New Century Reading

Mrs. Dalloway read-along

Hello, readerly friends. I hope you are all safe at home, as well as your loved ones. 

This Sunday, I'm doing a one-day read-along of Mrs. Dalloway. I've read it multiple times, but never in one day. This lovely book takes place in one day and, at least in my edition, is less than 200 pages. (I also have the above edition, which has lots of thoughtful critical analysis.) If you're interested, those of us who are reading and virtually chatting about the book will be over on Twitter (@amycrea), and we'll use the hashtag @SunDalloway. Feel free to join us!

Abigail

Abigail is considered to be Hungarian novelist Magda Svabo's masterpiece, and I am all in for it. The jacket copy says it's like Jane Austen mixed with J.K. Rowling, and some places refer to it as a young adult novel. It felt a bit YA, but an awfully sophisticated YA for having originally been published in 1970. 

Abigail is the story of Gina Vitay, a motherless child who leads a pampered and happy life with her general father and French governess. But WWII is growing in scope and devastation, and it's no longer tolerable to have a French governess, and Gina's father determines that he will instead send her to boarding school, far across the country from her home of Budapest, in a small town, in a highly restrictive, religious school.

Gina is used to getting her way, so this decision doesn't sit well with her. She's barely arrived at the school before she manages to ostracize her class and most of the staff. Mean girls aren't a new phenomenon, and Szabo gives excruciating detail as to how they behave in a 1940s religious boarding school. So tormented, Gina tries to run away, but fails. 

It's only then that she begins to pay attention to the story the girls tell about the statue named Abigail that stands in the school's (heavily fortified) garden. The girls fervently believe that Abigail is a sentient being who can work on the girls' behalf when bad things happen or are about to happen. Gina thinks that's a lot of stuff and nonsense, until Abigail involves Gina in helping another girl. Not sure what she believes--is it just another student sneaking around, or a staff member?--Gina considers asking Abigail for help returning to her father.

The Austen/Rowling comparison is apt. Austen, for her work in showing that first impressions are often not correct, and Rowling for the boarding school setting where not everyone is who they appear to be. But Szabo was a singular writer herself, and she beautifully evokes the period and place. Gina is a flawed character, but you can't help root for her, not least of which because she adores her father. There are laugh-out-loud scenes of school escapades, but Szabo doesn't let you forget the threat that WWII played, especially in late 1943 (the Germans occupied Hungary in spring 1944). 

Szabo is a great stylist, and the opening chapter is a master class in how to open a novel: Suspense, swift pacing, characters carefully fleshed out and yet done so quickly so the story can get into motion. There were times in the middle when the pacing sagged a bit, but only a bit. I also figured out the secret of Abigail long before the ending, but I didn't mind, so charmingly was it done. 

What a shame it took 50 years for this book to be translated into English.

Jacob's Room

So, book 3 in my quest to read all of Virginia Woolf's novels in the order they were written and published. This is one I had not read before. It's a big change from her first two novels (The Voyage Out and Night and Day). Those are more traditional novels, while Jacob's Room shows Woolf breaking away from traditional and developing her own experimental style that is used to great effect in books like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. 

This book is about the eponymous Jacob, but not in the usual way. We learn very little about Jacob directly from Jacob. Instead, we see him through the eyes of people around him, and that of course provides a wide array of portraits, some in conflict with each other. Who Jacob is to his mother and her friends is someone entirely different than who he is to a married woman tempted into an affair, or a gay best friend, or a not-overly-bright young woman who easily and willingly goes to bed with him. 

There's more than this going on too; Woolf is looking at pre-WWI Britain (this was published in 1922) and the years leading up to that war. It was a time of immense change, and Woolf explores that through a number of ways, including clothing:

"Fix your eyes upon the lady's skirt: the grey one will do -- above the pink silk stockings. It changes: drapes her ankles -- the nineties; then it amplifies -- the seventies -- now it's burnished red and stretched above a crinoline -- the sixties; a tiny black foot wearing a white cotton stocking peeps out."

