European Reading Challenge 2020 Wrapup

 

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts a challenge to visit European countries by reading books set in them; this is one of the funnest challenges going as far as I'm concerned. My evidence this is true? It's the one I go the most over the top with and this year has been no different. And it was the only form of travel possible for most of this year.

The Deluxe tour is five countries. I visited a few more than that...

1.) Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. (UK)
2.) Henry James' The American. (France)
3.) Joan B. Flood's Left Unsaid. (Ireland)
4.) Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra. (Spain)
5.) Arthur Schnitzler's Late Fame. (Austria)
6.) Nino Haratischvili's The Eighth Life (For Brilka). (Georgia)
7.) Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Czech Republic)
8.) Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. (Norway)
9.) I. B. Singer's In My Father's Court. (Poland)
10.) Henrik Pontoppidan's Lucky Per. (Denmark)
11.) Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. (Russia)
12.) Anna Seghers' Transit. (Germany)
13.) Amelie Nothomb's Life Form. (Belgium)
14.) Matei Calinescu's Zacharias Lichter. (Romania)
15.) Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. (Italy)

My favorite countries this year were Russia, Denmark, and France.

This was my third year taking part. No surprise, I guess, that I visited the UK, France, Germany, and Italy all three years. A little more surprising was that I got to Poland and Austria each year. (Well, Austria is not that surprising. I'm a big Vienna-ophile...) The real surprise was I've been to Romania all three years. Maybe it's a sign I need to go in person? 

Thanks to Gilion for hosting! The signup for the new year is available. I need to do it!

The Volcano Lover

 "Nothing can match the elation of the chronically melancholy when joy arrives."

I've been on a bit of a Susan Sontag kick lately; after I'd been waiting a while, my library coughed up Benjamin Moser's recent biography. When I saw it was 'in transit' I read some of Sontag's essays; before I got to Moser's description of that period in her life, I decided to read The Volcano Lover. It first came out in 1992. Sontag was 59.

The story is set in the Napoleonic era; its basis is the love triangle of Sir William Hamilton, English ambassador to the kingdom of Naples, Emma Hamilton, the most famous beauty of the day, and Lord Nelson. Sontag gives herself a good story and good characters to start with.

Moser tends to read all of Sontag's books as if they were disguised autobiography (post on his biography coming soon?) and, while I didn't mean it to, that colored my reading of this. That quote above is Sir William Hamilton in the novel, but it might very well have been about Sontag herself when this, her third novel, was a critical and commercial success. 

But even without Moser's help you might be inclined to read this as disguised autobiography. Sontag deliberately flirts with that sort of reading. Like Proust writing his book where the narrator is Marcel. The opening:

"It is the entrance to a flea market. No charge. Admittance free."

Sounds like now. It is:

"But I would be entering it here. In my jeans and silk blouse and tennis shoes: Manhattan, spring of 1992."

Call this narrator 'Susan' if you like. She portrays herself as a collector, at least potentially: postcards of movie stars, Navajo rings, World War II bomber jackets, knives, model cars, cut-glass dishes, Roman coins. The things one might find at a flea market. But notice how our collectibles are moving back in time. We then drop some space and switch to the collector that is the main character of the novel, Sir William Hamilton:

"It is the end of a picture auction. London, autumn of 1772."

And we're off. 

Most of the novel takes place in Naples; Hamilton in addition to collecting pictures and statuary, studies Vesuvius, the volcano outside of Naples. He's the volcano lover. (Ignoring metaphorical readings.) He thinks of himself at times as a new Pliny the Elder, though he doesn't plan on dying in an eruption.

Sontag never refers to Hamilton as Hamilton; he's always the Cavaliere. Emma Hamilton is the Wife, and Nelson is the Hero. Other characters from the historical record are given their actual names, but the center of the drama is shifted a bit into an archetypal space.

It's Hamilton who's Sontag's historical alter ego, and it's Hamilton who's given the most space, and who's the best portrayed character in the novel. The first section, a hundred pages or so, shows him with his first wife, unwell and eventually dying. They were in love, she more than he, but his grief is genuine.

Then Emma comes into his life. Except for small items such as her beauty and her intelligence, Emma is not exactly marriageable in 1791. She'd been the painter Romney's model, known to be the mistress of various men, born way over on the very wrong side of whatever tracks there might have been. Hamilton is independent enough to not care. He accepts he will never be able to present her at court in London, though he does eventually in Naples. Emma comes to love him. 

Then Nelson comes to Naples. And here's the hole at the center of the novel. It's a romantic triangle. Sontag has emphasized the archetypal nature of the triangle. But the three of them all get along. It's very annoying. I also wasn't really convinced. 

I've never read anything about the real persons who appear in the novel. Maybe they did all get along. But there's not much subtlety here. The Cavaliere is convincing as a character. The Wife, less so; and the Hero, not at all. There's drama and tension in the novel, real human relations: the Cavaliere and his first wife; Emma and her mother. Sontag writes fiercely about the atrocities perpetrated at the fall of the Parthenopean Republic, with Nelson taking a good chunk of the blame. But the main romance I just found dull, which seems wrong. 

Ah, well. The beginning was good. The end was good, too: it ends with retrospectives written by dead characters, including the Cavaliere's first wife, whom I was happy to see more of:

"I cannot speak of myself without speaking of him. Even when I do not mention him, he is present by omission. But I will speak of myself, too.

I was his first wife.

I was plain. I was often unwell. I was devout. I loved music. He married me for my money. I fell in love with him after we were married. My God, how I loved him! He grew to love me, more than he had expected."

Overall I quite liked it, but curiously more for what happened at the margins than at the center.

The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

"One way or another, all philosophical insight derives from an awareness of the mendacious nature of language. In fact, in language, truth is always relative, partial, circumscribed--a fragment of a fragment, an echo of an echo, a mere shadow." [p.126]

 

That's not an unrepresentative sample from Matei Calinescu's The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter. (1969, tr. Andrea Calinescu and Breon Mitchell, 2018.) It is labeled a novel, but...you were warned.

I tend to be OK with that sort of thing. And while the talk may be philosophical, and the plot near to non-existent, it does have characters. The 'Biographer' who is telling us about Lichter, Lichter himself, and several figures in Lichter's circle: the drunk and silent philosopher Leopold Nacht,  Adrian Leonescu, a specialist in English phonetics, and Doctor S., a psychotherapist, the villain of the piece, if that's not too exalted a term. (He keeps wanting to explain Lichter, to explain Lichter to himself.) A few others. Zacharias Lichter is culturally Jewish, but not practicing.

The book is divided into short chapters, many of which are philosophical treatises in miniature. The quote above, for example, comes from a chapter 'On Lying.' Others include 'Regarding the Devil,' 'Responsibility and Freedom,' and 'On Mathematical Language.' At points it suggested Wittgenstein, if you leave out the math.

