The Time Traveler's Wife

I simply cannot count the times that I closed the book, set it down and said, "Dangit,  Niffenegger." 

There's a bit of male culture that not a lot of women understand.   I suppose there are a lot of things in that realm that are difficult to understand, but specifically for today I'm talking about calling someone by their last name.  I've had women tell me that by not referring to someone by their given first name you aren't seeing them as an individual, you aren't recognizing them for their essence,  who they are independent of their family name.  Naturally I call "poppycock" on that.  Sure, that may be how someone takes it, but that is not at all how it is meant.

So, please allow me to peel back the curtain a little on Man culture here.  Not too far, naturally.  No one would want that.  Honestly I hadn't thought about this aspect until this gem of a novel.  Every time my sniffling exclamation was, "Dangit, Niffenegger," and never "Dangit, Audrey."  For guys, calling someone by their last name is a badge of respect; significant respect.  It's fallen into disuse before our generation and, typically for me, that means I'm attracted to it.  It says, "I recognize you as a credit to your family name."  It's on the same level as "sir" and "Mr." or "Mrs." with me.  People get annoyed at me for using them because they come off as formalizing, but really it shows that I respect you in a way that only repeated reminders to call you by your first name will relieve.  And Niffenegger is VERY much up there with this book.  

Early on I was a little thrown off by some of her writing.  The female lead, Claire, was very well written, but when it came to Henry it fell short.  He was doing things few men would ever do and noticing things no guy ever notices, let alone when they are a little boy.  No little boy is going to notice that his mother's fingernails match her shoes.  Henry does.  There are more examples of this throughout the first few chapters and I sympathize.  As a writer I find it difficult to write characters of another gender, and I see it all the time where men don't know how to write women and women don't know how to write men.  They are great at writing caricatures of men.  Seeley Booth of the "Bones" series has always bothered me as a particularly 2d example of a man, but in TV and movies you can get away with this.  You've got an hour, maybe more, to transmit a lot of information and stereotypes work well.  In books, if you go beyond dialogue and deep into internal reflections and reasonings, you have to nail it.  There is no faking it.  If you do a crap job you can't just do a razzle dazzle to distract.  Ok.  You can.  But people have to fully buy into it to get away with it...and since mostly women read "Twilight"...  *cough* sorry.  

One of the many rewarding things about reading "The Time Travelers Wife" is that you can see the author grow over time.  Something happens around chapter two or three where she suddenly shifts into being a better writer.  She gets Henry and his perspective right.  Niffenegger runs with it and there's no stopping her.  

"The Time Travelers Wife" is the story of Henry, an individual with a genetic disorder that unsticks him from time.  Usually this occurs during times of high stress but it's been know to happen during average every day moments as well.  When we first meet Henry he is in his later 30s and Claire, his eventually to be wife, is 8.  While this seems sketchy you come to realize in his 30s Henry, in Claire's future, is already married to Claire.  It's almost a Twilight Zone episode.  In the hands of a lesser author that is where it would remain, just in the weirdness, but Niffenegger is not a lesser author.

What emerges from this bizarre opening tale is something very rare in this world.  "The Time Traveler's Wife" is that rare book that is about absolutely everything and in the end reaffirms life, virtue, and makes you look at the world far more positively by the end.  The couple doesn't come off as unrelatable in the least.  They go through all of the same highs and lows, same difficulties and joys, that every couple does.  In fact she somehow uses Henry's chronal displacement disorder in such a way as to increase the relatability.  I still don't know quite how she does it.  Books don't normally make me smile, cry, grit my teeth, or shout in triumph, but this one truly does.

It's kind of like "The Notebook" but less sappy and more realistic.   

Yep.  I said it.  A genetic disorder that causes uncontrollable TIME TRAVEL is more realistic as a plot device than the entirety of "The Notebook".  

"The Time Travelers Wife" is the first novel I've read from this century.  I was leery of it at first.  I mean, honestly...Top 100 Books to Read Before You Die and this book is just 15 years old?  Could it really deserve to be on this list?  Other Modern novels (And I'm perpetually throwing shade at you Catch-22) clearly didn't deserve it.

Does it belong on the list?  Emphatically, yes.  

I don't normally say this, but if you haven't read it I highly suggest it.  It belongs on the list, it should be on your shelf.  It is officially in my top 10 books of all time solidly...and that's a pretty fluid list.  My life is genuinely better for having read it, and...I won't go so far as to say we can't be friends if you haven't read it.  It is, however, one of those books I'm dying to talk with someone over coffee about.  Coffee and pie.  Coffee and pie or cake.  Coffee and pie and cake.  There we go.  I knew I'd get there eventually.  

So...next time..  

The next book on the list is "Middlemarch" by George Eliot.  That's right, we are headed back to the Victorians and I know nothing about it.  Absolutely nothing.  The one thing I do know for certain is that it is the book right before "War and Peace".  Yeah.  "Middlemarch" is feeling like a slight stay of execution before I need to use my sliding glass doors as a massive flow chart just to keep the story straight.  Please be good...please be good...

Apparently getting the proper translation is supposedly key to "enjoying" "War and Peace".  I got the 3.99 classics on Amazon so...we'll see.

Provehito in Altum,

W

Birdsong (Finale)

Since I've been off Facebook I've had plenty of time to think about how I approach doing things.  Having time to reflect is always a benefit in this world that favors and encourages knee-jerk responses.  As such, it's been kicking around in my brain that I need to readjust my approach to the 100BYSRBYD.  I've spent a lot of time making each bit a synopsis and, while interesting in some ways, that doesn't really help many people.  I'll be making the shift to reviewing the book overall rather than recounting the individual events.  There's more to say about a book than simply what happens, and if I synopsisize (not a word apparently) it then why should you read it yourself?  Reading is kind of what this is all about. So...to continue...

"Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks is a hell of a book.  And by "hell" I mean both that it is a great book and that so much of it seems to take place in the closest humanity can get to hell on this side of the veil. 

In the previous entry I posted about the opening love affair that occurs.  I haven't looked but I'm sure I mentioned my general contempt for all books that glorify affairs as these wonderfully romantic things that are somehow virtuous rather than devastatingly destructive and wholly selfish events.  The book surprised me by ending its first part with her leaving Stephen to return to her proper husband once she realized she was pregnant.  And then...the war.

Oh, the war.  World War I, to be precise.  Faulks clearly dug deep in his research to find some of the most amazing, gripping, and detailed accounts that he could then immortalize her.  "Catch-22" serves to mock war and all its facets as horrible and pointless and so does "Birdsong".  The key difference between the two is that "Catch-22" tries to do so by pointing out how clever it is.  "22" is the party equivalent of the guy with a can beer in his hand, laughing at his own jokes which he follows up with, "amiright?".  "Birdsong", on the other hand, is the vet in the corner staring out of the window trying to ignore the blowhard and remembering it all too well as he walks his his tortured way through PTSD.  He's not going to say anything unless you ask and even then it's all still too fresh.

Faulks makes you feel the mortar fire, the desperation, the claustrophobia of the tunnels beneath the trenches, the anxiety, the loss of normalcy and as many aspects of that life as it was that he possibly can. 

And why?  Why does this book exist?  For that matter, why is it on the 100BYSRBYD? 

The why is represented in the character of Elizabeth whose life is vastly different that Stephen's.  She exists 50(ish) years later in the 1970s, a modern woman in a modern time who juggles her career, friends, and the monthly visits of her married boyfriend.  Everyone tells her that he's never going to leave his wife, and he strings her along with, "I'm just waiting for the right time...".  After an inciting incident which I won't reveal her...cause spoilers...she starts to try and forge a connection with her past and she begins to look into her grandfather's involvement in World War I.  She begins to sift through his things to try and glean what happened.

The world is so far removed from that time that her research creates a series of realizations, not least of which is the selfishness of her generation and the selflessness of her grandfather's.  This smacked me in between the eyes particularly when Elizabeth travels through France and takes a handful of back roads to come to a war memorial forgotten by the rest of the world.  It's a tall structure literally in the middle of a farmer's field.  It's a massive structure built of bricks each bearing the name of every man who died there. 

"I didn't know.  They never told us." Is her reaction as she weeps, devastated on the sight at her ignorance and the ignorance of the world at large.  I'd bet all the money I currently have that you could easily swap Faulks and Elizabeth at that part of the novel.

And that is the point of the novel; there is a massive gulf of what we don't know.  Everything we are taught in World War I was names, dates, important battles, casualty numbers and how it caused World War II.  Honestly, I learned more about World War I watching, "Black Adder" than I did in school.

"Birdsong" serves to give the reader context for what occurred, and good Lord does it.

There is a scene in which one of Stephen's fellow soldiers is sent back home on leave.  He has massive difficulty functioning.  He remembers the city, his parents, his childhood home, all of the modern conveniences, but none of it seems realistic to him.  Months in the trenches has changed everything for him.  Everyone expects him to enjoy himself but the only thing he can think is of all the atrocities he's experienced at the front and how no one could understand.  He tries to unburden himself to his father, tries to express his thoughts and feelings, but in stereotypical English fashion his father tells him it's best not to discuss it.  With everything pent up inside and no way to get it out we realize it is the very moment the character becomes an alcoholic.

