New Century Reading

Bleak House

Well, hello, and welcome to Bleak House 2012-13! I'm your host for this long ride. Now, right up front, I must apologize, for I am nowhere near as erudite and insightful as could be wished for a host, and as, I'm sure, many of you really are. And if you should tell me I am erudite and insightful, I think we both know that really, you are talking about yourself. But not in a conceited way, but in an erudition-ful and insightful way that doesn't even recognize your own brilliance, and your kindness in overlooking my simpleton ways while pretending that they are so much more fulfilling than they are--

Whoops, sorry, just channeling a little Esther Summerson there.

So. Here's the thing. I acquired the pretty Penguin copy shown above because it's, well, pretty. And then I acquired the Edward Gorey-illustrated version because, c'mon, it's Edward Gorey!! Then I worried that I needed some kind of critical edition--in order to perhaps have a whiff of a prayer of being erudite and insightful--and so acquired the Oxford University Press edition.

This weekend I gathered up all these Bleak treasures, settled into a cozy chair in my family room, sighed with contentment, looked up at the bookshelf by the TV, and lo and behold, what did I spy but the Norton critical edition?

It seems I am rather too well set for this read-along.

The bonus of finding the Norton critical edition that I apparently acquired and then promptly forgot about is that it has a very nice introduction with no spoilers, unlike the OUP, which warns you right up front that you shouldn't read the intro until you've read the book.

I want to quote something from the intro that helps set some context for this book, which Dickens thought to be his second-best book (David Copperfield was his first choice). In fact, Copperfield is the book he wrote before this one, and there was over a year between the completion of Copperfield and the starting of Bleak House. During that time,

"[M]ost of his energies during this interval were expended in areas other than literary. In particular he was keenly involved in directing a touring troup of amateur actors in a play by his friend, Bulwer-Lytton [yes, that Bulwer-Lytton, who, by the way, had some influence on the published ending of Great Expectations]...of greater significance in the shaping of Bleak House, was the assistance he provided for...slum clearance and the building of model housing. This activity...reinforced his awareness that behind the impressively solid front of mid-Victorian prosperity, the urban poor were living in a deplorable state of wretchedness and ignorance.

"Pollution was another related problem that engaged Dickens' energies at this time, an issue which since the ravages of cholera in 1848-49 [the book was begun in 1851] had become of pressing importance."

His concern is evident right in the very first paragraph of the book:

"Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun."

Wow. Dickens just pulled me back 170 years and plopped me into a very vivid and very miserable scene. it made my mostly dormant asthma start to creak, just reading it.

Then that second paragraph about fog, which we also know is pollution, but it really sets a tone for this book--of pollution, of lack of clarity, and utterly sinister in tone.

In other words, I don't know about you guys, but I was sucked in hard by this opening.

The discussion of Lady Dedlock--oh, how I love Dickensian names--and fashion is reminiscent of similar discussions in Our Mutual Friend. And her ever-so-upstanding husband, Sir Leicester.

But how quickly we are able to forget about them when we arrive at chapter 3 and the introduction--in first person, no less--of the aforementioned Esther Summerson. Good lord, Dickens has really outdone himself with the pathetic orphan here. What a ghastly godmother! "It would have been far better, little Esther, that you had had no birthday; that you had never been born!"

No wonder her eventual arrival at the Jellyby home doesn't seem quite so bad, in spite of the chaos and lack of any kind of cleanliness or order and the obsession with Africa and coffee cultivation. At least Esther seems welcome and wanted there.

What did you guys think? Favorite quotes? Here's my favorite Gorey illustration from this section, with Mrs. Jellyby educating her new lodgers with tales of her work for Africa while her humiliated, ink-stained daughter looks on:

Next week, chapters 5-7. Enjoy!

 

In book-related news...

Over on my other blog, I'm giving a way a signed copy of The Spoonriver Cookbook by local (MN) chef, restaurant owner, and farmers market founder Brenda Langton. It's a good 'un. Bonus: I posted a recipe from the book there too.

