focuses on the goings-on in the Indian village, where life is getting increasingly less peaceful, but there are many chapters detailing the lives of Indian illegal immigrants in America which are just as powerful, if not more so.
It's easy to see why The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Booker Prize; it's just the kind of multi-cultural story the Booker judges love, full of local colour and wry observations about life, class, history, cultural identity and the effects of colonialism. Desai has quite a talent for description; many of her short chapters read like vignettes on some aspect of her characters' lives and/or memories, and many are quite colourful or impressive. Sadly, the storyline sometimes gets a little lost in between all the details and memories. The characters don't really have story arcs, and there are parts where it seems the story itself isn't really going anywhere, either. And indeed the ending doesn't provide any great changes or developments. I guess that is the point of the book, though; life has no redemption, no happy ending for these characters. It just goes... on.
As a meditation on life and humanity, then, The Inheritance of Loss is quite impressive. It's likely to turn you into a bit of a misanthrope, but don't hold that against it; it's a beautifully written book and an interesting look at a part of the world many of us aren't all that familiar with. ...more
The Emperor's Children is supposed to be a twenty-first-century take on Edith Wharton and Henry James, which is to say a New York-based comedy of mannThe Emperor's Children is supposed to be a twenty-first-century take on Edith Wharton and Henry James, which is to say a New York-based comedy of manners with a hefty dose of Woody Allen-style neuroticism and some 9/11 stuff thrown in for good measure. For my part, I found it an intelligent soap opera, excellent in some respects but frustrating in others. I certainly didn't mind reading it, but I much prefer the real James and Wharton.
The Emperor's Children tells the story of Murray Thwaite (a former journalist turned literary giant), his beautiful and spoilt daughter Marina, her much tougher friend Danielle (with whom Murray is having an affair), their gay and promiscuous friend Julius and Marina's cousin Bootie, who idolises his famous uncle and would do anything to follow in his footsteps. Like all good protagonists, these characters yearn for romance, but more importantly, they crave recognition. They want success and they're not getting it, so they're disillusioned and frustrated. They're also very intelligent and self-obsessed, which means they spend a large chunk of the book navel-gazing. Messud's descriptions of her characters' inner selves are sharp and detailed, as are her observations on the vapid circles in which they move. Sadly, however, her characters are nearly identical; they all seem to have the same voice, which is fine at first but begins to grate after a while. Furthermore, the navel-gazing rather takes over at times, meaning the plot takes a long time to advance. Finally, and most damaging as far as I'm concerned, Messud has a tendency to use really long, convoluted sentences and to interrupt herself mid-sentence, going off on long tangents before returning to the original sentence, which is of course long forgotten by then. I found it hard to translate these sentences and almost equally hard to read them. Still, Messud is undeniably a gifted writer, and the picture she paints of New York's glitterati is fascinating if you can deal with all the navel-gazing. ...more
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