As I closed the book after turning the last page the ending felt a little hollow.  It was hopeful and a 60 year promise was fulfilled so everyone should feel happy...Yay!  It felt tacked on, as if Faulks' agent wouldn't let it end where Faulks wanted it to.  The "good damage" was done in me regardless.  I've spent a few hours now thinking about that gulf of what we don't know, what we can't possibly know.  The ancient Greeks referred to the effect of knowledge as a light, a lamp shining on everything else we encounter. 

It is so easy to believe that we know enough, that we are done, that we don't need to seek out more knowledge and understanding, but I disagree.  The more we seek, the more we read, the more we try to understand, the more we try to know the brighter that light becomes and the more we see by it.  If we give in to our own desire for ignorance the more likely it is that we will die in darkness.

Faulks challenges us to chase after the knowledge we are uncomfortable with.  There is a scene where Elizabeth goes to a veterans hospital to meet a man in his 80s who may have known her grandfather.  I nearly cried in that part for many reasons, but chief of those was because the man hadn't had a visitor in 40 years.  He'd been sat at the same window for 40 years believing no one cared, no one wanted to hear, no one literally knew that he existed.  I can't help but wonder how many...  Well, I won't finish that thought. 

I don't just recommend that you read this book; I implore you to read it.  It will broaden your understanding and add just a bit more light to your lamp.

Pax,

W

War is Certainly Hell (Birdsong Part Two, France 1916)

Faulks' style is never content to remain stuck in a single person's perspective for too long, and he is certainly right to do so.  War is a strange thing in that a person can walk through the exact same events and have an entirely different perspective. 

My self-critical brain stands up and says, "Yeah, but you can say that about life in general."  You could say that, but it seems to me to be even more true when we talk about soldiers in war.  The effect is  amped up like colors under blacklight.  That may actually be a more apt metaphor than I realize.  There is a concept in art that states that the viewer of any artistic piece brings all the psychological pieces of themselves to bear onto the piece.  When someone views, reads, or listens to a piece of art it acts as a sort of mirror so that the person isn't seeing the thing objectively.  They bring a massive amount of subjectivity independent of any creator's intention.  War, from what I've read, turns this (and everything in a human being) up to 11.

The second episode of the seven opens with a new character, Jack Firebrace.  He's a miner from back in England who joined up to dig tunnels from the English trenches into German territory.  From there they set a mine to punch a hole inside enemy territory.  The difficulties for Jack are to numerous to mention.  Each hole is only three feet wide, timbers that hold up the walls falter, explosions overhead destroy the structural integrity of the tunnel, and, as we discover in the opening scene, the ever present danger of discovery by German tunnelers coming from the other direction.

I've never in my reading experience had someone such write in such a way that I experienced full on claustrophobia in the middle of a quite open room.  Throughout the entire second part of the novel Faulks does a truly admirable job of making you feel like as if you are actually there, in a situation in a part of the world and a time that you never could have experienced on your own.  All great writing does this and Faulks is as much a master as Tolkien in world building.

As the perspective shifts between Jack and Stephen in the days leading up to the climatic big push you watch people come apart in vastly different ways including our protagonists.  Jack is dealing with issues from his wife and sickly son back home by throwing himself into his mining.  Helplessness can be ignored when you have something to do with your hands.  Stephen is given a group of men to command and begins to suspect that they are being led as lambs to the slaughter despite the reassurances of his superiors.  Stephen clearly uses the war to give his life some sort of meaning since Isabelle left him with their baby still in her womb, and how he deals with that comes out in some surprising ways, one of which I'll get to soon. 

The thing that sets this book apart is, of course, the details.  It's abundantly clear that Faulks had to do massive amounts of research including getting ahold of all the veterans from the war still alive.  There are so many things in this novel that he couldn't make up or simply intuit.  As someone who is addicted to trivia, it was a dream to find glorious tidbits on every page that both illumined and horrified me.  As a general pacifist unwilling to mobilize and authorize the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men for a cause other than defense of our own country, it did the incredible job of both affirming and challenging my position. 

This is where "Birdsong" far excels as a war novel up against "Catch-22".  I was disgusted with "Catch-22" and may have even referred to it as an "abortion of a novel" so filled with nihilism and self congratulatory cleverness that swung at the load bearing pillars of virtue and nobility, laughing maniacally as the structure collapses on itself and wondering why nothing magically sprung up to take its place.  While "Catch-22" deals with many of the same issues but paints them as a pointless farce.  In "Birdsong" the characters actually struggle with the horrors of war and virtue.  There is a tension there that simply can't exist in "Catch-22".  This is specifically highlighted in the way each deals with prostitution that the soldiers use to "comfort" themselves.

In "Catch-22" the main characters engage the prostitutes mechanically, looking at them with efficient pragmatism.  When one soldier beats a prostitute the other characters concern and reason for stopping him and trying to smoothe things over is only so that they will be allowed back.  They take care of the problem with money, chocolates, and silk hosiery.  The women have as much function as an ATM further highlighting the pointlessness of existence and general ennui that is prevalent in much post-modernist writing.

In "Birdsong", Stephen knows that his company and the company of one of his fellow men of rank, Weir, is going to make the push and in all likelihood be fodder for the German guns.  It's so sure that when he looks through a pair of binoculars at the enemy position there is even a sign that says "Welcome, 29th British Infantry!" hanging over the German artillery position.   Stephen has known for some time that Weir was still a virgin and he decides that this is a travesty that he can rectify before they certainly die.

Wier protests once he realizes what Stephen is up to but relents once he is shoved into the whorehouse.  Stephen is all big talk, but his heart seems to be in the "right" place.  He thinks back to Isabelle and how the union with feminine flesh illuminated his life.  He can't imagine existence without having tasted that at least once.  Certainly it burned him, and crippled him in some ways, but to him it was light and nourishing light at that.  Weir lets out a bellow of rage and kicks open the door blaming Stephen for what happened.  Stephen freaks out, wondering what Weir has done but comes to find out that the rage was only due to the fact that his friend couldn't bring himself  do what Stephen expected.  The prostitute laughs and offers Stephen to take Weirs place.  He did pay for it after all.  Stephen ascents as long as its with a younger prostitute.  Once she touches Stephen his whole world shifts and he sees the darkness, the perversion of the situation.  It's not the warm, loving touch of Isabelle that he assumed was common to all woman.  He's disgusted as he wrestles with his conscience and makes a fumbling but polite exit.

That is ultimately what sets it apart; the struggle with conscience, the endurance of virtue in the darkest of circumstances, the seeing through of duty even when certain death is before you.  Those elements are often found in the most enduring stories of heroes.  The difference between the two is similar to the difference between Loki and Thor.  We can do without worshiping the cowardly trickster as a species.  We cannot do without tales of self sacrifice for the greater good, the denial of self for the others, or the wrestling with virtue because it is right. 

Naturally, and I half-expect this, the novel could take a terrible turn any minute now.  We are moving from the front line at Amiens and going to 1978 in the next part.  We shall see how that goes. 

Pax,

W 

Settling Accounts (Rebecca to Birdsong)

As per my usual blogging style I find that it's been a year since I last entered anything here.  I'm appalled by my behavior on that count AND by the fact that I didn't lay a finish to the novel, "Rebecca".  I am apparently confoundedly thick.  I'm not sure where my copy is and as such I can't excerpt it like I like...BUT I will review it.

"Rebecca" is one of the single best suspense novels I have ever read in my life.  Unlike...some...it absolutely deserves its place on this list of 100 Books.  Mdme. Du Maurier is far and away one of the best writers I have encountered in ages.  She can take an otherwise beautiful scene and inject just the right amount of tension that makes you think there is something wrong. By the same hand she deftly gives you reason to believe that everything actually is fine, you're just making something out of nothing.  Her sense of character and setting is so good it's ridiculous.  There is no character that is not believable.  Even the secondary villain of the novel, Mrs. Danvers, is quite believable.  You do not walk away thinking, "Oh, that could never happen."  Instead you wonder how often this sort of thing actually does happen. 

When we come to the end and the massive reveal, when the truth comes out, it is more ugly and sinister than you imagine.  At the same time, though, you feel as if you suspected it the entire time.  When the true villain is revealed (and just who that is happens to be up for debate) you actually understand the actions taken.  They are entirely logical.  Now, it is up to the reader to decide if that's a comfort or not.

The fallout at Manderlay is complete.  No one gets out of it unharmed, and Du Maurier leaves it all hanging there making you wonder what will go on, what lays beyond the final dot on the last page.  Normally that sort of thing annoys me; often it's used in a manner that tries to show the world how clever the author is.  Not so here.  To put a bow on it would detract from what the characters and yourself had just experience.  Life rarely has a tidy bow on it at any point, and all the feelings, thoughts, and emotions continue to wreck havoc on the couple beyond and probably into their last days. 

Short version:  It's a novel I'm proud to have on my shelf...as opposed to, say, "Catch-22". 

I bring up "Catch-22" and I'll be bringing it up again soon because it is the first novel of any war that I'd read on this list.  Now I have "Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks to compare it too. 

