New Century Reading

It's Tuesday, where are you?

 

I'm all over the world, following the trail of Phoebe Snetsinger, the first birder to build a life list of 8,000 birds. A great accomplishment--but it came at great cost, to her and to her family. Life List by Olivia Gentile (a great read!).

Fiction of the Bronte Sisters

And I'm not talking about the books they wrote. Apparently the Bronte sisters are becoming fictional fodder themselves, in a big way; maybe authors are getting tired of playing off Jane Austen?

Whatever. It can't be denied that there's a certain mystique to the young woman up on the moors, living in a dreary parsonage with a cemetery in their front yard, writing books of passion and not necessarily traditional romance.

Just because they lived those lives, though, should other writers try to capitalize on them? That depends--on the author.

Emily's Ghost, by Denise Giardina, focuses primarily on Emily, who, of course, authored Wuthering Heights, a book that seems to polarize people (I fall firmly into the camp of "love it"). Who was this woman who wrote such a strange and dark book (not to mention reams of poetry) and died far too young? Well, according to Giardina, she's a fairly standard-issue misunderstood heroine, someone who just needs the love of a good man to finally bring her around to the conventionality she seems to hide from. To that end, Giardina suggests that Rev. Bronte's curate, William Weightman, was Emily's secret love, a passion that is suggested was felt by him too, but who--wait for it--died too soon (if this many early deaths took place in a truly fictional work, people would laugh--once again, truth is stranger than fiction).

Unfortunately, Giardini's characterizations are pretty much boilerplate, with Emily as the misunderstood heroine, Charlotte as a bitchy, simpering wench (who seems unlikely to have written Jane Eyre and Villette), and Anne as a juvenile with a crush and not much else worth examining.

Are you getting the impression that I didn't much like the book? Yeah, pretty much. It wasn't terrible--I did read it through to the end, rather than giving up partway through. But the characterization didn't cover any new or particularly interesting ground. And, frankly, a scene towards the end of the book portrays Emily hearing a live performance of Beethoven's Ninth, with this description: "The music washed over Emily in waves, an orgasm of sound and emotion."

Really? Really?

In contrast, Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow, while not necessarily offering up anything previously undiscovered, is a vast fictional improvement. It's an elegant book that doesn't try to ape the Brontes' writing style, but pays homage to it with a serious but highly readable tone. It also looks at the lives of the three writing Bronte sisters, rather than only focusing on one, and in doing so, offers a fresh and in-depth look at what the sisters' lives might have been like, and what they might have been like. In Morgan's book, Emily is several degrees past eccentric, but unlike Giardini's view of Emily as misunderstood, Morgan portrays her as a true individual who could be extremely difficult or uncomfortable to be around, yet not unlikable. Charlotte has her quirks, but her surface world is at conflict with the world within; rather than the simpering lightweight of Giardini's book, she is much closer to the emotionally complex Lucy Snowe of Charlotte's novel Villette. And Anne, a model of goodness much the same as Beth in Little Women or Mary in the Little House books, at least has an interior life that shows her struggle with the desire to behave properly versus her own emotions.

As all three sisters cope with the decline of their brother Branwell and their private miseries, Morgan writes beautifully of the landscape around them, both interior and exterior. She writes of Branwell's final decline:

"Branwell's unhappiness, the ruling passion of the house in the weeks and months that follow, is not really a lack or a negative. It defines him. It is all he has; and it is as if, having made defeated stabs at so many things in life, he means to make a thoroughgoing success of this. A lesser being, a more commonplace person, might be betrayed occasionally into acceptance, into quiet, into momentary pleasure. No such backsliding for Branwell. He is a pedant and perfectionist of misery."

Both books draw on the known biographical details of the Brontes' lives, but Morgan is more content to let the story tell itself, rather than force the reader into conclusions that are iffy. There are more fictionalized accounts to come, but I'm hard-pressed to think anyone will top Morgan's work.

10 Books to Read Before You Die

When Pam suggested writing about the 10 books we think others should read before they die, I thought it was a great idea, if sort of crazy--let's face, my 10 books will be at polar opposites to lots of other people's 10 books. Frankly, my 10 books this week might be completely different if you ask me next week. Nevertheless, I give you--the (completely subjective list of) 10 books I think you should read before you die. In no particular order--hard enough to choose 10 without having to rank them.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. A wonderful tour de force of a book.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. I've been in three book groups that have read this book, and it really polarizes people--they either love it or hate it, no middle ground. I love it.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Because it's a wonderful children's classic.

A book by one of the Bronte sisters. I'm having trouble choosing, but I'd narrow it to Emily's Wuthering Heights, or Charlotte's Jane Eyre or Villette.

A book by Jane Austen. Probably Pride and Prejudice, but maybe Emma, or Persuasion.

A book by Virginia Woolf, either Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Difficult reading, but so rewarding.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Haunting.