Triburbia

I had a few different reactions to this book of connected-short-stories-as-novel. One is that it's not nearly as well done as Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists or Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. I think that's due in part to the fact that rarely does the same character return as the story's focus, so there's a whole lot of people we have to keep track of. And in the end, many of them sound the same.

Second, this group of people who live in the Tribeca neighborhood in New York are almost all very wealthy, very concerned with real estate, and live lives of sad wealthy desperation. Not to say that wealthy people can't have screwed-up lives or be depressed. It's just a little harder to feel sorry for them. When you're on an enormous yacht in the Mediterranean and feel down, please tell me you have a very good reason why I should feel bad for you.

Not to mention the story where the father learns about mean girls in the elementary school. His shock and dismay is out of proportion--it's like he had absolutely no idea. C'mon--mean girls are nothing new. The Brontes and Jane Austen covered them, and let's not forget Nellie "Little Bitch on the Prairie" Oleson.

On the other hand, I'm a suburbanite who gets very tired of people assuming I'm a certain way just because I live in the 'burbs. Obviously all of us 'burb-dwellers are shallow, haughty, appearance-driven, competitive with our kids, and only want to eat at Applebee's, right? I'm here to tell you it ain't so. My suburb has those kind of people, yes, but there are a great many who are the exact opposite, people who are highly literate and intelligent, kind, concerned about the greater good, and can even poke fun of themselves for living here. If you're in Minnesota, you'll understand when I say: there are a whole lot of Vote No signs in this suburb. So reading about urban dwellers who act exactly as I'm told is how all suburbanites act, I got a bit of a chuckle out of the idea that--hey! those people live in the big gritty city too!

Overall? I'm kind of meh on this one. The publisher sent me a review copy, which I hadn't solicited, and I thought it looked interesting. But I'm only lukewarm.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

I stopped at my local library this weekend to pick up a book I had on reserve (because in addition to having too many books to read at home, I also keep a lively library book request queue) (but supporting the library is like a civic duty, right?) and saw this book on the Bestseller Express checkout shelf. I don't know if all libraries do this; ours takes popular, high-demand books and has a number of copies that can be checked out for a fee ($4) and can only be kept 10 days instead of the usual 21. I've never used it before, but as I saw it on the shelf and reflected on the fact that I was #311 on the non-express waitlist the last time I checked, I picked it up, paid the fee, and drove home, hoping I'd have time to squeeze it in during the 10 days.

That was Saturday morning. Sunday before dinner, I finished it.

Best $4 I ever spent.

How could I possibly resist a book about family dysfunction, a mother (Bernadette) who disappears right before the family is supposed to head out on a trip to Antarctica as a reward for the middle-school kid getting perfect grades, the same mother whose intense dislike of the Seattle community and specifically the other parents at her daughter's school has caused her to retreat into her house and hire a virtual assistant from India to do things like schedule dentist appointments, another mother who's a brilliant parody (or perhaps not quite parody, even scarier) of parents who don't believe their little darlings can do anything wrong, and architecture, and Microsoft, and a mudslide, and what happens when creative genius is stifled?

Bonus: lots of humor, but lots of touching moments that don't tip over into gooey sentimentality.

Right off the bat, we learn a great deal about the middle school in question:

"Galer Street School is a place where compassion, academics, and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet.

Student: Bee Branch
Grade: Eight
Teacher: Levy

KEY
S  Surpasses Excellence
A  Achieves Excellence
W  Working towards Excellence"

Global connectitude? A grade system that only recognizes levels of excellence? Author Maria Semple had me on that first page and held onto me through the wild ride that follows.

The narrative is a crazy quilt of emails, faxes, police records, and Bee's (the middle school daughter of Bernadette) narration as she tries to make sense of her mother's abrupt disappearance. Along the way, as the puzzle pieces come together, Bee learns--as does the reader--a whole lot about who Bernadette really is and why she behaves the way she does.