I won't go too much into "Catch-22" except to say it was a pointless novel about the pointlessness of war and the pointlessness of everything.  Nihilistic to its core it even went so far, to me, as to not even be able to justify its existence.  "Birdsong", on the other hand, blimey what a book. 

The reason I hadn't gone back to it, and thereby back to this blog, was due to the first part of the book.  I made the horrible, horrible mistake of judging it by the first 99 pages. 

"Birdsong" opens up from the perspective of Stephen, a young man somehow attached to the British military, who has come to live at the home of the Azaires.  Rene, the husband, teaches Stephen about the French textile industry.  Isabelle is the second wife of Rene and takes care of his children.  It doesn't take long for romantic tension to build up between Stephen and Isabelle and I proceeded to gag. 

I like a love story.  I have an almost feminine love for love stories.  Watching a couple go through the BS of life trying to find each other, and then overcoming insurmountable odds to end up together and hand in hand bravely face down the rest of their lives...  Honestly there probably isn't a better, more hopeful thing someone can write about.  BUT...This whole "oh dash it all, Penbrooke, I'm married to another...whatever shall we do...Oh, I can't...but, oh, I want to" back and forth tripe is ridiculous.  When the obstacles to a romance are marriage, that's when I check out. 

It's not love.  It's hormones.  I know, the post-modernists would rise up and say, "But all love is just hormones!" to which vehemently respond that just because that is the entirety of your limited experience, that doesn't necessarily make it so.  There is out there significant love; true, faithful, sure, enduring, selfless love.  I know because I experience that every day.  Infidelity, even when it's dressed up as polyamory, or an "open marriage" is the exact opposite.  It is false, unfaithful, unsolid, fleeting, selfish lust.  There is nothing noble in it whatsoever; nothing that pushes the human narrative towards the light, and I reject it as a narrative device wholeheartedly.

Except...

Except when it is not glorifying it.  When it shows, and rightly so, how destructive and gutting it truly is. 

When we arrive at the end of the first part of the novel (which is broken up into 7 episodes or acts) we see just that.  The farce is laid bare, the hopes are dashed, and the child they created between the two of them returns to her husband.  Stephen watches both the woman he "loves" and the child she is carrying walk out the door with only a cowardly note left behind. 

I don't root for a cheating couple.  I can't.  I won't.  Yes, her husband punishes her with a belt.  He's a brute and a terrible man.  I agree.  But infidelity is not a cure for anything.

The second of the 7 episodes begins with Stephen on the front lines of World War I.  And I'll properly write that episode up next time. 

Pax,

W

A Ghost Takes Shape (Rebecca ch. 11-18)

My love for author Daphne Du Maurier only grows.

Once this list of 100 books comes to an end I am absolutely certain I will be looking into more of her novels.  Her sense of pacing and timing is simply impeccable.  Mrs. Du Maurier's word choices and insight into the universal bits of the human condition, and the manner in which she plays on them, is nothing short of masterful.  When most women write women I find myself not caring.  Call it a condition of my gender view, but I find it to be often to over dramatically done, too foreign to my way of thinking, or too forgiving of a female character's flaws.  In Rebecca I find only a perennially relatable character who reacts in completely legitimate ways that any human might to the given situation.

This section of the novel opens with the beginning of a breakdown for our unnamed heroine.  She continues to see Rebecca everywhere, in the rooms she enters, at the table, and even well into the minds and hearts of everyone she meets.  She begins an inevitable slide into a minor form of madness believing she is losing her identity with the knowledge that everyone is comparing her and finding her short to the nearly sainted Rebecca.  She is driven by this need to know her, who she was and how she died but no one wants to speak of her but to praise her.  Finally Maxim's friend, Frank, reveals how Rebecca died, capsized at sea in a boat she often took out alone.

Frank calms the heroine and comforts her, telling her that no one is actively trying to compare her.  He reassures her that Maxim is happy, her own qualities are quite admirable, and that all of her paranoia is unfounded.  Naturally she has to ask if Rebecca was as beautiful as everyone says.  For all his faults Frank is an honest man and declares that she was, "...the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life."

Domestic bliss, or what passes for it at Manderley, continues.  Our Mrs. de Winter continues to act bashful around the servants, even to the point of dashing into the dining room to quickly gather food and duck out so that the help wouldn't feel obliged to serve her.  It's such a strange moment but so oddly relatable to me.  To this day I have a strong aversion to an employee of any business making much of a fuss over me.  I just don't like it.  When we went on a Caribbean cruise there was a formal dinner we had to attend every night with our table having three different waiters for three different purposes.  One poured the wine, one served the meal, and the third was in charge of anything we might need done which included cutting up our meat.  If I'm at a fast casual restaurant I won't even ask for a soda refill if the machine is behind the counter because I don't want to be a bother, and there I am with three waiters for eight people.  I was mortified.  The only way I got through it was remembering the words of Mrs. Macready from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe "That's their function.  We mustn't deprive people of their function."  At a hotel with a free breakfast I get in and out as fast as possible.  If a place gets my order wrong I spend no less than five minutes trying to decide whether it's worth saying anything.  That is all to say...I feel ya sister.

The heroine goes out for a walk to a cove that Maxim had warned her away from earlier and finds a dim witted man who knew of Rebecca's death.  He also tells her that some great secret is being kept and that a dark snake like lady, clearly Mrs. Danvers, doesn't want him to speak on it.  When she returns to the house she finds a car there and a man talking to Mrs. Danvers.  Later she discovers it's a man Maxim had forbidden to ever come to the house while Rebecca was alive thought Rebecca knew the man well.  Plot thickens.

Chapter fourteen is one of the most beautiful and creepy chapters.  Our Mrs. de Winter finds herself in a corridor and dives into an unlocked room to avoid being seen by the servants and made a fuss over.  The room wasn't like many others in that wing.  It was not forgotten and covered to keep out the ravages of dust and light.  It was well kept and cleaned.  Mrs. Danvers and begins to reveal her obsessive behavior towards Rebecca, whose room it was.  This chapter makes it clear why Alfred Hitchcock stood up and took notice, this and the final moments of the eighteenth chapter.  Dang.  Our lady escapes and naturally chalks it up to normal grief rather than something more sinister.

Things seem to be on the upswing again as Beatrice returns to whisk Mrs. de Winter away from the gloom and melancholy.  Beatrice is quite the great soul, on par with Samwise Gamgee when it comes to down to earth thinking and lifting spirits.  She takes her to see her and Maxim's grandmother who has some dementia.  Our lady is quite accepted by the woman who longs to return to Manderley some day, and why has there not been a ball in some time?  The warmth, serenity, and confidence the grandmother engenders is suddenly broken as she calls for Rebecca.  You can almost palpably feel our heroine's pain as the warmth and joy, the possibility of acceptance is wrenched from her.  Beatrice apologizes profusely and our lady puts on a brave face, but the wounds are so much deeper than she'd like to admit.

After she recovers from the shock and grief she considers what everyone has told her, that there should be a ball at Manderley.  Maxim agrees, as long as he doesn't have to be a part of the planning, and plans are underway.  She agonizes over what to wear until Mrs. Danvers suggests that she would look rather fetching in a costume based on a painting.  The death faced woman insists again and again.  With no other ideas our lady agrees.  Come the day of the ball, she realizes that Mrs. Danvers is not as well meaning as she had believed.  What follows, the reaction and the confrontation, I won't ruin for you but Mrs. Danvers pulls an almost Norman Bates style performance that is simply amazing.  You can feel the creeping fear as our lady realizes just what she is up against and why.  *shiver*

Pax,

W

Life In Another's Shoes (Rebecca ch. 1-10)

"Wait.  What happened to 'Catch-22'?"

Oh, it's a thing.  It still exists.  In fact it is still sitting on my bookshelf with the other of those 100BYSRBYD.  The only reason that I'm moving on to the next book on the list is because I couldn't take the inanity anymore.  I spent months trying and months avoiding it by setting parenting magazines and random flyers I received on top of it.  Sure enough it kept peeking out from under the stack with an accusing glare.  "FINE," I shouted and sat down with it for thirty minutes a day for about a week.  At the end of those few days the book magically leapt from my hand, flew across the room and smacked into the wall.

Final Word on "Catch-22":  While I'm sure that it has a place in the great works of literature I don't believe that a slot in the top 20 of the top 100 is deserved at ALL.  This book is pretty much the novel equivalent of many "Palm d'Or" Winners at the Cannes film festival or, indeed, some of the "Best Film" winners at the Oscars.  Often it seems that those films win not because of artistic merit but because it has something perceived as "worthy", a political message or something socially "relevant" to the time.  It is in that same manner that I view this novel.  It has an audience, sure.  The Mary-like deification of prostitutes, the disregard and target abuse of any virtuous character that happens to come along, and the constant Post-Modern message that there is no goodness, there is no virtue, and all your institutions are crap so let's tear them down, violate innocence & goodness, and somehow society will magically hold together since we don't have any constructive ideas; it all coalesced into something I realized wasn't worthy of my time.  I've ranted about Post-Modernism before and I realized that just because the fecal matter is being sold at the market doesn't mean I have to purchase it.  It's a clever parlor trick devoid of any substance.  /rantoff

"Rebecca" on the other hand has been quite a joy to read.  I started it less than a week ago and I'm already one-third of the way through it.

