New Century Reading

Great Expectations

Curiouser and curiouser.

So...Pip finally gets to meet Estella again, but before he does, he meets--sort of--convicts who know him, but don't recognize him all got up in his gentlemanly way. And then Estella, who is even more beautiful, admonishes him not to love her, because she has no heart, no heart at all.

And then the pale young man turns out to be engaged, but sadly, lacks the means to get married, while Pip has the means, but is faced with a gorgeous woman who makes it pretty clear that she might be difficult.

Where is this all going?

Sometimes I bemoan the fact that I retain so little of what I read. I had coffee this week with two friends who discussed in detail books they read years ago. Good heavens, I can't discuss in detail a book a read a month ago. However, that's serving me well at the moment, because I honestly don't remember what happens next. Is Estella part of Pip's "good fortune"? Is Miss Havisham the mysterious benefactor? Will the prisoners cross Pip's path again?

It seems highly unlikely that the prisoners aren't going to play more in this story, yet the argument for Miss Havisham being the benefactress could go either way. It would be logical, since she's gotten to know Pip when he came to "play." On the other hand, it may be someone else altogether, and Miss Havisham is just reaping the benefits of being able to put Pip in touch with Estella, knowing that Estella has been raised to be cruel and heartless to men.

What do you think? And if you know, hush up. I don't want spoilers.

 

Emily, Alone

Oh, Stewart O'Nan, how do you do this? How do you write a book in which not a great deal happens, and ordinary people go about their ordinary lives, and yet make it such an extraordinary reading experience? I thought you couldn't possibly top Last Night at the Lobster. And I may have been right, but you come darn close with Emily, Alone.

Emily Maxwell is a widow living alone, watching her days march by with trips to the buffet with her sister-in-law Arlene, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, tending to her elderly, overweight dog, and waiting for her grown-and-gone children to visit for Christmas so she can go over her will with them. You'd hope--or at least I'd hope--that by Emily's stage of life, I will have gotten over most of the petty trials and come to terms with the way things are, but no; Emily still revisits her emotions over tangles with her long-dead parents and the trials of raising her children, and replays scenes from her mostly happy marriage. Her world is small, her routines set.

That should make for a dull read, but Emily is a lively person with an active mind. O'Nan chose a wonderful epigraph from Virginia Woolf: "Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life--startling, unexpected, unknown?"

And that describes Emily's journey. The startling, unexpected, unknown aspects are quiet ones, mostly interior, but they are momentous to Emily, and because O'Nan is such a fine writer, they're momentous to the reader too. And she has wonderfully quirky insights, especially when she and Arlene visit a Van Gogh exhibit:

"She so wanted to enjoy them, to drink them in, and yet...there was something that prevented Emily from fully sharing it, distracted by the children and the drab streets outside. It seemed a less than ideal way to experience art, and for a brief and selfish instant she understood why the black market thrived. To be alone with a masterpiece was to possess it wholly. No guide's or bystander's commentary intervened, no curator's notes printed in foot-high letters on teh wall, just you and the painting, and in that quiet space, intimacy, connection and, perhaps, communion. She wanted to be moved, to be thrilled, and how was that possible in a room full of third-graders?"

If you're looking for a book with a joyride of a plot, this isn't for you. But if you are a fan of Last Night at the Lobster, get your hands on Emily, Alone. Her quiet days lead me to look differently at those "women of a certain age" I see wandering the grocery store and walking elderly dogs.

Great Expectations

But first, go check out the suggested alternate title for our book of the day.

All righty then. This seemed like a bit more of the transitional pieces. We're seeing more of Pip's new world, including the increasingly peculiar Mr. Jaggers (a little OCD there on the hand-washing, or just ahead of his time in terms of hygiene?) and the highly unlikable Bentley Drummle. The dinner scene at Mr. Jaggers', with Drummle nearly becoming violent and the creepy display of Molly's wrists, was a head-scratcher in many ways. Clearly Dickens is setting something up, and I guess we'll just have to wait.