Lichter is also a poet, and we see his poems, though Lichter treats his own poetry dismissively. One poem presented in the text, the 'Biographer' tells us he had to rescue from the trash. They're typically held together with a sort of Biblical anaphora. Here's the opening to 'Mouth Full of Flowers': [p.56]

Beggars, lunatics, old friends,
It's been raining so long we have no shelter,
It rains of winter, of spring, and of other seasons,
It rains of thought and death, and without a purpose, it rains
Of fright and of cold words, of words, words.

But mostly, in addition to being a philosopher and a poet, Lichter is a sort of secular saint. He takes up an almost Buddhist begging rather than accumulate possessions. He's kind to the downtrodden and concerned with the aetherial. Lichter, himself, though denies this, saying that the silent (stille? und so heilige? 'Tis the season...) Nacht is the embodiment of love in the world. 

Norman Manea in the introduction says that 1969 was a period of relative liberalization in Romania; the book came out then. Also maybe the censors were too stupid to see. The novel takes place in a no-time, possibly the 1930s, but not very explicitly so, so how could Calinescu be complaining about Ceausescu? Nevertheless Calinescu was not allowed to publish afterwards, and got out of Romania, ultimately taking a position at Indiana University. He died in 2009. 

Life and Opinions suggests to English readers Tristram Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and apparently it does to a Romanian, too. Cioran said of the novel, it's the story of the Baal Shem Tov as told by Sterne. It's not a bad comparison. Lichter is more analytic and less purely genial than the Baal Shem Tov, at least as the latter is presented in Buber and I. B. Singer. But like the Baal Shem Tov, and Socrates for that matter, Lichter doesn't write much:

"The fiery truth can only be transmitted orally." [p.80]

When he does write, he considers it shameful. (Hence, the poem in the trashcan.) 

While it's as plotless as Tristram Shandy, it is plotless in a different way and its prose is quite different. It reminded me of George Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, though I wonder if Calinescu could even have seen that work. But Gissing's short book has a biographer, G. G. as character, and a series of texts on philosophical or spiritual issues. Ryecroft is more of a nature writer than the urban Lichter. Anyway, Zacharias Lichter is its own thing, and I liked that thing. But it may have been wise on Calinescu's part to keep it short... (145 pages in translation).

"And now, may I ask what moved you to write my biography? Don't you see that my 'biography' is the last thing that could possibly be written? If I knew, at least that you meant to write a fictional life of Zacharias Lichter, so be it!...I predict that the biography you write will be serious and boring, cold, perhaps awkwardly ironic; something fitting only for yourself." [p.144]

Maybe, maybe not...

Nearing the end of the year, but one more for Gillion's European Reading Challenge!

Amélie Nothomb's Life Form (#WITMonth)

In Life Form, the character Amélie Nothomb (sort of to be confused with the author, but not completely) receives a letter from Iraq, from Melvin Mapple, who writes, "I'm a private in the US Army...I've been posted in Baghdad ever since the beginning of this fucking war, over six years ago."

She decides to write back. 

The correspondence is basically the book. It turns out the Melvin Mapple has become terribly obese--this was a problem among American soldiers in Iraq, though Mapple is an extreme case--and is unhappy with the whole situation. Though both are now against the war, Amélie tries to help him make sense out of the situation.

I thought the letters from Mapple were brilliantly convincing. They sounded like I would imagine a fairly literate, but not especially educated, young American writing. So all kudos to Nothomb, but then also to the translator, Alison Anderson. 

This is the second novel I've read by Nothomb and I've seen the movie version of a third. She's a Belgian writer now living in France, so generally is the Amélie Nothomb character in the books. Nevertheless they are clearly fiction. Pétronille, that I read earlier, was funnier, but the Iraq War and obesity are not exactly funny subjects.

Still Melvin's obesity gets transformed into an artistic statement against the war, which is a little funny, and allows for witty double-edged observations on the nature of art. 

"...my obesity has become my life's work.' [49]

"I had not known how to provide him with one essential artistic quality: doubt." [64]

"There is a crook in every writer." [108]

The novel ends in a surprising twist.

I don't think either Life Form or Pétronille are considered among the very top Amélie Nothomb novels, yet I found both of them funny and thoughtful. They're also short and easy-to-read. But if she gets better than these, she could be very good indeed. Hygiene and the Assassin, The Prince's Act, and especially Fear and Trembling have all won major French language prizes.

Not sure about that picture of her on the cover, though.

Anna Seghers' Transit (#WITMonth)

 "Aren't you fed up with such thrilling stories?"

The narrator of Anna Seghers' Transit buttonholes the reader and asks that question--with exasperation. With cause. He's a German, persona non grata with the Nazis, stuck in Marseille, in Vichy France. He's neither able to stay, nor to leave, nor to return home. A life less thrilling would be welcome.

Nevertheless, Transit is a story with thrills.

At the start of the novel, the narrator Seidler is in a work camp for enemy aliens in the north of France. He'd already escaped from a Nazi prison into France; as the Nazis roll into France in 1940, the prisoners have to convince the French guard to look the other way as they flee the camp, Seidler escaping for a second time, because most of them would be doomed if caught by the Nazis. 

Seidler makes his way south with other refugees, passing through Paris. He agrees as a favor for a friend to deliver a letter to the writer Weidel, but when he finds Weidel's place of residence, Weidel has committed suicide, leaving only a manuscript and his documents. The letter he was meant to deliver, now undeliverable, tells him that the writer's estranged widow needs the documents, as well as Weidel himself, to get a visa so she can leave France. Seidler takes the manuscript, the documents, the suitcase, and goes south to Marseille to deliver all these things to the waiting widow.

So far the story could easily be by Helen MacInnes or Alan Furst. But Seidler is not a naif caught up in a romance, nor a dedicated anti-Nazi; he's just a mechanic who doesn't like the Nazis (and whom the Nazis do not like.) He'd like to settle in Marseille, stop running. He becomes attached to the child of friends, a child who lives in fear of abandonment. The local authorities tell him he can only stay in Marseille so long as he can demonstrate that he's making efforts to leave. So in addition to MacInnes and Furst, you can throw in a bit of Kafka. Everyone in Marseille is facing the same conundrum: you have to have an exit visa, a transit visa for any country you pass through on your way out, as well as an entry visa for your destination country. Any one of those visas can expire while you're still trying to acquire the others.

He helps people who really do want to leave, who have to leave, but for himself he dates, falls in love, discovers pizza. He just wants a normal-ish life, but he's been thrust into a thriller story, albeit one with Kafka-esque twists.