WIKA (What I Know About):  Essentially the only thing I knew about this novel coming into it was that if I was reading it in public, chances were someone would think I was reading a trashy romance novel as opposed to a literary romance novel.  The cover looks as though it is wrapped in scarlet silk, much like rumpled bed sheets, and only the title and author's name besides.  It has all the indications of being a Harlequin novel too hot to put something representative of the contents on the cover.  Yes, I could have gotten a handsome looking trade paperback edition that would be less scandalous looking...but I would have paid 10$ more for the privilege.  Other than that I knew nothing.  I hadn't even heard of the opening line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" which is supposedly as famous as, "Call me Ishmael".  I was ready for a surprise.

The novel begins with something you couldn't get away with in fiction these days; two chapters of tease.  The author spends those two chapters making it clear that they occur long after the end of the book.  It describes the emotional state of two nameless characters who are trying to move on from some unnamed tragedy that has expelled them from Manderley much like the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.

The first thing that grabs me about this novel is the author's writing style.  I'm going to say it right here and right now...I'm in love with Daphne Du Maurier.  I have not "swooned" this much while reading a novel because of spot on word usage to create a mood in a long time.  She is absolutely fabulous and this novel is a moment of literary lightning captured for all time.

Describing the Manderley in her dreams she writes: "Nature had come into her own again and, little by, little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers....The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church."

In chapter two she begins: "We can never go back again, that much is certain.  The past is still too close to us.  The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and the sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had been before."

In describing the unnamed male companion stuck in this emotional turmoil (also from chapter two): "He will fall to smoking cigarette after cigarette, not bothering to extinguish them, and the glowing stubs will lie around on the ground like petals.  He will talk quickly and eagerly about nothing at all, snatching at any subject as a panacea to pain."

Woo! Somebody fan me.  I've got the vapors.

It's this combination of excellent language usage and insight into the human condition that makes a good book for me.  As we've said all along, a great novel speaks to these common, universal human experiences and sheds light on them.  It sets us in the direction of hope and we can glean wisdom along the way, even if it is only the comforting wisdom of, "You are not alone."

In the third chapter we are introduced to Mrs. Van Hopper, who is easily one of my favorite characters in fiction.  Not my favorite in the same way Bilbo Bagins, Jane Eyre, or Hamlet is.  She is more in line with a Falstaff, or Meriadoc Brandybuck.  Not essential for the whole novel, but a delight as they come on and enter the stage.

Mrs. Van Hopper is a bit of a one woman paparazzi.  She travels to Monte Carlo every year not to take in the sights and relax.  Rather, she goes to find and ingratiate herself to the rich and famous also on vacation there.

"It seemed as though notables must be fed to her, much as invalids are spooned their jelly; and though titles were preferred by her, any face seen in a social paper served as well.  Names scattered in a gossip column, authors, artists, actors and their kind, even the mediocre ones, as long as she had learnt of them in print."

The unnamed protagonist is introduced as a sort of hired companion for Mrs. Van Hopper.  She was hired for ninety pounds, payable at the end of the season.  She is often draw into the games Mrs. Van Hopper plays with the famous.  Essentially the old woman runs a scam where she declares that she saw the individual at the wedding of her nephew, produces a picture of the happy couple on their honeymoon, and trusts the fact that famous people attend a ridiculous number of weddings they can't remember and depends on their good manners to treat her like an acquaintance they simply forgot.  This nets her no end of favors and invitations to parties and lavish estates.

"There was nothing for it but to sit in my usual place beside Mrs. Van Hopper while she, like a large, complacent spider, spun her wide net of tedium about the stranger's person."

Seriously..."wide net of tedium".  My goodness, I'm in love heart palpitations and all.

The following chapters contain the whirlwind romance with the much older and previously married Maxim, aided by Mrs Van Hopper catching a nasty case of influenza, and lends some foreshadowing of future difficulties and a secret buried or, more appropriately, drowned.  In the end the two get unexpectedly married, have a honeymoon in Italy, and return to Maxim's home of Manderley.

The introduction to Manderley chapters are quite beautifully written and you get a genuine sense of awkwardness as the protagonist begins her life in someone else's place, and with someone else's things.  How strange and otherworldly would it be to sit in a chair beside your husband knowing that its cushion had already had years forming to someone else, that the dog cuddled up to you did so because of a habit formed with someone else, that your bed, desk, bathroom items and all were previously used by another who came before you.  She struggles with this throughout.  Then she begins to meet people who all judge her against Rebecca, commenting on how different she is from her, wondering if she will uphold the traditions of parties and balls, etc.  Everywhere Rebecca is praised and our unnamed heroine begins a slide down into a mental breakdown as she begins to compare herself to Rebecca in her own soul.

I actually look forward to this book with delight every time I sit down to read it.  While I know what happens in the end (because I'm like Harry from "When Harry Met Sally") I look forward to the end.  It's not a happy ending, but it is certainly in keeping with the tone of the book.

Fun Fact:  Daphne Du Maurier was also the author of "Birds" which Alfred Hitchcock based his film "The Birds" on.

Pax,

W

Mustn't Be Hasty (Catch 22 chapters 10-19)

It is official.  I am halfway through Catch-22 and find myself quite happy about this.  Two books in a row now I've been less than interested in the listed novel and it has been wearing on me.  Naturally my wife has been casting me funny looks and shaking her head.

"Why are you doing this to yourself?" she asks.

I've asked myself that for months now.  The answers have wavered very little.  Because it is there.  Because it is a challenge.  Because not everyone does this.  It is something I can take a bit of pride in.  I'll have a shelf full of books that I didn't have before.

Above all, however, stands one particular reason; Because they have lasted the test of time, centuries some of them.  I want to know why they endure.  I want to dig into them and find the redeeming value.  Catch-22 however is the product of the 1960s remembrances of World War II and written for a disaffected generation.  Will it stand the test of time?

Nelson Algren said of it, "This novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II, it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years."

So...why?

As the title suggests I may have been a bit hasty in my previous assessment.  Oh sure, the post modern snobbery is still there going "Validate me!  I don't need you to validate me but...Tell me I'm clever!".  The format of this blog lends itself to mistaken impressions, however.  I write as I'm reading it.  There have been slews of books that have changed my mind mid-course.  (Wondered where "slew" came from as I was writing this.  From the Irish "sluagh" which means "a large quantity".  #WordNerd)

You'll be ambivalent to learn that I'm coming around to not liking but at least understanding Yossarian.  I have a hope that this will turn into something worthwhile reading after all.

The first few chapters are very much in the same vein as the previous nine.  The dead man in Yossarian's tent who wasn't there was finally explained as a replacement pilot who arrived at the base, set his stuff in his assigned tent, but went on a mission immediately and was shot down.  "Because he had never officially gotten into the squadron, he could never officially be gotten out..." which enhances the strange limbo quality of the novel.

The Bologna mission is mentioned and addressed with more frequency.  All of the characters, save the officers, live in fear of the mission and keep coming up with excuses and stratagems to delay or call off the mission.  It rains for days straight keeping the squadron grounded.  "When it did stop raining in Pianosa (where the squadron is) it rained in Bologna.  When it stopped raining in Bologna, it began again in Pianosa.  If there was no rain at all, there were freakish, inexplicable phenomena like an epidemic of diarrhea or the bomb line had moved.  Four times during the first six days they were assembled and briefed and then sent back."

Come to find out Yossarian bribed the cook to put soap flakes in the mashed potatoes to cause the diarrhea, and he was also responsible for moving the bomb line (the line on the map showing how far ground forces had advanced and therefore where the squadron should bomb).   This proves potentially tragic when Major de Coverly wakes one morning to find, according to the map, ground troops had taken Bologna.

Major de Coverly is written of in particularly glowing terms.  Well, I say particularly glowing but remember the kind of book we are talking about.  According to the book every military man appears to be a coward, self serving, conceited, or outright incompetent.  Major de Coverly has the distinction of being a man who gives a proverbial poop.  He cares about his job, and he cares about his men.  He cares about his men so much that in chapter 13, when he sees that Bologna has been secured not knowing Yossarian moved the line, he does was he always does when a new major city has been liberated.  Without a word he gets in his plane, flies to the city and secures lavish apartments complete with cooking staff, maids, and laundry so his men can be pampered during their days and weeks of leave.  Because of Yossarian's antics he is heading straight into dangerous enemy territory believing it to be secure.  No good deed goes unpunished.  And so it goes...

Because of the odd nature of the novel we get chapters out of sequence.  When the reader comes to chapter 14 it shows Yossarian's side of the Bologna mission which ends quickly for him when he fakes not being able to hear anything over the intercom and in the confusion the pilot turns back thinking those were the orders.  They return to the squadron base and the writer gives this beautiful otherworldly scene of Yossarian stripping off his parachute and flight suit, and walking through the camp, down to the beach.  Throughout you get the feeling that Yossarian is taking in the beauty of the world as only a man who came near death can.  At the same time the beauty seems pointless.  In Yossarian's head they had done the bombing run and all was well.  In reality, the mission was still ahead.  It is at this point you realize that Yossarian is the least reliable of all possible narrators.