Speaking of the dinner, this sentence befuddled me, spoken by Pip about Molly:

"Years afterwards, I made a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair, to pass behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room."

What? Am I missing something? I don't get it.

And of course there was a visit from Joe, poor bumbling Joe, who feels so out of place--and is made to feel that way by Pip--but still standing up for himself in the end.

Not the most satisfying set of chapters, but I'm more than happy to continue. And hey--next week, at least in my edition, we'll pass the halfway mark!

How are you liking it so far?

Wuthering Heights

That is, Wuthering Heights, the opera, by Bernard Herrmann. Which I saw last night, staged by the Minnesota Opera.

(c) Michal Daniel

Where to start? How about with the exemplary work done by the MN Opera? They took a one-off obsession project composed by Hollywood heavyweight Bernard Herrmann (he composed scores for movies like Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Taxi Driver) and poured a tremendous amount of creativity and thought into the production. Herrmann's opera composition is, not surprisingly, very cinematic in sound, and in fact almost sounds as if the orchestra was the focal point, not the opera singers themselves. The orchestra was in fine form (as were the singers), delivering lush, tension-filled music.

The staging was brilliantly designed to complement the cinematic music. Wuthering Heights itself was a dramatic, gothic building, while Thrushcross Grange was a cozier, sweeter place. More intriguing was the use of projections and scrims that allowed the Opera to create seasonal scenes--flowers or leaves blowing in the wind, snow falling--as well as ghostly apparations looking through windows. It was beautiful, great eye candy, and worked perfectly with the story and the music.

(c) Michal Daniel

So here's the thing: I give huge props to the Minnesota Opera for tackling this piece and creating something beautiful.It's only the second time it's been performed since Mr. Herrmann completed it in 1951.

But.

The opera itself--so sorry, Mr. Herrmann--is not really a success. The Minnesota Opera trimmed it back quite a bit to just under three hours (in its original form, apparently it ran to almost four hours--and it only covers the first part of the novel, up to the point where Catherine dies), and it still felt draggy in spots. The friend with me agreed that the Mr. Herrmann's musical talent seemed more focused on the orchestral pieces, which were often beautiful, but the vocal parts seemed more like filler, or bits of necessary evil to keep the story moving along.

And speaking of the story...

If you haven't read the book, you might find it somewhat hard to understand--or care--about what's going on. The opera opens as the book does, with Mr. Lockwood's arrival, but after that Mr. Lockwood disappears. Heathcliff, Catherine, and Hindley are all tossed on stage with explanations as to their relationships delivered later. Hareton makes an appearance with no explanation at all and seems only to serve a brief purpose of showing Heathcliff's monstrous behavior.

Heathcliff and Catherine are quite possibly the two most unlikable--downright hateable, maybe--romantic leads in history. But Herrmann takes the odd approach of presenting them at first as serene, joy-filled creatures frolicking in nature, a well-matched, kindly pair. If you don't know what's coming, it's a shock to see them change with little explanation.

It may be that Herrmann was using them as a metaphor for nature in general and the moors in specific, places that can be beautiful and harmonious, then cruel and killing with little warning. I get that. But he simply doesn't give us enough insight into their characters to make us care. Like I said, in the novel they're downright repellent at times--but always compelling, and that's lacking from Mr. Herrmann's lackluster and oddly chosen plotting.

(c) Michal Daniel

In fact, possibly the most telling sign of something not being quite right was at the end, when most of the audience, while applauding loudly, did not stand. This is Minnesota--if Rebecca Black showed up at a local Starbucks and sang Friday, we'd probably stand up. But I think last night people were puzzled. The production? Wonderful. I'd have stood for that. But the opera itself? Not so much.

So: hurrahs and huzzahs for the wonderful work on the part of the Minnesota Opera. But not so much for the (operatic) work of Mr. Herrmann.