Anna Seghers herself was German and was arrested in 1933 by the Nazis for being a communist. She was released, but she was also of Jewish ancestry and left for France soon after. She passed through Marseille on her way to Mexico where she spent the war years before returning to East Germany after the war. Transit first appeared in English and Spanish translations in 1944, and not in German until 1948, and then only in East Germany. My edition has an afterward by Heinrich Böll for its first publication in West Germany.

I thought it was very good. One of the interesting things about it were the characters who did not want to go. Sure, Rick Blaine decides to stay, but he never seemed like he would be in danger. I mean, he's Humphrey Bogart after all. In Transit, Seidler is not the only one who doesn't want to cross the ocean. Another returns to Lithuania, his home, even though it's almost certainly a death sentence. Others decide to quit running, knowing or suspecting the cost.

It's Women in Translation month! This was translated by Margot Dembauer Betto for New York Review of Books.

The Master and Margarita

What if the devil came to Moscow in 1930?

Professor Woland arrives from somewhere (never quite specified--maybe Germany? Maybe someplace a little hotter...) and arranges to give a demonstration in black magic, after which, in a nod to the official rationalism of the Soviet Union, he will explain how the tricks are done.

Except he doesn't. Because those tricks can't be rationally explained.

We're not exactly told Woland is the devil, but it's pretty clear from the start. Wikipedia tells me that voland is an archaic German word for demon. At the very beginning of Bulgakov's novel, in arranging his demonstration of magic, Woland meets Mikhail Berlioz, the director of MASSOLIT. He predicts Berlioz will die within the hour when his head is cut off by a woman. Which proceeds to happen. Did Woland make it happen? Or did he just foresee it?

The epigram to Bulgakov's novel is another clue: he quotes Goethe's Faust: "'Say at last -- who are thou?'/'That power that I serve/Which wills forever evil/Yet does forever good.'" The quote is from the scene in Faust's study after Faust has first summoned Mephistopheles. Is Woland doing good by doing evil to those who deserve it in 1930s Moscow? Hmm. A bit. But I'd say Bulgakov's novel is far too anarchic to be so simply categorized.

But it's a great anarchic ride. There are three strands woven together: there's Woland, and his devilish entourage, in Moscow, afflicting the comfortable, getting rid of minor bureaucrats as needed. There's the final days of Yeshua ha-Notsri, that is, Jesus of Nazareth, recognizably parallel to the biblical account, but not identical to it. Is that a tale told by the devil? Or is it the novel of The Master, thought burned? Or is it the actual historical record? Don't ask me; evidence for all three theories appear.

The third strand is the one that gives the novel its title, but is the last to get started. It's a love story. The thirteenth (numerologically significant?) chapter is titled 'Enter the Hero' and it's where we first meet the Master, who has a written a novel about Pontius Pilate and his search for philosophical wisdom, which may be identical to some of the chapters we've already read. But the Master, otherwise unnamed, is confined to a madhouse, and believes his manuscript burned, that his one true love has forgotten him. 

The nineteenth chapter is titled 'Margarita.' It begins:

"Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue!

Follow me, reader, and only me and I will show you that love!" 

Margarita believes she has lost the Master; he thinks she has forgotten him. But maybe by becoming a witch, and with a little help from the Devil...

Bulgakov was unable to publish this during his lifetime--or really anything during the last decade of his life. (He died in 1940, at age 48, of kidney disease.) He must have known this novel had no chance. He had reason to be angry at Stalin, at the snivelling Stalinist bureaucrats who managed to keep him from publishing. Yet the satirical parts struck me as surprisingly genial. Embarrassment and discomfiture are the rule, not anything more dire. Berlioz dies, grotesquely, but the director of the theatre, who has done some actual bad things, is magically carried off to Yalta and returns to Moscow at the end unharmed. There are other restorations of the sort.

It's funny, it's affecting, it's a remarkable tour-de-force. Basically it's a great book that bears rereading and I've only just read it, so maybe I'll simply not say anything else. (And I've been a slow blogger of late.) But I can see that I will be rereading it. It's been translated multiple times. I read it in the Michael Glenny version. I didn't compare this version to others, but it read quite well.

Lucky Per

Peter Andreas Sidenius (Per) is a middle child in a large family. His father is a severe and pious minister; his mother, an invalid. They live in a small town in the south of Jutland, which was then, as now, considered the sticks of Denmark.

Prayers and hymns are the order of the day for the family, but not for Per, who rebels against all that. We feel Per is an irritable and objectionable young man, but his sins, while in his home town, are pretty minor: with a gang of boys, he steals apples from a farmer's tree; he sneaks out of the house to go sledding after dinner. Nevertheless his father shames him publicly for these transgressions. Per is determined to get to Copenhagen as soon as he can; he's going to be an engineer, none of this piety for him.

But when he gets to Copenhagen and university, he can't be bothered with classes or even exams; instead he spends all his time drafting a proposal to create a canal network for Jutland. As far as we can judge such things the canal network seems clever, but Per hasn't the patience to master the preparatory training and offends the financial and political powers he will need to make things happen.

(Weirdly my professional career as a computer consultant involved three business areas; two of them were shipping and finance. I would say Pontoppidan, who trained as an engineer, understood shipping--canal dredging in this case--in a deep way; his knowledge of financial markets and stock issuances feels pretty shallow.)

Per is a pretty objectionable hero, and the narrative voice doesn't let us forget that. There's a lot Nietzschean-sounding language: is Per an Übermensch who will remake the world if only all those little people get out of his way? Sometimes he thinks so. Still we care about him. He definitely does some bad things, but some of the worst are only fantasized: he thinks about dumping his rich fiancée to chase after an even richer girl, but doesn't. Like many a young man he can't bring himself to say, "I love you." Too socially maladroit to say it, he writes her a rather charming love letter, but decides it's all sentiment and burns it rather than send it.

And whatever he does brings on the clucking condemnation of his father and his oldest brother.

That rich fiancée is Jakobe, the daughter of a Jewish merchant, and is a fascinating character in her own right. She has a younger, more conventionally pretty sister, Nanny, who attracts all the boys, including Per, until Per decides he's more interested in her more serious-minded older sister. I was reminded of Dorothea (though Nanny is flightier--and less likeable--than Celia) from Middlemarch, though the other Eliot comparison is clearly Daniel Deronda (a point made in the Introduction as well) and here Pontoppidan wins hands down. Pontoppidan's view of the Jewish community is equally sympathetic as Eliot's but far more nuanced and convincing.

Too much more of the plot would start to feel spoilerish, so I'll refrain, though I will say the novel surprised me all the way through. Even thirty pages from the end I couldn't see how Pontoppidan would end it, but end it he did and more than satisfactorily. (Though there may have been a little too much forgiveness at the end. I don't know. But maybe.)