The next chapter both gives reason to Yossarian's mentality and further expands on his unreliability as a narrator.  Chapter 15 is a nightmare of war.  The reader can really get inside Yossarian's head as he relates the scene of the moment he snaps while on a mission.  This is where I got a real sympathy for the character.  High above the earth in a bomber amid the exploding flak, bullets ripping into the hull, confusion over the intercom the pressure mounts and suddenly Yossarian is scared for his life.  It's a real PTSD inducing kind of experience for him.  Suddenly he realizes that people he doesn't know want to kill him and he's being told to kill people he doesn't even know.  Fearing for his own life blends into some sort of mystic personal experience where he superimposes his plight on the plight of soldiers on the other side.  He doesn't want to die and neither do they but they are being puppeteered by people who are far away encouraging them to kill.
Chapter 18 opens with, "Yossarian owed his good health to exercise, fresh air, teamwork, and good sportsmanship; it was to get away from them all that he had first discovered the hospital."  After the above mission (two chapters later that involves him falling in love with a whore and then spending time with the commander's wife in the same capacity) Yossarian instead of going as ordered to morning calisthenics he, while in emotional turmoil from the bombing run that made him snap, went to the dispensary with a fake pain in his side.  It's there that the doctors began to, some blatantly others unintentionally, train him on how to fake a liver complaint and get to stay in the hospital for 10 days at a time.  This facilitates his desire to never experience a bombing run again.  The doctors, clearly tired of watching good men die, start bargaining with him even to the point of promising him more hospital time if he pretends to have a different ailment for the records so that they can prove some hypothesis, or pretend to be someone's dying son.

Somewhere in all the dark comedy the book reached up and grabbed me by the feels in much the same way the ending of Catcher in the Rye did.  Suddenly I could relate to the character I despised not having known his story.  Fear of death makes "cowards" of us all at some point or another.  I've never been in the military.  I've never even been in much of a life threatening situation before.  As a result my understanding is very limited.  That is one of the wonders of novels, though.  It may be fiction and therefore an imperfect representation, but it can begin to weave in some threads of sympathy into our world view.

That may very well be why this novel endures.

Pax,

W

Post Modern War (Catch 22 chapters 1-9)

First off...I'm going to start by being honest.  I already don't like this book.  It is going to take a major emotional shift near the end (much like the one that happens at the end of Catcher in the Rye which no one pays attention to anyway for how to interpret the book) for me to agree that this is one of the 100 Books You Should Read Before You Die.

From the very first chapter it has all the flavor of the play "Waiting for Godot" which is a play best summed up in the review "Ninety minutes, nothing happens, and nobody learned anything".

The first nine chapters are some fairly decent character studies on different people that the main character, Yossarian, has come into contact with both in his flight group and at the hospital.  Yossarian has a naturally high temperature and he complains of pain in his liver which gets him out of having to go back to war.  Since he is an officer he spends his hospital time, when not annoying or being annoyed by his fellow patients, with the job of redacting letters.  He doesn't follow any specific protocols in redacting said letters.  Sometimes he has a ban on adverbs, other times he blacks out everything in the body of the letter leaving only the closing.  Why?  Because it entertains him to do so.

Every officer who does the redacting must sign the redacted document.  He signs not his name but instead Irving Washington, or Washington Irving so that they can't trace it back to him.

And it's about this time that I realize this is a book of Post Modernism.  It isn't labeled as such.  Some people call it Black Humor, others Absurdist Fiction, but ultimately it has the saccharine likability of Post Modernism.  It screams from every page, "Ooooh, I'm clever.  Look at me!!  I'm Clever!  Wasn't that writing clever?  Here, I'll even spin round and do the same joke with different words because I'm so effing Clever.  That's right.  I'm clever with a capital "c"!  That's how clever I am."

Imagine Abbott and Costello performing "Who's on First" except with knowing "didja get it" nods to the audience, and then if there was even an iota of doubt they would repeat the whole line again, stomp after the punchline, and hold out a hand to signal that the audience should laugh.

Yossarian is not at all a likable character in my estimation.  Like many in Post Modernist fiction, the man has no heart or consideration beyond himself.  He is not a passive observer so much as a vindictive observer.  Each good thing he sees he pours his derision on.  And this is my issue with Post Modernism in general.  It says, "Let's tear down and destroy anything good and noble...and then not replace it with anything."  It is vanity.

For instance when Yossarian describes the, "Texan who was from Texas."  Ok, I will admit happily that it was the one line that actually got a laugh from me.  I mean, who hasn't met a Texan who would happily tell you with overpride "I'm a Texan from Texas"?  However the line later follows, "The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous, and likable.  In three days no one could stand him."  In speaking of Clevinger, another patient who seemed nice enough, "The case against Clevinger was open and shut.  The only thing missing was something to charge him with."  These other guys are decent men who simply aren't in on the joke, so let's deride and mock them.  Why?  Cause we're bored and there's a war on that we are trying to avoid going back to.

In the aspect of criticism of war I do have to give it props.  It echoes much of my own sentiment as a pacifist.  The military sends a C.I.D. man to catch Washington Irving or Irving Washington in the hospital and in chapter two it begins, "In a way the C.I.D. man was pretty lucky, because outside the hospital the war was still going on.  Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their lives."

All sorts of horrible things happen in war that are against all rationality.  I could never volunteer for such a thing.  If I was drafted I would be more of a liability than anything because of certain sensibilities like not being able to put away rationality and that would cause me to hesitate.  I tend to over think especially when the pressure is on.  However, the difference between myself and Yossarian is the fact that when called upon I would go, and once there I would do my best to protect the one on my left and my right.  I would fight with everything rather than sit in a hospital criticizing others and childishly redacting love letters with no thought to those on the other side of them.

"Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who belived in God, Motherhood, and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.  'I hate that son of a bitch,' Yossarian growled."

A few back and forths later Yossarian reveals his "Rebel Without a Cause" style philosophy.
"What son of a bitch do you hate, then?"
"What son of a bitch is there?"

Many of the men got together to build a sort of Officer's Club that ended up taking a lot of work which Yossarian never went to help at until it was already finished.  "It was truly a splendid structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it was his."

In the world of Catch 22 everyone hates someone, everyone is trying to scam everyone else, there is nothing to live for, nothing to die for, and nothing worth anything.  Every hero is torn down, every man with any value despised and held in contempt.  It's very much the world we live in now fifty five years later.  This mentality has spread everywhere to the point that schools are stopping teaching the founders of this country as "Great Men".  They are being taught as average guys who didn't really do anything special.  We tear down our heroes, eviscerate virtues, call truth a lie.  We are swinging a sledgehammer at anything solid in a two story house and expecting it to magically stay in tact.

I don't believe war to be a virtue, or even something glorious.  War is, as has been famously said, hell.  War is madness.  But it is sometimes a necessary madness.  Even I, pacifist I am, have to admit that.

In these first one hundred pages the only real thing I got from any of this were brief moments where PTSD shown through the murk.  Chapter 6 on Hungry Joe had a lot of really good moments where the damage of war was clear and made me think differently about those coming home.  Naturally Doc Daneeka ruins plenty of moments by bemoaning how he had to go to war and left behind a 50k a year medical practice with plenty of tax free income on the side.  "I gotta laugh when I hear someone like Hungry Joe screaming his brains out every night.  I really gotta laugh.  He's sick?  How doesn't he think I feel."

Consumed with self, zero empathy, null compassion is what characterizes much of this novel.  The book casts a microscopic lens on the cracks in any seemingly good individual while neglecting to cast it upon those deriding such individuals.  It casts promiscuous wives of higher ups as blessed saints.  Literally says "He had sinned, and it was good..." "Major Major had lied, and it was good" in a bit of mockery of God declaring the different phases of creation "and it was good".

I don't hold out much hope for my enjoyment of this novel.  It tears down everything and affirms nothing which is pretty much the opposite of the novels I've loved in this series.

Well...I do have to admit it taught me what the word "furgle" means so...that's something.

Pax.

W

Tess of the D'urbervilles No More...

I was encouraged by a cousin of mine to include the following as my review of Tess of the D'urbervilles:

It...wasn't for me. They put the character through multiple hell's, gets the love of her life, they get married, he leaves her because of what Alec did to her, she marries Alec under protest for the money for her family, the husband comes back, she murders Alec, she and husband run off from the law, the law catches up with her, she tells husband to marry her little sister which he does even before her execution. Blech.

That short encapsulation of my entire experience for a friend on Facebook is pretty much the easiest way I could put it.  On a scale of Pride and Prejudice to Wuthering Heights I'm giving this a "First Chapter of Wuthering Heights when I still had a shred of hope and some dignity as a reader.

I can hear some of the Thomas Hardy admirers already clamoring, "But this is an important novel!  It ended how real life ended and that should be applauded!"

I will certainly not debate that first point.  It is an important novel that challenges the social mores of the times that were at best hypocritical and at worst outright debasing of a whole section of the female gender that individually did no wrong.  Hardy did his best to challenge the Victorian establishment and things actually changed.  My issue isn't with the general drama of the novel.  It's the ending because, let's face it dearios, it's a cheap ending.