Thanks to the Minnesota Opera for providing me with tickets to Wuthering Heights.

 

Great Expectations

All right, all right, I'm a couple of days late. Crazy week. What can I say?

The interesting thing about reading this in serial form is I get a closer view of how Dickens worked. In the case of this week's chapters (22-24), I see him setting up a transition, and while there's no huge plot developments, we're introduced to quite a few new characters who are probably going to be important: the highly dysfunctional Pocket family (oh, poor Mr. Pocket), the "toady neighbour" Mrs. Coiler, and the most unfortunate clerks and clients in Mr. Jaggers' office. Dickens is at his rip-roaringest with his descriptions of those poor workers:

"In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, who Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would make me anything I pleased--and who was in an excessive white perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself."

Best of all, we get to know Wemmick better, and it turns out he's a pretty decent guy--when he's away from Jaggers' watch.

So, even though the plot itself didn't do much in this section, we have a raft of new and interesting people to keep an eye on. And for that, I'm ready to go on to chapters 25-27.

The Empty Family

I love Colm Toibin. Happily for me, that love wasn't lessened at all by reading his latest collection of stories, The Empty Family. You know how it is; there's an author whose work you fervently admire, book after book, but then, bam, they're suddenly not so good anymore. You're crestfallen. And then you worry about the other authors you fervently admire. When are they going to decline?

I'm not sure Toibin will ever decline, but he certainly hasn't as of yet. This is a wide-ranging collection touching on various aspects of family, including a story about Lady Gregory reflecting back on her life and poetic affairs, and her desire to share the details of her life with Henry James at dinner; an elderly but eminent film set designer returns to the land of her birth (Ireland) for a film and finds her resolve tested by unwelcome memories; two stories set in post-dictator Spain, one about a young gay man finding his way in a brave new world, and the other about a young woman returning to Spain after taking exile in Britain, and the changes time has wrought on both her and her family; and, in what's possibly my favorite story of the collection (The Colour of Shadows), a young gay man returns to his small Irish home town to see after the aunt who raised him, who is sliding away into age and dementia, and who inadvertently says things that could destroy a relationship--but don't, with heartbreaking results.

Toibin is such a clear and distinct writer, elegant, but not self-consciously artsy. His characters all have a certain amount of self-awareness, some of it gained over time. Some of them do hurtful things, for hurtful reasons, while others mean no harm but still inflict it. Home, birthplaces, birthrights, and family are all woven into the subtext of these stories.

Toibin is also an amazing male writer of women. I'm often skeptical about a man writing from a woman's point of view, but he does it several times in this collection, and always believably. There's a fair amount of sadness, but there's also happiness, sometimes hard won, and flat-out relief.

My thanks to Scribner for sending me a review copy of this lovely book.

Great Expectations

I have to admit I found this set of three chapters a bit slow going. Now, that may have had something to do with the end of the TBR Dare last Friday. Freed from those restraints, I spent most of last weekend ricocheting from one book to another like the Roadrunner on speed. Oh! I'll start Swamplandia!! Oh! I'll start Caribou Island! Oh! I'll start The Empty Family! What's that, Hennepin County Library? You have books on hold for me? Oh! Oh! Oh! The lure of the new and, until last Friday, forbidden!!!

Poor old Pip paled in comparison.

That was a nice bit of alliteration, wasn't it?

Yes, the older Pip's looking back on his leavetaking was very touching, as he reflected with the wisdom of years down the road on what he was actually giving up. Yes, the London Pip arrives to isn't exactly the London of his dreams. Yes, Mr. Jaggers (anything else have a hard time getting Mick Jagger out of their head?) seems like about the sleaziest piece of lawyerliness ever created.

But just when I was about to ricochet away from this, we had the astonishing ending of chapter 21: the pale young man has returned!

And just like that, Dickens got me back again. Very clever at this whole serializing thing, he was.