I will confess that I wasn't certain what to make of this short novel when I finished it. Thankfully, I read the Wordsworth Classics edition (not the one shown above--the Wordsworth has a most regrettable cover) that had an enlightening introduction. Normally I don't like to read the introduction first when reading a book for the first time, because they're usually full of spoilers (and this one is no different). But in this case, I wish I had, as I would have approached the text differently. Which is to say that I'd find it worthwhile to read this book again sometime.

But now, on to the magnificent Mrs. Dalloway, which I have read multiple times before and always loved. This time, I think, I'm going to try and read it all in one day, as the book takes place in one day. It's only about 200 pages, so doable if I pick the right day.

 

Weather

I loved Offill's previous book, Dept. of Speculation, very, very much. Perhaps my expectations were then set too high for her next book, Weather. The spare writing style from the previous book is here, a kind of "read between the lines" writing that feels like what isn't being said is as important, if not more so, than what is. But while that worked beautifully for Speculation, here it fell flat for me (your mileage may vary--it's getting a lot of love). 

It may also be that the topic of devastating climate change viewed through the lens of the minutiae of day-to-day life hit too close to home. But this book just felt so static to me; no one and nothing much changes. But again, I seem to be in the minority on this one. That said, I did appreciate her including this link in the book: Obligatory Note of Hope. 

Evidence of V

Well, this book threw me for a loop. Sheila O'Connor has written a book that I've tagged as both novel and nonfiction, and it is indeed both (and by her own admission). It's the story of her maternal grandmother, V, who got pregnant at 15 and was sent to a "girl's home" in Minnesota, where she gave birth, but was essentially incarcerated until she turned 18, when she was "paroled" into servitude with a family in Duluth. 

V is dismayed at all that happens. But when the baby is born, she falls in love with it and wants to keep it. But she has no say in the matter.

This is, of course, a heartwrenching story that brings up the Magdalene Laundries. Sadly, those weren't contained to Ireland. O'Connor learns that her mother was born to someone other than the woman who had always been presented as O'Connor's grandmother. Her mother eventually takes matters into her own hands, and together they visit the Minnesota Historical Society, where they're able to pull up pieces of the truth.

But here's the thing. The pieces of truth they pull up don't tell a very full story. So O'Connor spent several more years researching this particular girl's home, and girl's home from the times (1930s) in general, to put together a story of what might have happened--to full in the blanks surrounding what is known to have happened.

This book then becomes part novel, part biography, part research document, and even part poetry collection. It's a quick read, but it's also deeply troubling. There were good intentions, of course. But we know the path to hell is paved with those. 

Read this book, knowing it's part fiction and part nonfiction, and see the bigger picture of what happened to so many, too many, young women in the early part of the 20th century--and not just in Ireland.

Night and Day

I'm on a quest to read, in order of publication, all of Virginia Woolf's novels (there are 10). I've already read 7 of them, but I wanted to see her writing development as it progressed. Last month I read her debut novel, The Voyage Out, which I didn't bother to blog about. It's not bad, but it's also not great. However, her second novel, Night and Day, is a big step up. She hadn't yet gotten to her full innovative powers yet, but you can see how she's beginning to detach a little from traditional novels of the period. 

Night and Day is a book in which not an awful lot happens. The world of the interior, of the mind and emotion, is mostly what Woolf is going for. It's the story of Katharine Hilberry, an only child living as an adult with her indulgent parents. Katharine is beautiful and observes all the proper social decorum, but inside she wants more. At night, she spends hours working on mathematics, wishing she had the ability to pursue education in that line instead of being stuck as a female in a family that had a famous literary ancestor whose reputation and biography they endeavor to keep alive. 

Into her world come two men, Ralph Denham and William Rodney. Both love her; Rodney is the obvious choice, as he's her social equal, while Denham is not. But Katharine, cool and withdrawn, feels she has little choice but to accept William even though she knows she doesn't love him. Ralph is devastated and tries to strike up a courtship with another female friend. But William and Katharine both have some doubts and some hard conversations.