One can very easily compare this novel to Jane Eyre if one does not consider the challenge to moral standards of the time.  In each chapter, at every side, the heroine is beset by all manner of difficulties, all manner of ridiculous prejudices, holier-than-thou hypocrisy, and looming, larger than life jerks that stand between them and their shot at some form of happiness.  Each heroine refuses to be defined by their circumstances...well...until Tess does.  She gives in to marrying her rapist for financial security.  Sure, it can be seen as a virtue that Tess did it for her family who was left fatherless and more penniless than before.  However, she submits to her rapist for money and security.  It can be argued that it was because she honestly believed that her husband was never coming home after all.  When all was lost for Jane there was not a moment that she altered what she believed or who she was for security or because of a man.  Tess changes everything that defines her for her rapist and for her struggling family.

The moment that the ending comes off as horribly cheap is not in the murder of Alec because, as she said, he lied about Angel never coming back.  The cheapness didn't even come off in Angel and Tess running off having an idyllic time on the lam.  No.  It's in the moment when Tess actually tells her husband to go off and marry her little sister Liza.  Why?  Basically because she looks like a young Tess but without all the being raped thing.

What the hell?

No, seriously...what...the...hell?

When I read that part I literally looked at my wife and said, "He better not do it.  Hell no."

Oh, he does it.  Angel doesn't even wait for Tess' execution to be carried out.  He's running through town with Liza hand in hand, happy as a lark, going to surely get some uncomplicated lovin' from Tess' little sister later that evening, and oh...well...they pause and see a black flag that's raised to signify that Tess had died.

It occurs to me as I write this that maybe this is another bit of social commentary, that maybe Angel is still one of the upper class jerks at heart.  In which case, bully to Mr. Hardy.  However...I doubt it.

One of the things that annoys me in all manner of fiction is when a character isn't called out on their BS.  The most prevalent example that comes to mind is Magneto in the X-Men comics and movies.  Here he is all pissed off about the holocaust, about this jerks who are some sort of master race condemning the "lesser races" to execution or servitude because the Aryans are obviously superior.  And yet he's a jerk who is part of a master race condemning....because Mutants are obviously superior.  No one EVER calls him out on that horrible glaring inconsistency.

In Tess that horrible inconsistency is the fact that Angel admits to Tess on their wedding night that she's not his first, that he spent thirty days in Egypt (?) in the sordid embrace of a woman he had no intention of marrying.  He willingly went into bed not once but for thirty days with a strumpet...but heaven forfend that Tess be accepted by him.  I mean she was raped...that's a sin...by nature she has a husband already.  "And by that rationale you have a wife, you whore monger!" I accidentally said out loud in a Starbucks when I read it.  He never faces up to that reality.  He never admits that wrong.  Oh, sure, he says, "I treated her too harshly," but that's not the same as actually seeing that the far far greater "sin" is his.

Back to the cheap ending...

It is my considered opinion that books with this sort of ending are simply not for me.  I much prefer the endings of books like Jane Eyre and Little Women.  Those books don't end in a perfect or idyllic way either, but they give us something we drastically need in this world...hope.  Yes, your life won't turn out the way you wanted it to at the first blush of life or love.  However, if you stick by your guns, cling to your faith and your principles, then in the end you will get something good, maybe even something better than you thought it could be.  It may be like at the end of Jane Eyre where it has been years apart, each of them covered in emotional scars, they're older but wiser, and yet I guarantee what those two feel sitting near the fire together after all that is more solid, more valuable, and a more intense love than what they would have had if they said, "Screw the fact that I have a crazy wife in the attic, lets get hitched and get it on."

Give me an ending that reminds me that life is hard...but there's a light.

Pax,

W

A Woman of Sullied Virtue (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Phase 1)

Upon reading the first few pages of Tess of the D'Urbervilles I really had no idea what to expect other than what the back of the book had already declared:

There's a family called the Derbeyfields who might be related to the wealthy D'Urbervilles and so they send Tess to maybe claim a bit of the fortunes.  Her manipulative "cousin" does some shocking act of betrayal that makes Tess an outcast upon returning home.  The parson's son, Angel Clare, comes along and is probably the man she ends up with in the end.  Manipulations, twisted morality, and other frustrations ensue.

I have to say I have been a little apprehensive to delve too deeply into this one.  There's a bit of a Wuthering Heights vibe from the get go with the manipulative cousin and "shocking act of betrayal".  I swear I'm still suffering some PTSD after that damnable novel.

Thomas Hardy starts out the novel in one of the best ways that I can imagine.  Tess' father is walking down the lane when the local minister calls out a greeting to him by the name "Sir John".  Confused John asks why.  The minister tells him it's because of something he'd read, that John Durbeyfield's last name is a corruption of an older family name "D'Urberville" which was once a noble name in those parts.  The minister bids "Sir John" good evening and walks off.  From there the tale becomes further embroidered by "Sir John" into how rich the family was, how noble, how many holdings they had, and a knightly shield that they once carried, and all this he tells down at the local pub in a drunken game of "Telephone".  The legend grows so great in his telling of it that he and his wife send Tess to the "D'Urbervilles" to claim kin and perhaps gain some amount of fortune...BUT...that particular clan of D'Urbervilles is a false clan given that the man, a financier or merchant, trying to escape debts and/or trouble changed his christened named to D'Urberville which just happened to be an ancient he discovered in some old and musty books.  It suited his purpose and he set himself down in peace sure he'd never have trouble come knocking.   Fast forward a few years and there is Tess knocking on their door gaining the unfortunate attention of one Alec D'Urberville.

Now, it is important for me to relate that I really appreciate Hardy's style.  There are moments where the sentences and imagery is a bit overwrought, but that aside the man has a very good eye for someone who wasn't born in the era of moving pictures.  We go from the evening meeting with the minister to the pub, with a pass by Tess with other women in white dresses dancing for some peculiar village reason where she meets and dances with the man I'm fairly certain she ends up with, and then back to home where Mrs. Derbyfield is tending to a house full of her own urchins.  It is so well paced and timed I could practically see the film in my head with scene handoffs like that.

When we first meet Alec the reader almost instantly, on "sight", by which I mean his physical description, we know him for exactly who he is.  After Tess leaves him the first time Hardy let's the "camera" that has been exclusively by Tess' side hang back to look over Alec's shoulder as he hints to no one in particular his terrible intentions.  The next few chapters in the phase highlights Tess' innocence and Alec's grooming of her in an incredibly cinematic manner, pulling in focus on this, giving a landscape there.  Even Alec's return at night in the wood where he left Tess is fraught with cinematic cues that naturally blossom within the modern mind.  Out of all the books I've read in the 100BYSRBYD series so far none of them have been so ready for filming as this one.

Today I finished Phase One and, naturally, I came to the part that I had been dreading.  At least I assume what happened in my head actually happened.  I mean it was written in the later half of the 1800s and so he couldn't just come out and say that Alec raped Tess.

My natural outrage came out at the act.  Hardy wrote Alec so well in his monstrous regard that I was somewhat shocked that Alec's desires and reasons for doing it are still used to this day.  "She wanted it."  "She owed me." "She shouldn't have dressed or acted like that."  His grooming of her all along the way is still typical in this modern age and that was half of the shock for me.  "We still haven't learned.  There were jerks like that back then.  So little has changed." was the first series of thoughts.

Fortunately what has changed is our level of compassion as individuals.

You can't look up information on this novel without coming across the fact that it garnered such outrage and such scandal not because Tess was raped.  Rather the scandalous nature of the novel was in suggesting that after the rape act Tess was still a "pure woman".  These days we can acknowledge the fact that it is not the victim's fault.  Back then there was no such consideration at all.  The man would get away with it, might be frowned at, but the victim would be marred for life.  It's still something I'm not sure I can wrap my mind around.  The idea that she is somehow to be punished for it, as if she "allowed" it to happen, is immediately repugnant to any modern thinking human being.

It will certainly be difficult to dig into the following chapters and "phases" while attempting to understand their viewpoint.  It's easy for us to point and go "bloody idiots" to that society, but we often forget that they had actually reasons for behaving the way they did and thinking the way they did.  These reasons made sense to them or they wouldn't have ascribed to them.  Someday our values will be mocked by future generations, so it should be possible to at least a gain a sense of it.

Given that the novel appears to be a long treatise on how that society acts in shaming Tess, I imagine this is going to be quite the difficult novel to get through.  I hope for a happy...ish ending...but it's got that battery acid tang of Wuthering Heights to it that unsettles me to my core.

Pax,

W

To Endings that are Good...Enough (Little Women wrap-up)

By heaven.  Has it really been since September that I last wrote in this blog?  I haven't been idle, if that comforts anyone.  It does me a great comfort given that I usually spend quite a bit of time idle.

`There's been October, which really needs no excuse.  October is a time for celebration for my people, the Autumnals, and is the one month of the year which I look forward to the most.  It's also the one month of the year where the temperature is perfect for going out of doors.  The summer is too sticky, spring too wishy washy, and winter too frigid by half.  October is, in a word, perfection.

There was a wedding in there somewhere within that month, and a vacation to Colonial Williamsburg.

