Finding time for Proust

Review: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

2011-09-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to read this book. Something about its fast rise to popularity along with its quick step into the movie theater made me rather wary of it. It was only after numerous recommendations that I requested it from the library, and then I had to wait several weeks before it became available. All of that waiting, and I read it in two days. It's not a short book, and not overly easy read, I just couldn't put it down. My sleep suffered.

Told from three different view points, The Help is a fictional story set in Jackson, Mississippi during the civil rights era. Skeeter is a young white girl, just home from college and living with her family on their cotten farm. She is troubled by what she sees around her, but initially reluctant to become involved. Looking for a way to break into the publishing world, she sets her sights on annonymously writing a book from the point of view of the black domestic workers in Jackson. To do so she enlists the help of Aibileen and Minny, both black domestic maids working for white members of the country club set. It's their voices, rich in dialect, and their stories, full of the culture and history of the era, that make this book deserving of non-stop reading. Well devloped characters and strong writing filled with the hate, shame, pride and hope of an era, will make it an enduring hit.

Book 34 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Secret Zoo, by Bryan Chick

2011-09-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

Late one night Megan notices something strange about the animals in the next door zoo. Shortly after that she disappears. Her brother, Noah, is convinced that the zoo had something to do with her disappearance, and when he starts receiving strange visitations and communications from the animals there, he enlists the help of close friends Ella and Richie in getting her back. The kids are used to having adventures together, but they aren't at all prepared for the bizarre experience that awaits them at the zoo in their quest to rescue Megan. Told with humor and warmth, The Secret Zoo is a unique story of friendship and conservation, and in this capacity it was enjoyable read. But being a mystery, the element of suspense is strong, and a war at the end of the book brings fighting and death into the conversation, so this may not be the best read aloud for young children. Additionally I found the sarcastic tone of humor to be off-putting, especially in an example of young friendships.

Review: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Jaonne Greenberg

2011-09-18T07:43:00.000-07:00

For most of her life Deborah has been slipping further and further into a world different from our own, a world richly created by her schizophrenia and existing only in her mind. As her illness becomes more apparent in adolescence, her parents finally recognize the need for treatment, and send her to a rest home to work with a renowned doctor. Over the next three years we witness Deborah's struggle to accept reality and close the door on the world of her illness. Told mostly from Deborah's view point, this is a semi-autobiographical novel, and Greenberg's telling is unsurprisingly expert. She has drawn the world from inside the mind of young Deborah with careful detail and well expressed emotion. Though dark at times, this is a beautiful book that escapes being too dense with an occasional lightness and humor found in its thread of hope and friendship.
Book 33 on my way to 52 in 2011

Swann In Love, pp.355-378: The beginning of Swann's fall

2011-09-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

Swann falls out of favor with the Verdurins. He is usurped by the Comte de Forcheville, who is willing to lie in order to remain in their good graces. And so, Swann's integrity fails him. Mme. Verdurin is already trying to set Odette up with Forcheville, and edge Swann out (p.373). In fact, in comparing the two M. Verdurin declares that he dislikes Swann's continual reluctance to share an opinion, while he greatly appreciates Forcheville's willingness to "tell you straight out what he thinks" (p.376), ironic since Forcheville is merely performing lip service. But the Verdurins, no doubt, prefer the lie.

Also ironic...their claiming Swann to be "a failure, one of those small-minded individuals who are envious of anything that's at all big" (p.377). So obvious it's almost not worth noting.

But Swann's fall from grace is not due only to the appearance of Forcheville. The Verdurins are known to be jealous of their "faithful" having relationships, so Swann's pointed interest in Odette alone could put him out of favor (remember, he has wooed her away from the group on occassion), but he also fails to follow some of the hosts' rules regarding absolute worship of the faithful, especially Cottard and Brichot. Forcheville, on the other hand, shows proper adulation towards all the faithful present, and in fact says little that isn't simply honoring one of the other guests.

We meet Brichot. He is a professor of something at the Sorbonne. His speech is peppered not with English like Odette's, but with Latin and other traditional references. He is intelligent but would not be welcome in the salons of the upper class because he is incredibly boring, giving speeches without social awareness. This accentuates the satire drawn in the Verdurin's drawing room with reference to the upper class and noble salons. Then Swann has the audacity to critique him to Mme. Verdurin (p.375)

And M. Verdurin has now perfected his version of the fake laugh. No need for real merriment in this house. (p.372)

Cool stuff
Use of the article "de" in French names. Often, but not always, connected to nobility. Notably, though, in later years some people added it in order to appear noble born.