Hans im Glück from my student edition of Grimm's Fairy
Tales. Clearly I once knew what vorteilhaft meant, but
had to look it up to reread the tale.

One of the questions in the novel is which fairy tale best represents Per's trajectory. (You can decide if you think Nietzsche just another fairy tale.) It seems that an issue at the time was whether Scandinavian literature was all just fairy tales, or did it address real people with real problems. Pontoppidan suggests, why choose?

Is Per the stable boy who does a service for the king, marries the princess, and gains half the kingdom? Or--apparently a well-known Scandinavian fairy tale, though unknown to me--is he the troll that crawls out from under his rock, looks around, and then decides to crawl back under? Or a Cain doomed to wander? His father calls him that at one point. The German translation of the novel uses Hans im Glück for its title, one of Grimm's fairy tales, which would seem a bit to give it away, except after rereading the Grimm Brothers tale, I'm not so sure it's a perfect match either.

Lucky Per came out in in eight volumes from 1898 to 1904 (eight volumes making just under 600 pages in this edition) and is, I read, one of Henrik Pontoppidan's major novels. But it's only one of them. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917. Still the novel wasn't translated into English until 2010 and I don't know that even then it made much noise; Modern Library reissued it last year and that seems to have helped. I know a group of bloggers read it last year; James Wood reviewed it in The New Yorker; etc., etc. Those other novels haven't yet been translated into English. For something that seems to me quite clearly great this is pretty shocking. Germans were better served and took notice: my Modern Library edition features a rave blurb by Thomas Mann, and Georg Lukacs looked at the novel in depth in his The Story of the Novel.

So, yes, read it. It's touching, with love and ambition and philosophical questions (Nietzsche, but also very much Kierkegaard) on the go, it's troubling and thoughtful, and at least sometimes funny--forgot to mention funny earlier--and you care about the fate of the characters, Per and Jakobe, particularly.

But. I feel like I've been complaining about translations a lot recently, and I hate to grumble (no, of course, I like to grumble, I just don't want to be thought a grumbler) but the translation didn't strike me as very good. Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire, who wrote the introduction, says it's considered a stylistic masterpiece in Danish, and our Danish friend (also from rural Jutland in fact) told us the same. In English, it's not. Now I have no Danish, and I'm unlikely to learn Danish in this lifetime, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but there were a number of ungainly moments. Nanny eventually marries Dyhring, an editor and publisher:

"There was no question, on either side, of real passion. Dyhring's love expressed itself, after a while, mostly as a kind of impudent affection, and, despite the comparative meaninglessness of this inclination, Nanny showed herself willing to accept his provocative kisses. In fact, it was really the exigent satisfying of their mutual vanity that bound them together." [295]

This is funny, or meant to be, but 'showed herself willing'? And 'exigent'? Surely the register doesn't come across as so Latinate and pedantic in Danish. Or if it does, it's probably even more over the top, as satire.

Or this:

"When it was revealed that the cakes on the table were Frøken Inger's own handiwork, the baroness and her sister vied with each other to eulogize them,..." [427]

Now it's true the cakes were about to die the death all cakes deserve--thrown headlong down the gullet--but is a eulogy quite what's implied in Danish? I ask you.

There were a few slangy Americanisms that pulled me up ("cut him some slack") but on the other hand The Beautiful Game was called football and not soccer.

Now maybe all of these translation choices can be defended on the basis of the Danish--I don't know and can't tell you--but then there was this:

"By this famous, snaking drive, they reached the Janiculum, with the wonderful view of all of Rome and mile-wide vista from the Campagna to the shining Albanian mountains in the distance." [302]

Wow, I thought! Was the pollution really so much less in Rome in 1885 that you could see the Albanian mountains? Surely not!

And, indeed, not. Even on Rome's clearest day you can't see the mountains of Albania from the Janiculum. The Apennines are in the way. What you can see is the Alban Hills. This is simply illiterate, both geographically and verbally. Sigh.

Oh, dear. Well, #NameTheTranslator...though maybe I shouldn't. But it's Naomi Lebowitz; she's an emerita professor from Washington University who wrote about European literature, and in particular, Scandinavian literature. She ought to be good. I'm afraid I don't feel she was.

Nevertheless, having slagged this translation (a slangy Britishism--probably out of date, too) I would note it took us a century to get to this first translation into English. The novel really is great. Don't wait for the next.

I know some of you have already read it. (I'm late to the party as usual.) Am I getting it right?

In My Father's Court

"No man is judged in his hour of grief."

Those are the words of Singer's father when he hears a woman curse after her son had committed suicide.

Isaac Bashevis Singer has been on my mind lately. Various bloggers have been reading I. B. Singer (and also I. J. Singer); the Other Reader has recently finished Enemies, A Love Story and that's been a topic of dinner conversations. I was spouting off about his memoir In My Father's Court, and also Shosha, but then I wasn't really certain I'd read In My Father's Court. (I'm quite sure about Shosha. A great novel.) The database says I hadn't, but I thought I remembered parts of it. It's possible I didn't complete it previously, or it's also possible the database was wrong.

I went through a serious Singer phase in the 80s--this was when a friend suggested I should try reading a living author before they won the Nobel prize--and read a bunch of them. They're generally great.

In My Father's Court runs from Singer's earliest memories--he was born in 1902--until the end of World War I. The book is a series of short pieces that first appeared in Yiddish in the Jewish Daily Forward in the 60s (under a pseudonym) and were then translated into English before being collected into book form. Singer's father was an impoverished Hasidic rabbi who moved the family to Warsaw before the war; his mother was the daughter of a more prestigious Hasidic rabbi from Bilgoray in southeast Poland.

From the introduction:

"The book tells the story of a family and of a rabbinical court that were so close together it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The rabbinical court, the Beth Din, is an ancient institution among the Jews...The Beth Din was a kind of blend of a court of law, synagogue, house of study, and, if you will, psychoanalyst's office where people of a troubled spirit could come to unburden themselves."

And, perhaps we can add, a good training ground for a future writer.

There are stories of his father deciding in cases of divorce, wills, Talmudic disputations. At the same time events happen in their lives: his sister, his parents' first-born, marries into a Jewish family in Amsterdam and moves there. His brother, Joseph, ten years older, loses his faith, becomes a communist and an artist (he both writes and paints; now he's more famous for his writing); I. B. is studious, is fascinated by Jewish traditions, but at the same time reads Dostoevsky, gradually begins to doubt, discovers girls. The greatest part of the episodes take place in Warsaw, on Krochmalna Street, in the Warsaw ghetto. But during World War I, after Warsaw falls to the Germans and Austria-Hungary takes Bilgoray, it becomes possible to travel to his maternal grandfather's home, and with food short in Warsaw, he goes with his mother and younger brother to the country. The book ends with them in Bilgoray and his father and older brother still in Warsaw.