November was my birthday and the time of NaNoWriMo was upon me in which I get really crabby, exhausted, and want nothing to do with writing after the requisite 50k words have been accomplished.

December came quite hard and fast, as they are wont to do.  You never realize how busy a December can be until you're in recovery mode somewhere in the later part of the month.  And that's why we find ourselves here and now.  While in recovery I finished Little Women.  

I don't remember if, and I'm too lazy to go look, I talked last time about the marked difference between the first half of the novel and the last half.  Part two took me completely by surprise with the difference in tone.  It was as if so much time had elapsed between the two parts that she had no idea where to begin and, when in doubt, moralize.

Ms. Alcott did have quite a bit of moralizing going on in the novel to begin with, however she diffused it by employing her characters rather than herself as the agent of it.  If I was a better  blogger I would have researched the time in between parts, but alas.  What I do suspect is that the two parts were sold separately and she was told what people liked about the first part.  Praise before a novel's completion can be a terrible thing.

A few months ago at my writer's group the members had almost universal praise for my chapter, especially how poetic each line was which was so appropriate for the genre and subject matter.  It was so well praised that when I sat down to write the next chapter instead of flowing naturally like it usually does I was given to fits and half starts.  Why?  Because I was focusing on the poetry of the language than the actual story.

Halfway through this second half of the book, somewhere around where Mr. Bhaer is established as a fixture in Jo's life away from home having moved beyond acquaintance, Alcott picks up with the verve, wit, and natural ease of her writing that I quite admire.  The little pastiches showing life with Meg's family became a bit heavy handed again, but I do have to admit that the problems they suffered are remarkably still issues in families today.

I was as surprised as anyone to find that my opinion of Amy has actually softened.  My recollection of the movie version was that they tried to turn it into a little love triangle with Amy stealing Laurie and Jo being outraged or, at least, a little miffed about the whole thing.  Here I was actually overjoyed to find that Amy grew up, that she caused Laurie to grow up, and Jo was completely grown up about the whole thing; that she truly never did harbor any feelings Laurie beyond sisterhood.  I do understand that it's difficult to make a wholly interesting movie in the modern age with that as the story, and I wonder how many faithful readers of the book were outraged.  Jo didn't miss her chance because she never wanted one.  Showing a young woman who is actually mature, wise, and thoughtful would likely be an unbelievable thing in media these days where we embrace figures who live on the edge, are incomplete without a man (any man), and act foolishly at every turn but it all seems to work out in the end anyway.  

I was equally interested in Beth's passing.  It was such an understated, almost normal sort of thing to happen.  I suppose most of that is due to the fact that everyone knew, had time to prepare, and loved her through the whole ordeal.  Had it been a sudden death it would have been handled differently, I'm sure.  Mourning occurred but it wasn't drawn out.  The pain was there but not quite so acutely portrayed.  So much of modern movies and books is all about grabbing you by the emotions and tugging as hard as you can.  This was something different; a sweet passing, a gentle goodbye, a loving caress of a death.  I could moralize here myself and write about how we are so desensitized and so yearn to feel anything that of course we gravitate towards more overtly emotional tales.

The romance of Bhaer and Jo was something that I was naturally predisposed to enjoy.  Separation, mounds of letters in a year, sensible yet whole hearted love between them, etc. is something that mirrors my own love story.  Ok, my beloved was the sensible one.  I was the one who racked up a $450 phone bill while she was at school in Oxford.  I've never claimed sensibility when it comes to my bride.

My only complaint about the novel, and it is such a petty thing, was the ending.  It ends as it began, of course, being a portrait of a simple, loving family with all their faults, foibles, blessings, and the wisdom of their parents on display.  I can't imagine an appropriate ending that would tie everything in a nice bow, and so perhaps I shouldn't complain.

Overall I pretty much loved this novel, and all the more to find that Amy doesn't remain a hideous person.  I set out on this journey to see if the novels would change me, and so far they have, this one especially.  When I consider their "simple" life I don't do too much romanticizing.  Modernity certainly has more avenues to and support for living a crazed hectic life, but somewhere between the pages I made a connection.  It's a connection I'm not sure I can vocalize here, but naturally I'll try.

There wasn't more time in a day back then with which we could sit, ruminate, and come to a correct course of action.  There are a bajillion more choices of things we can do with our time, but that is what they all are; choices.  The life best lived is not in embracing every possibility of what we can do with our time, but choosing well and, as it laughably turns out, choosing fewer.  The right things, the beneficial things, the healthy things, the great and honorable things are all still there for us to choose.  They have endured.  Maybe society is more like my daughter who prefers the mediocre but color episodes of The Andy Griffith Show because, "Old things are not good and these are better because they are new" (yes...she'll be brought to wisdom if I have to drag her kicking and screaming).  I've gained an appreciation for the old and timeless because of those two qualities.  The old endures because of its virtues and timeless things are...well...timeless.  I shy away from every brand new iteration of Apple Products that they just have to have while the old one is just as usable.  A disposable, constantly upgradeable society is by its very nature a house of cards.  We have virtue and principles when it is convenient and violate them when it is not, and that's not the world I want to live in.  Remember...once upon a time a handshake was a legal agreement...and now we prenup our marriages.

Likesay, I'm not sure where I'm headed because of these books, but I'm fairly certain it will be better than the direction I was heading without them.

Pax,

W

Highs, Lows, Frustrations, and Joys (Ch. 11-22)

Now that I am half way through Little Woman, I've come to the conclusion that it would never have a market in this modern day.

As a writer, I've been through the query process many times, and the biggest criticism I have gotten on my work is that I start off too slow.  You need a good hook in the first page/paragraph/sentence/half sentence that will propel the prospective reader in a hurtling death race to the final page.  If you can make it dystopian, dark, gritty, oversexed, and maybe a teeny tiny bit about demons or dark magic then all the better.  A book about a random period of time with the major driving plot point being that the father is off to war and sick just wouldn't cut it these days.  I mean, let's face it, nothing major happens.  It's a book about relationships and a slice of life.  You'd pretty much only find a probable audience for the novel in the Christian Fiction market.

These days it doesn't matter how well written it is, and don't get me wrong I believe Little Women to be one of the best written books of all time, if it doesn't fit a certain formula it isn't going to be picked up.  Honestly, if you put Hunger Games and Little Women up against each other vying for an agent's pickup which do you think would get picked?  Exactly.  And it's a tragedy.  Certainly they are each in a different genre, but it's a shame that there is nothing modern to compare it to.  There's the odd straight "fiction" novel that breaks onto the public consciousness like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Life of Pi, or The Help, but nothing that endures like these past few books and I wonder why that is.  The classics have a completely different feel than anything modern.  Whether we bring that to the reading because they are designated as classics would make for an interesting discussion to have, but for now, and for decades, nothing our species has written has endured for long at all.  Maybe we can't tell during our time in the same way people didn't know that they were in the Renaissance while it was happening.

My personal opinion, however, is that this work simply glows from scene to scene.  I've mentioned before about how the magic of these novels is in their reality, that this is really how people are and have all the hallmarks of having actually happened.  The newspaper, along with their little alter egos, and post office adventures are extremely endearing.

 It reminds me of the sorts of things my own children come up with when they are "dying" of boredom.  Lately when they say, "I'm bored!", I respond with a hearty, "Congratulations!".  After a minute of the confused look on their faces they ask why I'm congratulating them.  "Because, that means that you're on the edge of making up some great game, or might end up acting out a play of a story, or you'll get an amazing idea that you wouldn't have if you'd been on devices or watching TV.  We should get you bored more often".  That usually gets me an eye roll, an aggravated sigh, and fists on hips, but within ten minutes they usually prove me right.

My daughter chose Little Women (abridged version) as her book report book a few weeks ago.  Probably the biggest reaction she showed (other than "Wow, Papa, Amy is just downright mean") was the experiment of the girls to try and do nothing, to have a little holiday.  Ever since reading about that, and especially Beth's unfortunate casualty, she has endeavored to work a little harder even on the days she has free of chores.  Appropriately it has affected me in quite similar ways in the care and keeping of our home.

"Have regular hours for work and play, make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well.  Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life become a beautiful success, in spite of poverty."

Try telling that to kids, let alone adults, these days and you'll get a response akin to, "Don't you tell me how to live my life.  You don't know me!".

In my daughter's homeschool materials I was delighted to find that at the top of her arithmetic pages and her spelling pages there are verses and maxims for her to read.  It used to be fairly standard in schools to have these "copybook headings".  We've become a culture that is obsessed with burning down the previous standards.  "If it's old it's bad," is something I've heard and even out of my own daughter's mouth.  It is an extremely human tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  It is a far easier thing to look at edifices and institutions of the past and say "burn it" than go through the hard work off picking over what is worth saving and taking with us.  As a species we always do what is easiest and most emotionally satisfying rather than what is actually best for us.  The older I get, the farther I look back and the more fastidious I am about sorting through the burnt wreckage for gems.

"Camp Laurence" was a delight.  I love it when I'm nostalgic for an era that I've never even been a part of.  Certainly I'm guilty of romanticizing the past and would find things to complain about if I were transported across space and time, but I do so love it, regardless.