The humor that balances out the sadder parts of the book is much needed, and it should come as no surprise that the author has also written for Mad About You, Ellen, and Arrested Development.

I guess this was my little weekend gift to myself. Loved it.

Home

I read Toni Morrison's Beloved for the first time this fall. I'd (shamefully) never read Morrison before. And I mostly loved it, except the end felt rushed to me.

Now I've read her latest novel, Home, and this slim (150 pages) little book covers a lot of territory in a very short space: we have a black Korean War vet returning to the States to face racism and difficult personal history; we have the woman he meets and falls in love with; we have some family history, especially about his nasty grandmother Lenore; and we have his hapless sister, Cee, who falls into the clutches of a white doctor who's studying eugenics.

That's a whole lot of stuff going on in 150 pages.

I suspect there's a lot of symbolism going on, and maybe the creation of a parable. The soldier, Frank Money (yes!), and his sister hate the town where they grew up, and they go out into the bigger world where they experience a lot of hurt. It's only when they return home that they can confront the pain the bigger world has caused them--and they've caused others--and begin to heal.

For me, whereas I thought most of Beloved was paced just right except for the rushed ending, this whole book felt rushed. It has none of the depth and exploration of Beloved. We're just handed these characters and situations and whoosh, we're at the end. These are significant events with significant consequences--I think I would have happily read the same story at four times the current length. But the shortness of it kept me at arm's reach; just when I was getting interested and concerned for one character, we zipped off to read another's story, and the main plot points occur so quickly and then are past, I barely had time to consider them and feel an emotional response.

But I hear I should read Sula and Song of Solomon. Thoughts from more experienced Toni Morrison readers?

You GUYS.

Look what I found: an edition of Bleak House--illustrated by EDWARD GOREY!!!!!

The drawings aren't quite as sinister as many of his own works, but still, awful damn perfect for Dickens.

This won't be my primary reading text for the Bleak House read-along (coming soon! Are you ready??); it has no footnotes or end notes, and I do need those. But you can bet I'll be checking out the drawings for each section. Speaking of sections...

I haven't read Bleak House before. I saw the PBS miniseries years ago, but barely remember any of it, so I expect to uncover plenty of surprises while reading. Then I thought, well, gee, I'm sort of the moderator for this read-along, maybe I should study up on the book even if that means encountering spoilers, so I can make some educated comments. But I really don't want to. But I really feel like I should. So--those of you joining in, what do you think?

Have You Seen Marie?

Have You Seen Marie by Sandra Cisneros looks a lot like a child's picture book, but it's really not. It's a gentle, sweet book that deals with the process of mourning.

The story is simple: Sandra is having a difficult time coping with the death of her mother. She feels like "a glove left behind at the bus station." Sandra's friend Roz drives from Tacoma to San Antonio to visit and help her and brings her cat, Marie. But on the very first day, Marie runs away.

As Sandra and Roz search for her, they encounter many people in Sandra's San Antonio community, some who seem like they want to help but can't/won't, some who haven't seen Marie but are willing to share their food and drinks and sympathy, people having musical get-togethers or knitting or who won't even open their doors.

The search for Marie forces Sandra to start breaking out of her cocoon of grief, and to get to know her neighbors, who all have their own stories to tell. Although this sounds precious, it really isn't.

The illustrations are by Ester Hernandez, and they're lovely:

"But they just barked above our voices, except for the rat terrier, who said nothing, too ashamed to disagree with his friends."

"Under the shadow of the Hemisfair tower, in a wooden house off Refugio and Matagorda, a nice couple dining on their porch invited us to look into their bamboo. ...We left with paper plates of brisket, beans, potato salad, and cups of iced tea."

This would be a perfect gift for an adult who's grieving. My thanks to Knopf for sending me a review copy.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt is yet another YA book that gave me a lump in my throat, just like The Fault in our Stars. What's up with that? Reading never used to make me teary. Is this a symptom of perimenopause??