The Collected Stories of Flannery O'Connor.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. Because what better book to illustrate the power of reading?

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan. Because of the perfect way he sheds light on a segment of American society.

What's your top 10 list?

The Thing Around Your Neck

It seems lately that I've been talking about books that I'm scared to read, because I so loved the author's previous book that I'm afraid of being disappointed. I was relieved and delighted by Kate Walbert's latest book, A Short History of Women, which overcame the concerns I had after loving Our Kind. But I still approached this book with the same level of trepidation.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of the National Book Critics Circle finalist Half of a Yellow Sun, which ranks way up there on my list of personal favorites. So naturally I was worried when The Thing Around Your Neck appeared. Would I like it as well? And was it even fair to compare them, since the former is a novel, and the new book is a collection of short stories?

Here's the thing. Adichie is a tremendously gifted writer. These short stories are things of beauty. They're stories of Nigerians in America, and in Nigeria, and the cultural clashes that occur on both sides. A group of African writers congregate for a writer's conference where race and gender matter in devastating ways; a young nanny finds herself drawn to the child's mother; a Nigerian emigrant living as an up-and-coming American finds her husband has a mistress back in the home country; and a young woman begins her life as the bride of an arranged marriage.

These are imaginative, deeply textured ideas, but as a whole, they're not as strong as her previous novel. The father in "On Monday of Last Week" teeters dangerously on the edge of stereotype. The second person narration in the title story feels strained. But perhaps the worst thing I can say--and this is something that could also easily be seen as a compliment--is that many of the stories felt compressed, as if they had enough potential to become a novel, but were restrained into the shorter form. The short story is a difficult form to write, and those who do it well (William Trevor, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro) make the story complete, make the length exactly right for what they're doing. In fact, Jhumpa Lahiri's recent collection Unaccustomed Earth accomplished what I think Adichie was trying to do with her book: look at life in America when you're not from America, and life going back and forth between various countries and cultures. But Lahiri's stories were complete in and of themselves, whereas Adichie's feel as if too much has been left out. In particular, the story "The Headstrong Historian" left me frustrated and longing for a full book-length version.

Which is to say, Adichie is a very gifted writer--I may just prefer novels by her to stories.  

It's Tuesday--where are you?

But first, I have to give a big shout-out to the MacArthur grant folks, who announced awards going to some utterly deserving writers: authors Edwidge Danticat (haven't read her? Go! Now! Get her books! She's amazing!) and Deborah Eisenberg, and poet Heather McHugh. It's so great to see such talented people rewarded.

OK then.

Today I'm in Wisconsin with a college student coming to grips with a post-9/11 world. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. One of my favorite writers, ever.

A Short History of Women

It's 1914, and the war is stirring uneasily in Britain when Dorothy Trevor Townsend takes it upon herself to give her all for the women's suffrage movement--literally: she goes on a hunger strike that ultimately takes her life.

Such is the premise of Kate Walbert's recent novel, A Short History of Women.

What brought Dorothy to this point, how the aftermath filters down into generations of descendants, and how the women who come after her deal in their own way with the issue of being female, makes up this powerful book.

Walbert is an amazing writer. I wasn't sure if a new book could even match the beauty of her last one, Our Kind. But A Short History of Women matches, and maybe even surpasses, her previous work. The book's starting point is shown by Dorothy's daughter, Evelyn, who will be separated from her brother after her mother's death, the two of them sent to separate parts of the world to be raised by strangers. But Evelyn's niece (also named Dorothy) shows the spirit of her grandmother, both politically (she trespasses onto military bases to photograph coffins carrying soldiers killed in Iraq) and in her own struggle to find her way as a woman, a struggle complicated by her own two daughters and their expectations of themselves and each other.

In less capable hands, this could be a hot mess of one-dimensional preachiness, but Walbert never lets the politics and history override the characters. The events of 9/11 make an appearance, but through the eyes of Dorothy's great-granddaughter Liz, who finds her way blindly as a parent of a young child in a post-terrorist home city.

The story is told primarily by Dorothy herself; Evelyn, Dorothy's daughter; Dorothy, the granddaughter and Evelyn's niece; and the latter Dorothy's daughters Liza and Caroline. Although the frequent use of "Dorothy" is occasionally confusing, Walbert does a masterful job of delineating the characters and the times they live in. She's that rare bird, an author who's done her historical homework to create a fully functional, believable world, but without feeling like she has to throw in every interesting tidbit she discovered along the way.

Walbert was a nominee for the National Book Award for Our Kind; surely this book should put her in contention for even more awards.

It's Tuesday--Where in the World Are You?

Taking a cue from An Adventure in Reading, I'm going to start posting my current reading on Tuesdays. This week: I'm alternating between Britain and America, time spans running from 1898 to current day, as I follow several generations of women from the same family, in Kate Walbert's luminous new book, A Short History of Women (full review in a few days, but so far, so very, very good).