Also, I love that Jo and I share the same birth month.  I do look at November far more pleasantly as a month because I was born on the first day of it.

Then the darkness comes...father is sick, Mother must leave, and then, while gone, Beth becomes sick.  Even though I knew it was coming, Beth getting sick was a blow.  I would write more except that I apparently don't like to talk about it.  Because of this, the return of Mr. March is incredibly bittersweet.  I do delight in Jo's quiet fury regarding the possibility that Meg and Mr. Brooke may get together.  There is something so honest, so genuine, about that emotion and how it plays out.

My great hope is that I'll be able to purposefully carve out more time for the novel.  I do have quite an affection for it.  It may even become one of those novels I dig out every year to remind myself there are encouraging and wondrous things in this world when it gets dark.

Of course October is the month that I read the Ray Bradbury novel Something Wicked This Way Comes to my daughter.  If you are looking for a good book for the prelude to Halloween it is very much worth your time, as is all Bradbury content.

Pax,

W

Another World, Another Time ("Little Women" Ch. 1-10)

I feel like I've got a "bajillion" (my daughter assures me that it is a standard unit of measurement) things to say about Little Women and yet I have no idea where to start.  I suppose I could start with the easiest revelation, which is that I'm pretty much in love with this book.

It was no surprise to me when I learned that Little Women is drawn from the experiences of the author's own life.  Each of the characters is completely believable and almost bowls you over with their authenticity.  It's been a common theme here on the 100BYSRBYD blog that these books stand the test of time because you actually know someone who isn't just kinda like Jo but is Jo.

Much like with To Kill a Mockingbird, this novel taps into the "Main Street USA" feels in my brain.  It makes me nostalgic for a time that I never was a part of.  Granted it takes place during a terrible time in our history, the Civil War, but it feels like it was a much simpler time.  Of course that's a trick of distance in time.  Each decade had its own complications and it's own longing for a simpler time.  Still I can't help but feel that I'd give up my cell phone and Twitter/Facebook accounts for floor scrubbing and field work and think it a fair trade.

You can't read Little Women and not have a favorite "little woman".  The book naturally skews one towards Jo, but there is a case to be made for Meg or Beth.  Amy...well, let me tell you about Amy.

As I mentioned in the WIKA, I barely remember the movie I once watched long ago.  Throughout the book so far I've been getting flashbacks to the movie.  Winona Ryder was Jo, Claire Danes was Beth, I don't remember who played Meg, and Kirsten Dunst played Amy.  I have always wondered why I have such a loathing for every character Kirsten Dunst has played.  I mean, she was tolerable as Mary Jane in Spiderman, but other than that every time I see here in a movie I've had this low level hostility towards any character she plays.  It genuinely borders on that questionable "want to punch them in the throat" level deep in my gut.  I'll never forget watching Mona Lisa Smile and realizing that every time her character was on screen I had to leave the room.  It was such a strange response that I spent a lot of time trying to understand.  I mean, yes, her character in that movie was written to irritate the viewer with here...well, there's no easy way to say it...outright bitchiness.  So, overall I couldn't understand my reaction...until I started having the flashbacks to the movie based on Little Women.

I hated Amy in the movie so much that the hatred transferred over onto the very actress who played her.  I'm getting ahead of myself here, but Amy, as with Blanche from Jane Eyre, is everything repulsive to me that a woman can be.  Cruel, conniving, poisonous, cold, soul shredding, selfish, pompous, and then tries to turn it all around with a little angelic smile and a sorry.  Just thinking about how she burns Jo's book as recompense for Jo and Meg going to a party with Laurie that Amy wasn't even invited to makes my blood pressure skyrocket.

Now before people claim that I am clearly sexist because I attribute the above adjectives to women let me say (by way of a disclaimer that I shouldn't even have to make) that I understand men can be cruel, conniving, poisonous, etc.  I will defend myself in saying that women do it so much differently than men.  There are those women who have chosen the above as a normal way of living life and interacting with humans and they scare the crap out of me.  I avoid them the way I avoid toxic nuclear waste...I avoid them by going miles around them.

So, for now enough about Amy.  I have my heart condition to think of and until she commits another "sin" in the book I'll table my loathing for her to write of better things here.

I will get to the quotes and thing that struck me the most in a bit, however I can't continue without pontificating on the single greatest aspect of this first quarter of the book.  I'm not exactly sure how to put it in the most "entertaining" way possibles.  As a result I'll just jump right in.

Virtue.  I know, that's almost a dirty word in today's culture, but in this novel it is ever present.  I'm not even talking about the points where it extols virtues, the very gift of a copy of Pilgrim's Progress is emphasis enough to be sure, I'm talking about how virtue is an active part of each person's life.  Most shocking to me, in a good way, is the manner in which each character is aware of their faults and failings to live up to an ideal (aside from Amy...blergh..) and is actively working to remedy their lack.  Jo knows that her fuse is short and is prone to flying into a rage.  Meg is fully aware that she craves finer things that amount to little in this world and only serve to enhance her prideful streak.  Even their mother looks around for lessons to apply to her own virtues.

It's at this point I wonder why this book is solidly in the top 100BYSRBD given that it's very substance is antithetical to our current society.  The entire American propensity towards self indulgence can hardly abide this.  If someone has a propensity towards anger, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, pride, lust, etc.  what do we say of them?  Or, rather, what do they say of themselves?  "It's just how I am.  Accept it.  I'll never change."  We didn't always believe so and this novel is evidence of that fact.  We have a near fatalist view of virtues and vices.  You have what you have and you'll never get any better.  We medicate ourselves into numbness (self or prescription) rather than go through the hard work of doing a objective self-assessment let alone striving through the hard slog of bettering ourselves.  And why should we be surprised, if indeed we are at all?  A relativistic society is not now and could never be a virtuous society.  Where once we followed "Know Thyself" with "Better Thyself" we now blithely mutter "Yeah, well that's fine for you but not for me".  When oneself is the measure of virtue then it's no wonder things are falling apart at the seems and reason is a bizarre way of looking at the world.  Facts become variables and feelings become laws.

Already this book has changed me in that regard and changed my parenting style.  If I don't encourage self analysis in my children, model it for them, or establish the virtues as goal posts then how dare I be surprised or even disappointed when they eventually grow up and miss the mark?  While people are content with their children getting participation trophies, receiving scouting badges they didn't earn, and sliding by in society I find myself rejecting that thinking more and more for my children.  My daughter was in Girl Scouts for about three months before the Summer break.  To my shock she was given a number of badges that the other girls had earned so she wouldn't feel left out.  For the sake of politeness I allowed it, but am wondering now if I should have made a bit of a stand.  My daughter and I have since had a talk about how different it is when you actually earn something yourself.  She and I are in agreement now that no one is to give her a badge or an award she didn't earn with the hard work of meeting every requirement.  We throw away standards at our own peril.  If other parents don't understand, I'm fine with that.  All of the books on the list so far have taught me one thing above all else.  "In a world of insanity, stand for sanity."

Now that I've gotten all that out into the open (for good or ill) let us move on to my favorite bits and bobs, quotes and such.

In reference to Pilgrim's Progress it is stated of Jo that "She knew it very well, for it was that beautiful story of the best life ever lived, and Jo felt that it was a true guidebook for any pilgrim going the long journey".  The Bunyan novel has gotten diminished as of late in the eyes of many Christians.  I'm not sure that we as a group afford it the honor that it is actually do.  Allegory seems the province of nursery rhymes to our "modern" sensibilities.  It's not on the 100 list, but I'm pretty sure I'll need to read it soon.

I love Beth to pieces.  She is such a pure and gentle soul.  Her affection and care of cast off dolls is such a delight to me.  She's the kind of person you want to be around if for no other reason than to stand between her and the wide world that is lying in wait to abuse and destroy her gentleness and innocence.  If Jane Eyre has taught me anything it is that in literature that's a signal that she is going to die before the book is done.  Unfortunately there's a big blank in my memory of the film in this regard so...here's hoping I'm wrong.

"There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind."

These types of characters make me feel ashamed; ashamed of my cynicism, skepticism and suspicious nature.  I've met a good many of them and they seem so alien to this world, to be honest.

I LOVE the elder Mr. Laurence.  The way he takes to little Beth and his reaction to her reaction to being given a piano is simply priceless.  In my movie of this book he would be played by Sir John Hurt.  A perfect match if ever there was one.  Mrs. March would be played by Jennifer Ehle of Possession fame.

"Watch and pray, dear, never get tired of trying and never think it impossible to conquer a fault."  See previous diatribe on this point.  I could repeat it all over again here, but I'll spare you.

Mrs. March proves her quality again and again throughout the book.  Particularly in the section after Meg "'fess"es after her trip to "Vanity Fair".  I could write out the two pages of text where she reveals her "plans" for her daughters...but I won't  It's well worth the read and shames my heart (in an ultimately constructive way) as a parent.  It can be distilled in the following quotes.

"I want my daughters to be beautiful, accomplished, and good;  to be admired, loved, and respected..."

"I'd rather see you poor men's wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones without self-respect and peace."

"...better happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands...

Next we'll have a goodly "Vocab" post.  I'm very glad to be back to finding words that I don't know the meaning of.

Pax,

W