Very good and very touching. I'm not quite sure what the cover has to do with the book--though what do covers ever have to do with books?--unless it's the last lines:

"Suddenly I was dazzled by a particular narrow face, a dark girl with coal-black eyes and an indescribable smile. I became confused and when she asked me a question I did not know what she was saying. Many novels and a lot of poetry had filled my mind by then; I was prepared for the turmoil that writers call 'love'..."

Peer Gynt

"But just what is the Gyntish self?"

I reread this to prepare for reading something else in the future. We'll see how that pans out...

Peer Gynt (1867) is a long dramatic poem, a play if you will, by Henrik Ibsen, but so long as to be almost unperformable. At any rate, Ibsen didn't imagine it being performed, until later when he did, and got his acquaintance Edvard Grieg to write some now-famous incidental music for a production.

Peer Gynt is the (anti-?) hero of his namesake play. His father is dead, having died drunk and nearly broke; his mother is still alive, exasperated by her wayward son, but not to the point where she will let anybody else say the bad things about him she allows herself to say.

There was an actual Peer Gynt fifty or a hundred years before the play, but he had already moved into folklore by the time Ibsen took him up as a subject.

The problem with Peer is that he's an irresponsible liar. I'm not sure I should be reading any more things (more than I already do) at this time about irresponsible liars, but be that as it may. When the play starts, Peer, returning home after a month supposedly hunting--his clothes are shredded--tells his mother he was abducted by a flying reindeer. She doesn't believe him, but his lies are so vivid, she starts to retroactively fear for his life anyway.

The play/poem, 200 pages in my edition, is Peer's entire life; the irresponsibility overwhelms the early lying, but then sheer immorality overwhelms the irresponsibility. Peer and his mother need money; there's a neighbor heiress who is attracted to Peer and is about to be married against her wishes. At that wedding Peer sees Solveig; maybe she's the one he wants? Instead Peer abducts the bride, but in the end refuses to marry her; and so now he's now wanted by the law.

What does Peer really want? What is that Gyntish self? He meets the daughter of the king of the trolls (or is that just a fantasy?) and could marry her, but then he'd have to live the trollish life, adopt the trollish motto: "to thy own self, be...enough." (There's also the little matter of a required eye surgery that makes anything ugly look beautiful.)

You see the beginnings of the existentialist crisis here. He flees Norway to try on various roles, all of which temporarily seem the proper Gyntish self: rich man, prophet, lover, even archeologist. None of them last. He behaves pretty badly in doing these things: it's the slave trade makes him rich, etc.

In the end he returns to Norway an old man. He meets the devil, (presumably, not so named) but worse he meets the Button-Moulder: if you go to heaven, then great, you've gone to heaven; if you go the other way, well, then, at least you were a great sinner, and you have preserved your identity. But the Button-Moulder! He recycles the soul-stuff from wishy-washy types by melting it all down to start anew. If you've never found yourself, your true Gyntish self, it's the Button-Moulder for you! And the Button-Moulder tells Peer that Peer is his kind of material.

This makes it all a bit Faust with a twist.

Does Peer save himself from the Button-Moulder? The ending is deliberately ambiguous. Should he have been saved? Enh, I don't know. Poking around, I found this quote from Robert Bly, "He does horrible things throughout the play and yet you end up loving him very much." I'm not sure I entirely felt that love, but clearly some do, and your mileage may vary...

In any case, I suppose even basically horrible people need to find themselves, too.

The edition I read was an older Penguin translated by Peter Watts. It was a verse translation and it was OK, but I wasn't amazed. I found the Robert Bly quote looking for alternative translations. Watts:

"...with a huge concern like mine,
that gave employment to some thousands,
to close the firm down altogether
becomes particularly hard."

Bly:

"Thousands worked for me--to an enjoyment.
But I became concerned about unemployment!"

I'm not entirely sure between those two. I assume the Watts is much closer to the text, but Ibsen rhymes in Norwegian, and the Bly has more brio. The Bly doesn't seem to have ever been printed, though it was the text for a production at the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota, with Mark Rylance (!) as Peer Gynt in 2007. That would have been fun. Penguin has replaced the older Peer Gynt I have with a new translation by Geoffrey Hill; Oxford has one translated by Christopher Fry. If you have ideas, let me know! Because my copy has basically dissolved after this reading, and Peer Gynt is after all a classic...

Some other quotes I copied out from the Watts translation:

The King of the Trolls: "My son, we trolls aren't as black as we're painted--
that's another difference between us and you!"

-Act II

(Meaning, we humans *are* as black as we're painted?)

The Great Boyg: "He was too strong. There were women behind him."

-Act II

Peer Gynt: "'Exalted?' Yes, that's what will happen to me;
Anything else is unthinkable."

-Act IV

Peer Gynt: ...I've just one question first:
what, after all, is this 'being one's self'? 

The Button-Moulder: A curious question indeed, on the lips
of a man who has just-- 

Peer Gynt: A direct answer, please. 

The Button-Moulder: Being one's self means slaying one's Self
But that answer's presumably wasted on you,
and therefore let's say: 'Above everything else
it's observing the Master's intentions in all things.' 

Peer Gynt: But what can one do if one's never found out
what the Master intended? 

The Button-Moulder: One just has to guess. 

Peer Gynt: But a man's intuitions so often prove wrong,
and then one is sunk, as it were, in mid-ocean! 

The Button-Moulder: Exactly, Peer Gynt, it's when insight is lacking
that the lad with the hoof makes the best of his captures.

-Act V

So: to thine own self be true?

Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (#1920Club)

"Well, the story begins in 1920,..."

A rather cool poster for a 1939 production.

Czech author Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. is famous, as much as it is, because it's the origin of our word robot, which is related to the Czech word for serf or slave. It's a four act play about a company that makes a fortune building robots for industrial production. Those robots have already, when the play starts, transformed the world through low-cost labor. R.U.R., the name of the play, is the name of the company, that is, Rossum's Universal Robots (English even in the original Czech.)

In Act I, Helen Glory arrives at the remote island location where the robots are made. She's the daughter of the famous Sir Edward Glory (and is very beautiful) so she's immediately shown in to see Harry Domin the managing director of the company. Domin--and all the other directors, Alquist, Busman, Fabry, Gall, Hallemeier--comically fall in love with her on the spot, and so, even though they see right through her scheme to liberate the robots, they don't care and show her all their secrets.