So, yes, a romantic intrigue, but there's much here besides that: ruminations on the end of the Victorian era, what exactly is love, what is the point of marriage, and, importantly, should women have careers and vocations. Woolf explores what the morals and accepted behaviors of the period were, and why they weren't something necessarily worth preserving. 

Within these lofty explorations are some missteps. A subplot about an errant family member who had children with a woman he wasn't married to is raised, explored, then dropped. There are some plot points that are borderline ridiculous (which, according to the introduction to my edition, may have been deliberate on Woolf's part, to parody books of the day). 

But throughout there is some wonderful, Woolfian writing:

"The three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent, and then Mary left them in order to see the great pitcher of coffee was properly handled, for beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who owns china."

"The whole aspect of the place started another train of thought and struck her as enviably free; in such a room one could work--one could have a life of one's own."

Worth reading, and also worth reading Lauren Groff's recent wonderful essay about it.  

Agnes Grey

January 17, 2020 marked the 200th anniversary of Anne Bronte's birth, and as such, I thought I'd revisit one of her novels. My book club read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not that long ago, so I decided to go with Agnes Grey, which I don't think I've read since college.

Agnes Grey is the story of a young woman from a not-well-off family. Agnes decides to become a governess, one of the few respectable options at the time, and sets off for her first assignment. It's a nightmare. The children have been raised to think they can do no wrong, and the parents aren't interested in the governess' opinions. Agnes is eventually fired, but tries again, and gets a somewhat better (only marginally) position that she sticks with for several years, until her father dies and she returns home to help her mother. There is a bit of romantic interest, which shouldn't be a spoiler (it's an old book, people) to say ends well. 

I didn't expect much; Anne is somewhat considered the "lesser" Bronte, and this her lesser book. But I ended up being drawn in and quite interested in the story, and found more to like than I remembered. Poor Anne has suffered from comparisons to her sisters, especially Charlotte. Charlotte, after all, wrote the governess novel: Jane Eyre. In fact, Anne wrote Agnes Grey before Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, but Charlotte had the good fortune to see her novel published before Anne did. Anne was then stuck with the comparisons and the insinuation that she'd written after Charlotte.

There's a great Guardian story that goes over the history of the book and makes an impassioned plea as to Agnes Grey's value and importance in literary history. Notably, while Jane Eyre had an unusually ideal first position in a lovely home with only one student and a kindly housekeeper who's on her side, Agnes Grey tells a different--and more accurate--story of governessing during that time. Multiple kids, unsupportive parents with unreasonable expectations and demands, and terrible loneliness; a governess was in a limited social strata where she wasn't good enough to socialize with the adults of the family, but she was considered above being able to befriend the servants (after all, who's want a servant teaching their children?). Agnes shows us all the indignities and miseries of this life. It's more than a little heartbreaking that Anne allowed Agnes to have the happy ending Anne herself did not get, dying at age 29 of tuberculosis. 

I'm glad I took the time to revisit this book, and think I will also try Tenant again. I didn't have a terribly favorable impression of it the last time I read it, but now think it's worth reading again from a different place of understanding. 

This Tender Land

This Tender Land is the story of two orphaned brothers, Odie and Albert, who are the only white kids at a boarding school for Native Americans in a small Minnesota town in 1932. Times are hard everywhere, but especially at the school, which is run by a cruel couple who think little of using their students in forced labor, barely feeding or clothing them. Odie in particular is willing the wrath of the school's leaders, getting himself into trouble again and again. But often, he's not getting into trouble for the sake of getting into trouble, but to stand up for himself or another student who can't. That's laudable, but one especially bad night, things get out of hand, and Odie and Albert, along with their Native friend Mose and Emmy, a young girl just orphaned herself. Their goal: Get to St. Louis, where Odie and Albert's aunt lives, or lived the last they knew. They take the canoe formerly owned by Emmy's mother, and off they go.

But they realize all too soon that the schoolmasters are determined to find them, and have the means to hire help in that regard. They also realize that there's something very different about Emmy.