 

Civility on the Interwebs!!!

Thanks to Kerry, I enjoyed reading a long set of commentary on a blog post that was critical of a novel. The novelist (and his father!) both chimed in--but unlike certain other recent blog exchanges that devolved into profanity and general nastiness, the author in this case was respectful and polite, and the comments ended up being a wonderful discussion. Check it out here.

Caribou Island

Caribou Island by David Vann

Some bloggers will recommend books they've read to specific readers. I don't do that because I'm pretty sure most of the time I'd be wrong. However, I can make a recommendation for this book that I can stand behind 100%:

Do not, under any circumstances, give this book to that nice young literature-minded couple who's getting married soon.

Here's just one example of what they'd get to read if you did:

"Gary, she said, and she tried to put her arms around him, but he stomped off inot the trees. Hard to believe he was fifty-five years old. He could have been twenty, or thirteen, or three. Having a tantrum, just like the children she'd taught for thirty-three years.

"And meanwhile, Irene said quietly to herself, this gets to be my life. Because you can choose who you'll be with, but you can't choose who they'll become."

That's about as optimistic as the novel gets about marriage. It goes downhill from there.

A while back I read Vann's collection of stories, Legend of a Suicide, and noted that I found it uneven overall. Some of the stories had that careful overcrafting of an MFA program, or strained to be artsy, while a novella was piercingly beautiful and terrifying. I hoped for the latter qualities when Harper sent me a review copy of Caribou Island. There were moments of that, but ultimately far more moments that had me rolling my eyes.

Where to start?

Lack of quotation marks, which has always been a bugaboo for me. I find it very distracting and stylized. If a book can make me forget about that, well, cheers and a toast to that writer. Vann didn't. It annoyed me throughout, because I couldn't see any good reason to have left them out.

A lot of repetition. His descriptions of the Alaskan setting were sometimes beautiful, often menacing, occasionally depressing--but no matter what, we got more and more of it. Same with the scenes of Gary and Irene building a cabin on a remote island in a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage. Lifting logs, sawing, all with unspoken anger bubbling between them most ominously.

Oh, and the sentence fragments. Just those. The little sentences. The ones that aren't, quite. Representing angst. Fractured thinking and emotions. So artistic, really. Heartfelt.

While lifting logs. In the ominous snow.

So, while I know there are readers who found this wonderful, I'm definitely not one of them. I stuck with it because I wanted to see how it would end, and unfortunately, it ended pretty much how I suspected--and feared--it would. How's that for an unvarnished opinion?

 

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

Ever read a book where terrible things are happening to the characters, but you're guffawing out loud, and then you feel terrible about it? That's this book.

But here's the thing. In some books, that would mean the author failed miserably. Not in this one--I do believe author Barbar Comyns meant to make me laugh and make me supremely uncomfortable at exactly the same time.

This is a new edition of a 1954 novel, published by an intriguing publishing group called the Dorothy Project, which says it "want[s] to publish books that, whether conventional or un-, are uniquely themselves, that do not lean against preconceived ideas of what is wonderful, but brilliantly and purposefully convince us that they are, themselves, wonderful."

Well, then, mission accomplished. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is the story of the dysfunctional Willoweed family and the little English village they live in. The tone is set from the get-go, when a terrible flood swamps the village right on the opening page:

"The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows. The weight of the water had forced the windows open; so the ducks swam in. Round the room they sailed quacking their approval; then they sailed out again to explore the wonderful new world that had come in the night."

The flood is only a precursor to what's about to happen, as various villager begin to go crazy and kill themselves in various gruesome ways. And yet life continues: servants go a'courtin', sometimes with unintended consequences; the Willoweeds continue to their overbearing, ear-trumpet-reliant, matriarchal nightmare grandmother; and children find ways to be children.

To say much more is to give too much away. But if you're in the mood for a twisted little tale that's alternately horrifying and hilarious, this one's for you.