But it isn't Helen who convinces the directors; it's the directors who convince Helen. That opening quote is Harry Domin starting to explain the history of Rossum's Universal Robots and all the great things they've achieved. In 1932, Old Rossum (Old Reason in the version I just read) discovers the key to manufacturing life. He putters around with his discovery, but young Rossum sees the potential and makes a fortune. In Act I, around the year 2000, both Rossums are dead, but the company is a worldwide powerhouse. People don't have to work any more; the world is rich; robots do everything.

Act II finds us ten years later: Helen is married to Harry Domin, the director, but not everything is Utopian in this Utopia. Humans, including Helen, are no longer having babies. Robots are breaking down faster. Worse there's a new manifesto calling for robot liberation making the rounds.

By Act III, the robots are in active rebellion, and in Act IV? Well, you'll just have to see for yourself what happens in Act IV.

It's definitely a case where the road to whatever that outcome was is paved with good intentions. Čapek writes of his play:

"General Director Domin shows in the play that the development of technology frees man from heavy physical labor, and he is right. Alquist, with his Tolstoyan outlook, believes that technology demoralizes man, and I think he is right, too. Busman believes that only industrialism is capable of meeting modern needs, and he is right. Helena instinctively fears all these human machinations, and she is quite right. Finally, the robots themselves revolt agains all these idealists, and it seems they are right, too."

So with everybody being right, how can anything go wrong?

I read the play in the pink volume on the right (tr. by Peter Majer and Cathy Porter) from Methuen Press, but I'd read it previously in Catbird Press edition translated by Claudia Novack-Jones. I think I now prefer the Majer and Porter translation, but as far as I can tell with no Czech, both are fine. One major difference between the two is that the Majer and Porter translation makes clear the impact of the name Rossum for a Czech by changing the founder's name to Reason. (Rozum is the Czech word for mind/reason/intellect.) I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that; it seems a little heavy-handed, but maybe I'm just used to the name Rossum in the play.

Of course, why not have both? I do! With the exception of the play R.U.R., there's not much overlap between the two volumes. The Čapek quote above comes from the Catbird Press edition. Čapek died young, in 1938, of pneumonia; he'd suffered a crippling problem with his spine for his entire life. But not before he became world-famous and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

And the other thing that must be mentioned is that R.U.R., great in its own right, is also a first crack at themes that Čapek revisits in his brilliant (brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!) novel, War With The Newts. Don't miss it. I've probably just talked myself into rereading it in the the near future.

The play was first printed in Czech in 1920 (though the first production wasn't until January of 1921) and as such it's my first contribution to Simon and Kaggsy's #1920Club. Thanks to them for hosting!

The Eighth Life (For Brilka)

Well, that was a bit disappointing. Not terrible or anything--I did finish it--but from everything I'd heard I had higher hopes.

Nino Haratischvili's The Eighth Life (For Brilka) is a multi-generational epic looking at the history of the twentieth century from a Georgian (the country, not the state) perspective. The first of the sections of the book focuses on Anastasia Jashi, born in 1900 in a provincial town in what was then the Russian empire. Anastasia dies in 1999 in independent Georgia, having lived through the entire Soviet era. The eight lives--the eight sections of the book--are her, her half sister, her son, her daughter, her granddaughter, each of her two great-granddaughters, and lastly her great-great-granddaughter, Brilka. The book is written in the form of a family history for Brilka by Niza, one of those great-granddaughters.

OK, so I think of myself as a sucker for big fat novels with historical sweep and lots of characters. Georgia should be exotic and interesting. The novel was winning prizes for German books, its original language, and it had been longlisted for the Booker International Prize. Because of all that, when I put my name on my library's hold list, I figured I wouldn't see this for months; but when the library told me I could get it now, in the middle of lockdown, I thought great.

And it does have historical sweep. Georgia looms large in the history of Soviet Russia because Stalin was Georgian, as was Lavrentiy Beria. Stalin is only distant and ominous in the novel, but Beria, the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, is a definite dark presence in it until his death.

Bad things happen to the characters--well, it is the Soviet Union, much of it the years of Stalin. Acid-throwing, forced abortion, rape. Characters die in the Gulag, die in battle, die in the siege of Leningrad, or, captured in battle, are forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union, only to die once they get 'home.' Those who survive, well, survivor's guilt is a recurring theme.

One can hardly complain given the period. And much of the emotional impact of the novel occurs precisely in those moments. Haratischvili writes as well as she ever does about those moments of terror. I did often feel that the lives of the characters are manipulated too much to get them to where they needed to be for a big historical scene. Now this is a thing in historical novels--Prince Andrei meets Napoleon after all--but there can be too much of it, and here the believability of the characters suffers. They felt a bit too often like useful tools. The male characters especially were unconvincing.

'As well as she ever does,' I wrote, and meant it. The bigger problem is the prose. Now I read it in translation, but I have to assume the translators (Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin) are at least competent, and not wantonly introducing flabbiness. I wrote down several examples before giving up, but one will suffice. At the start of Operation Barbarossa, our narrator writes, "...the Generalissimus' [Stalin's] huge empire was being attacked from all points of the compass..." Now this metaphor is old and clichéd, but worse it's also completely wrong. The Germans came from the west and attacked, at most, from three points of the compass. And, as Haratischvili knows perfectly well, because she gives us the facts some pages later, it's important Japan doesn't join in the attack: the Soviet Union is able to transfer crucial reinforcements from the Far East (one of those unattacked compass points) at a critical moment, which may very well have been the one thing that saved Stalin's 'huge empire.' Relying on a clichéd metaphor, bad enough in its own right, is also a factual error. Orwell would no doubt approve the anti-Communism, but he'd cringe at the prose.

I don't want to go on, and as I say I did finish it. The novel is at its best, I thought, in the later sections: it's closer to Haratischvili's own life, and the stagnant final years of the Soviet Union and the troubled early years of Georgia's re-founded independence are things I know less about, and it was interesting to see them from the inside. But there are plenty of positive reviews of the novel to be found, and I felt some need to push back.

But it does cover Georgia as part of my tour of Europe for Gilion's European Reading Challenge!

Two Novellas by Arthur Schnitzler

Late Fame

In Late Fame, Eduard Saxberger is an unmarried civil servant in Vienna; he's approaching seventy. His life is quiet, but he has a few friends he meets regularly at his favorite restaurant.

Forty years ago he published a book of poetry The Wanderers which sank without notice; but in the 1890s, young poet Wolfgang Meier finds the book again, loves it, hunts down the aging Saxberger, and draws him into his circle of young literati. Late Fame has come to Saxberger.

At first it's nice. None of his restaurant regular friends knew he once had aspirations to poetry; he scarcely believed it himself anymore, but now Meier and his circle are telling him he's inspirational. Fräulein Gasteiner, the actress in the group, flirts with him, and the circle organize a reading and wouldn't he write something new to be the star of the evening?