I think it also has something to do the author's note: "It warms my heart that most of the time the facts of the world would have fit my story just right. But on those occasions where they haven't, I've taken the liberty of tailoring them--as gently as possible--to suit." So--is this autobiographical? The Fault in our Stars had a similar disclaimer. Maybe that's what makes both books feel all too real to me.

Wolves has a 14-year-old narrator, June, a social misfit whose only true friend is her uncle, the artist Finn Weiss. But it's 1987, and Finn is dying of a newly discovered, not-much-talked-about disease. At his funeral, a man appears outside the church, much to the consternation of June's mother (Finn's sister). June soon learns more about that man when he reaches out to her and she learns that there was someone else who loved Finn and misses him as much as she does.

There's so much to like about this book. It catches that time period very well. It's a devastating portrait of a family trying to cope with homosexuality and AIDS, and all filtered through June's adolescent lens, but also through a griever's lens. Particularly striking is her relationship with her older sister, Greta, who's a bit of a golden girl. Yet author Brunt manages to describe Greta from June's point of view in such a way that even though Greta often behaves badly and says terrible things to June, and June herself doesn't understand why, the reader does.

In the end, June learns a great deal, about herself, Greta, and her mother and uncle's relationship. These are hard lessons at any time of life, but at age 14, it's even more poignant: "Then I told [Greta] everything I knew about our mother. All the jealousy and sadness. All the meanness that could come out of loving someone too much."

I think I need to create a new category for this blog, labeled "Lump-in-Throat Books".

My thanks to Dial Press for sending me a review copy.

This Is How You Lose Her

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz is a follow-up, of sorts, to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The primary narrator of the latter book was Yunior, and he's the star of most of the short stories that make up This Is How You Lose Her. 

These are stories about family, and love, and obsession with love. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea--over on Amazon, I got a chuckle out of one reviewer's counting up all the times the F-bomb is dropped. And like Oscar Wao, there's a fair amount of foreign language dropped in. But I learned my lesson from Oscar and didn't bother looking any of it up--there's enough that it would have been disruptive to the reading, and I could pretty well guess from the context anyway.

The stories roam back and forth across different points of Yunior's life, from when his father brought Yunior, his older brother Rafa, and their mother to the US in the middle of winter, lodged them in an apartment not far from a landfill, and refused to let them go out and play or go to school. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out how that would affect two energetic little boys, or their poor trapped mother. Add to that the father's less than loving parenting and marital style, and it explains a lot about what happens to Yunior and Rafa as they grow up.

Rafa is his mother's favorite, and that doesn't bode well for a boy smart enough to take advantage of it. But in early adulthood, he's diagnosed with cancer, and many of the stories (this isn't really a spoiler, I should add) look at how Yunior copes with his brother's dying.

Yunior himself has some serious issues. When he cheats on his long-time girlfriend (multiple times), is it because, as she thinks, that's just what Dominican men do? Or is he damaged in some unique way? And when she leaves him for the infidelity, why can't he move beyond it, even though his life goes on in every other way?

All these characters are immensely flawed, yet Diaz shows us how they got that way, and we can empathize even when we cringe as they wander down a path we know is going to be oh-so-wrong. And we know why:

"For a few weeks people knock on the door, asking if the house is still for sale. Some of them are couples as hopeful as we must have looked. Ramon slams the door on them, as if afraid that they might haul him back to where they are. But when it's me I let them down softly. It's not, I say. Good luck with your search.

"This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever."

My only nitpick in this book is, unfortunately, one of my biggest pet peeves: no quotation marks with the dialogue. I usually find that distracting, and that was sometimes the case here. Still, the strength of the stories and the characters mostly overcame that.

My thanks to Riverhead Books for sending me a review copy.

The Poetry Project

This month's theme is all about Halloween and scary poems. I'm going to stretch the boundaries of that just a tad. As I type this, there's a crazy cold wind howling here in Minnesota, making the house creak and shift, knocking over unsecured things outside (thank goodness it's not my garbage and recycling pickup day). So for my creepy poem, I'm choosing one by Ted Hughes:

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.