I got sucked into this one hard and tore right through it. I wish I could say that I loved it. I loved maybe the first third or so, but then I began to have trouble suspending disbelief. The things that happened often felt forced rather than organic. Many of the characters felt two-dimensional, more there for type than to be real fleshed-out human beings. Some of the action felt repetitive. And finally, it's almost as if author Krueger had a list he wanted to tick off: Hmm, let's write about abuses at Native boarding schools, then about the 1862 Dakota War that led to 38 Natives hanged the day after Christmas, and the effects of the Depression, and the tent-pole evangelicals who thrived during that time, and anti-Semitism, and the history of the Irish in St. Paul, and lesbians, and...

Yeah. That's a lot for one book. It's not much of a spoiler to say that this book is supposed to be a Depression-era Odyssey, and I felt that angle was much too labored.

So, overall, not my favorite, even though parts are good, and the four main characters are fairly well drawn.

Mariette in Ecstasy

Mariette in Ecstasy is a spare, yet lyrical novel set in upstate New York, beginning in 1906. Mariette Baptiste is about to follow her older sister's footsteps and enter a convent, against the wishes of her widowed father. Mariette is beautiful and idealistic, but also deeply religious. When she enters the convent, there are immediately convent members who adore her, but also those who go the opposite way, as far as their faith will allow them.

Which complicates things when Mariette begins to experience religious ecstasy and shows signs of stigmata. Is it a miracle? Is she becoming one with Christ? Or is she an attention-seeking fraud? 

Hansen keeps an authorial distance that allows the reader to interpret as they wish. Is Mariette a con artist, or is she the real deal? He gives hints both ways, keeping the reader unsure.

And the writing is beautiful, with lovely little metaphors and similes that grace the pages: 

"Tallow candles in red glass jars shudder on a high altar."

"And when all the sisters have walked through and Sister Aimee has been excused, Mother Saint-Raphael installs a stool beside the headrail and with no more than a whisper of sound sits down beside Mariette and is as still as a picture for a while, as composed as a book of ritual, disarray's opposite."

A lovely, gentle book to start the year. 

This Is Happiness

This Is Happiness is the last book I completed in 2019, and what a way to end a year. This is one of those rare books that is slow in pacing, but I couldn't have cared less about that, so interested was I in the characters and the community so fully, richly, compassionately portrayed. And talk about gorgeous writing--I read the library's copy, so obviously wasn't going to write in it, but kept putting little flags at various points until I realized nearly every page had some writing that made me sigh in appreciation--and the great writing served the story itself, not detracting from it.

The story is simple: The narrator, Noel (or Noe, as he's called) is an orphan who has become disenchanted with the idea of becoming a priest. Writing from the vantage point of his elder years, Noe is recalling how at the age of 17, he's sent off to visit his grandparents in the western Irish town of Faha. Faha is on the verge, for better or worse, of getting electricity for the first time. As if that wasn't exciting enough, especially to young Noe, a man named Christy shows up unannounced and appears to be part of the move to bring electricity in. But it turns out Christy has more than one reason for wanting to come to Faha.

So it's a coming of age story told from the wry viewpoint of many years later, and it's a tale of love in its many forms. It's also very much a story of the town of Faha and its inhabitants, their quirks and their personal histories:

"Faha then had more to it too than it does now. The shops were small but there were more of them, grocers, butchers, hardware, draper, chemist and undertakers, each implacably marked by the character of their owners. You shopped by blood and tribe. If you were related, however thinly, to Clohessy, or Bourke, who both sold the same tea, flour and sugar, the same three vegetables and tins of imperishable foodstuffs, that's where you did your business. You didn't darken the door of the other."

And sometimes the beautiful writing is more philosophic:

"At the time you're living it you can sometimes think your life is nothing much. It's ordinary and everyday and should be and could be this or that way better. It is without the perspective by which any meaning can be derived because it's too sensual and urgent and immediate, which is the way life is to be lived. We're all, all the time, striving, and though that means there's a more-or-less constant supply of failure, it's not such a terrible thing if you think that we keep on trying. There's something to consider in that."

On Goodreads, I said this was a book to wallow in. If you're in a wallowing mood, where you don't mind if the plot is slow to chug along but you're introduced to myriad fascinating characters and heaps of gorgeous writing, this one's for you.