Of an earlier draft, Schnitzler wrote in his diary, "...end not sad enough." You'll have to see if you think the end is now sad enough, but it's not as sad as it possibly could be, and there's definitely humor in the middle parts.

The younger characters in the novella in the novella are partly caricatures of the Jung-Wien group of the 1890s in Vienna, of which Schnitzler himself was a young member. But the novella's artists are a little more hapless than the Jung-Wien group, which did have some notable successes among its members: Schnitzler himself as well as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and (for a while) Karl Kraus.

The novella was written at the time it was set for a weekly magazine Die Zeit (not connected as far as I can tell to the current German newspaper) but it was deemed too long for that and so it never appeared while Schnitzler was alive. His papers were rescued with the help of the British embassy in the aftermath of Anschluss; otherwise it would have been lost. It came out in English in 2015 and is translated by Alexander Starritt with an afterword.

Fräulein Else

Else is a nineteen-year-old girl staying a vacation spot in the Italian Alps; she's chaperoned by an aunt and her cousin is also present, but her parents are at home in Vienna. A nice life, right? Well, not entirely.

A letter arrives from her mother--written at the instigation of her father--asking Else to ask Herr von Dorsday for money. The situation is desperate; her father, a society lawyer, has been caught pilfering from a trust he administers in order to feed his gambling habit; if the money isn't restored in a few days, he'll be taken up for embezzlement, which means dishonorable jail or an honorable-ish suicide. Hours later a telegram comes from her father saying even more money is needed.

Herr von Dorsday is ostensibly a friend of her father, if her father still has any friends; his gambling compulsion and consequent need to sponge is well-known in Viennese society. And worse, what everyone knows, including both Else and her father, is that Herr von Dorsday is an old roué, who can't keep his hands off the girls. Does her father want Else to ask because it's an emergency and the personal touch is better? Or does he figure the 'personal touch' is better and it's Else who will be touched?

The novel is told in stream of consciousness--Else's--and it follows every twist and turn of her thought throughout this impossible situation she's been thrown into. I found it very convincing, but also very painful. So, though it's impressive, you might want to be sure to save it for a moment you can bear to read such a thing. It is timely, though, as Harvey Weinstein (hopefully!) is going off to jail.

The novella came out in German in 1924. My copy is from Pushkin Press and is translated by F. H. Lyon.

Collected Arthur Schnitzler on the blog.

Unsettled times. Keep well!

Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra

"The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past,..."

Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (1832) relies upon the power and charm of the Alhambra to work its magic. Though no doubt Irving worked on those reveries for a while himself.

In 1829, Irving, already a professional writer, traveled to Spain, and in particular to Granada, where he had arranged to live in the Alhambra. Though he had originally intended to stay longer, he was only there six months before he was drafted into taking on the secretary role at the American embassy in London. But he gathered enough material in those six months to write this book.

It's structured as a travel or guide book, and it begins with his crossing the lonely mountains north of Granada and worrying about bandits. He arrives in Granada, establishes himself in the Alhambra, and hires Mateo as his guide/valet. He looks around the Alhambra and describes its various features, famous towers and halls, and here it functions particularly like a guide book.

But the truly fun part is the embedded tales, unsurprising from the man who brought us Rip van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Irving knew Spanish and ten years later he was the U.S. Ambassador to Spain, and he presents these tales as picked up in conversation, quite often from Mateo. They're Romantic--Irving was influenced by Sir Walter Scott--but have an ironic humor to them that lightens the romanticizing. There's the tale of the three Moorish princesses in the Tower of Princesses, or the Two Discreet Statues that indicate (to those who know) where (one of the) buried Moorish treasures are. My favorite story was the longest, the story of Ahmed the Perfect, or the Pilgrim of Love. Ahmed is a Moorish prince, and the prophecies say he will live long and happily in a happy realm if only his father can keep him from thinking about love until after his teen years are done. Well, we know how that will go, don't we? (Or do we?)

His prose is a little fulsome, with more adjectives than it needs (see above) but also is also capable of amusing ironies like this, "Mohammed the Left-handed was acknowledged to be a wise king by his courtiers and was certainly so considered by himself." He's also, especially for a New England Protestant of that period, surprisingly tolerant of Catholicism and even of Islam.

Anyway, quite a fun book and a better read than I thought it was going to be. My edition is printed in Spain, in Granada in fact, and has an introduction by R. Villa-Real, though I bought it in Chicago. Mr. Royal House is almost too appropriate as the author of an introduction to a book on the Alhambra. It also comes with colored engravings from the 19th century of the Alhambra that are an amusing accompaniment.

Joan Flood's Left Unsaid (#CanBookChallenge)

Left Unsaid is the story of Delia Buckley, a Catholic Irish woman born in the late 1940s. The story is mostly set in Kiltilly, what I assume is a made-up village, near to Limerick, in Ireland. The novel occurs in two times:

In 1967, Delia has an affair with Daniel Wolfe, married, twenty years older, a famous author, Protestant, and owner of the village's Big House. She gets pregnant, thinks maybe he'll leave his wife for her, but, of course, she's wrong.

More of the novel occurs in 1990. Daniel Wolfe is now widowed and recently diagnosed with terminal cancer; Delia Buckley is an established nurse specializing in end-of-life care. Daniel offers to hire her--at well above her usual rate--to look after him until the end. He's presumably feeling guilty, and she's wary of the tangle, but she needs the money: her sister is institutionalized and her aging parents' farm is mortgaged to the hilt.

The novel starts with a bang, and it ends well, too, with a satisfying amount of surprise and resolution. There was a point in the middle, though, where I was a little less happy. With a title like Left Unsaid and the backstory outlined above, we expect some secrets. Quite unsurprisingly Delia didn't get the abortion Daniel gave her the check for in 1968. Ah, but where's the child? was a question we were clearly meant to ask.

But there were too many secrets. (So very many secrets!) This led to some portentous prose in the middle whose double-meaning irony I admit to not quite seeing through, but was too obviously there. "Surely she'd understand that if her mother felt the need to stay away from the family all those years there was a good reason for it." "Your mother kept things from you for a good reason, I'm sure." There were a few too many statements along those lines.

Ah, well. I still enjoyed it. The prose is clear and straightforward, with a pleasant acknowledgment of Irish dialect. (For example, streelish--a word I didn't know and which I see my spell-checker disapproves of, but is easily Google-able.)

Left Unsaid came out with Signature Editions in 2017. Part of my process of poking around in Canadian small presses. Joan B. Flood is a Canadian who emigrated from Ireland. She's written an earlier YA novel, plus some shorter works, none of which I've read.

Henry James' The American

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Hunh. You caught me. That's actually Jane Austen and not Henry James at all. But one of the people in that universe of truth-acknowledgers is Christopher Newman, the titular American of Henry James' novel. He's got a fortune and he wants a wife.

That's not the only thing he's up to, of course. He's in Paris to civilize himself and marriage, he figures, is part of the civilizing process, along with learning to eat with a fork.

We first meet Newman in the Louvre, a suitably civilized place, in 1868, where he's trying to educate himself about art. Newman is pretty clearly meant to be the best type of American: though he was forced to go to work at fifteen and forgo any advanced education, he's interested in culture and recognizes the value of higher things. But when he worked, his labors were rewarded:

"Made your everlasting fortune?"

Christopher Newman was silent for a moment, and then, with a tranquil smile, he answered: "Yes."

As a consequence Newman can go to Paris and cheerfully gallivant around Europe in search of culture. And he wants to. Because the process of acquiring wealth hasn't coarsened him.

Soon after Newman arrives in Paris, he meets an old acquaintance, Tom Tristram. Tristram is quite the contrast, 'a great gossip and tattler...' [whose] '...only aspirations were to hold out at poker, at his club, to know the names of all the cocottes...' But then he meets Tristam's wife, who is more cultured than her husband, and it's through her the main thread of the plot begins. He tells her:

"Since you ask me," said Newman, "I will say frankly that I want to marry. It is time, to begin with; before I know it, I shall be forty."

Lizzie Tristram suggests the most eligible woman in Paris is Madame de Cintré, a widow at twenty-five, a daughter of the aristocratic de Bellegarde family. She arranges the two of them meet, Newman is convinced, and the plot is set in motion.

Over the course of the novel, we learn some backstory about Newman. He's ironic and deprecating about the sources of his wealth: did well with washtubs, not so well in leather, 'successful in copper, only so-so in railroads, and a hopeless fizzle in oil," he tells us. He fought for the Union during the Civil War (Tristram steered clear) and rose to the rank of Brigadier-General. The most telling episode of his wealth-acquisition comes early in the novel when he's talking to Tom Tristram: he had the opportunity to pull off a coup and deprive an avowed enemy of $60,000; in the end he decides vengeance wasn't worth it, and as for the money, it wasn't that much. (Though Tristram says he wouldn't have forgone it.)

Newman's naiveté in the face of European customs is also well-portrayed. In the very first chapter at the Louvre, he meets Mademoiselle de Noémie, and makes the acquaintance of her father, who will go on to give him French lessons. She is in the Louvre, apparently an art student, copying one of the masterpieces; Newman is taken with quality of the painting and buys it on the spot, commissioning her to paint more for his soon-to-be established private collection. Newman thinks it good, and we do, too, as far as we can tell; but it soon appears that de Noémie is not a very good painter, and is, in fact, one of those Parisian cocottes.

Newman goes on to befriend Valentin de Bellegarde, Madame de Cintré's younger brother. He, too, tells Newman his sister is a worthy catch. But the other members of the de Bellegarde family are less certain about this rich, but not aristocratic, American.

So this is our hero: hard-working, curious, willing to learn, honorable, naive. A good American. Does he marry Madame de Cintré? Should he want to? Well, you'll just have to find out...

The American (1877) is early Henry James. If you're one of those people who goes around in terror of late Henry James (Reese raises a hand here...) this is not one of those: it's really quite readable. I felt the ending a little unnecessarily melodramatic, so it doesn't replace Washington Square as my favorite early Henry James, but it's a very good entry. Recommended.

A book off my Classics Club list...

Also the novel is set almost entirely in Paris; James had moved to Paris' Quartier Latin in 1875. I'm using it for my France book for Gilion's European Reading Challenge. 

Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own (#CCSpin)

I have to admit to being a bit surprised by A Room Of One's Own. Though I hadn't read it before I sort of thought I knew all about it. (To an ancient Greek, this is called hubris.) What I thought (in advance): In order for a woman (or anyone, really, but women were very much less likely to have it) to become a writer five hundred pounds a year and a room of one's own was needed.

And the essay does make that argument, it's true. But it still surprised me, stylistically I guess. I'm not that well-read in Woolf by any means. But the novels I've read--To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando--are complex, difficult in their language, and deep. Her essays--I've read the Common Reader series--on the other hand, are leaner in their language, full of sparking ideas, and deep. I don't know, I expected this to be like the Common Reader series. But it was neither one nor the other--neither fiction nor essay--exactly.

The initial occasion for the essay was a two-night talk on the subject 'Women and Fiction' Virginia Woolf gave at two women's colleges at Cambridge in October of 1928. She then rewrote the talks as a single essay which was published, in both the U.K. and the U.S. a year later, and is the text in this volume. But she refers several times in the printed essay to the occasion of the talks and starts her essay by saying what her hosts and audience likely mean by 'Women and Fiction' is not what she will address.

What surprised me was the almost fanciful, the fictional, aspect of her essay. The introduction appropriately quotes Woolf herself from The Pargiters, "I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction." And so she does here. Woolf supposes a sister of William Shakespeare named Judith, equally talented, and how her purported career as a writer would go. (Short answer: not well.) The essay more stops and starts, circles around its argument with its fictional conceit, and demonstrates more by example than by any close-reasoned progression. I'd say it was closer to Orlando, than to anything in the Common Reader volumes. In short, the truth here is important, and she is writing fiction.

My edition (shown above next to Hubert) is the Penguin, and also includes Three Guineas, which I haven't read. It contains a pretty good, though not brilliant, introduction by Michèle Barrett.

Two other things I did notice: Woolf writes at one point, apropos of the British Library catalog: "Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?" I hate to argue with Virginia Woolf, and I certainly know nothing about the state of the British Library catalog in 1928, but I doubt that's really true. Her basic point, that men want to control women in that time, (we'll ignore for now whether anything's changed or not) I don't doubt: but that's (alas) not the same thing as really wanting to know anything about them. I think she's confusing two different activities here. At some point I might write about men writing about women in fiction, contrasting that with women writing about men. It's a thing I've been thinking about.

The other is that Barrett includes a footnote explaining the name Coleridge: "Coleridge: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), poet and essayist." Really, I thought? A reader of Virginia Woolf will need to be told such basic information about Coleridge? There is no "Shakespeare: William Shakespeare (1564-1616), poet and playwright." But then I decided Barrett was probably right. These days I can imagine this book assigned to incoming college students--possibly high school students--students so young they don't yet even know who Coleridge is. What would Virginia Woolf herself have thought about this turn of events? I have to imagine she would be shocked Coleridge was no longer a household name, and she herself was read first. So: maybe the world has changed.

This was my book for the Classics Club spin #22. I finished the book a couple of weeks ago, but between traveling to California and just generally being slothful, here I am writing this post at the last possible minute...