Vocabulary
Termagant (p.357) a violent, argumentative woman

demirep (p.375) a woman of ill repute

Swann in Love, pp.341-355: Vulgar Odette, and social commentary

2011-09-08T19:52:00.000-07:00

Beginning with "Except when he asked her for Vinteuil's little phrase..."

A closer look at Odette. She does not understand Swann—he is so far superior to her intellectually that she can't see the forest for the trees and instead believes him "inferior, intellectually, to what she had supposed." At the same time "she was more impressed by his indifference to money, by his kindness to everyone, by his courtesy and tact," (p.342) which makes sense, if she is basically a courtesan.

Odette apparently also has her own sense of fashion which deviates from the classic definition of the word as given by Swann, saying that

"it emanates from a comparatively small number of individuals, who project it to a considerable distance—more and more faintly the further one is from their intimate centre—within the circle of their friends and the friends of their friends, whose names form a sort of tabulated index." (p.343)

Odette longs to be in fashion, but her fashion plight may be similar to her social plight, when she refuses Swann's invitations to take her into society, and that of the Verdurins, who declaim all the most popular salons to be boring, perhaps as a means of protecting themselves from the disappointment of social shunning.

She doesn't find Swann to be as in fashion as she would like. She is displeased with his choice of abode, as she believes the Quai d'Orleans to be "unworthy of him." Interestingly, the Quai d'Orleans was (and is) an established part of town, apparently called home by many artists and writers during the late 19th century. Odette's real beef with the place seems to be its age. She has more respect for the "sham-antique" and would not have him living "among a lot of broken-down chairs and threadbare carpets." She does greatly respect those who enjoyed "picking up antiques, who liked poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love," but believes "there was no need actually to have those tastes, as long as one proclaimed them." (p.247) So again we see Odette as duplicitous vulgar: not only does she fail to see established value, but again her speech is peppered with English phrases, like "rummaging," "bric-a-brac," and especially "smart," which implies she has traded French tradition for the vulgarity of contemporary English or even American.

Swann is in love with being in love, and he will do anything to keep that feeling alive, and to keep Odette in love with him, right down to lowering himself.

"But, now that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share in her sympathies, to strive to be one with her in spirit, was a task so attractive that he tried to find enjoyment in the things that she liked, and did find a pleasure, not only in imitating her habits but in adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because, as those habits and opinions had no roots in his own intelligence, they reminded him only of his love," (p.349)

He is seriously love sick, and Proust writes his plight very naturally and deeply. The mental journey makes me think of a D. H. Lawrence character or two.

But oh the social commentary. Odette is not really a likeable person. She is a twit at best, short of intelligence and identifiable values would seem a satire of the lower classes doing their best to move their way up—the proverbial social climber—but then Swann assigns no more value than Odette to the social establishment, and he is far more likeable and no less of a social climber, having once been more middle class along with M's family and now moving in the upper most social circles.

"the objects we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of period and class, is no more than a series of fashions, the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined." (of Swann's opinion, p.350)

The late 19th century was a time of social mobility, and these are Proust's sketches of the times, but I'd like to read more about his position on the situation.

There are a lot of cool references in this section that I didn't research this time. Some of that information has been informative, and all of it has been fun, but I do want to finish this book during my lifetime.

Review: Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, by Naomi Aldort

2011-09-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

Respect, authenticity, and logic. Those are the three key ingredients to raising a healthy, happy, and productive child as I heard them in reading this book. Aldort presents a lot of good points and great suggestions here, but it wouldn't be a parenting book if it didn't come across as a little self-indulgent and didn't have some kind of agenda. For Aldort, who actually either falsified her credentials or is the biggest dope on the planet (source), the agenda begins with attachment parenting and moves smoothly into gentle parenting. That sounds good, but many of her expectations felt downright unrealistic to me, and the supposedly real dialogue is incredibly stilted. I did take a lot away from this book, but I was looking to it for general guidance and rough ideas, not as a parenting bible.

Swann in Love, pp.320-341: Odette, Swann, and blinding art

2011-09-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

Beginning with "Thus the simple and regular manifestations of this social organism, the 'little clan,' automatically provided Swann with a daily rendezvous with Odette..."

Proust and character writing, delving right into Swann's psyche. The onset or growth of Swann's feelings for Odette, which are ultimately his downfall, is like an internal battle to which we have a first seat row. In fact we seem to have a better handle on what's happening to him than he does, and so do his friends and acquaintances, who felt that "indeed Swann was no longer the same man" (p.333). Even the Verdurins have decided "the man must be a prize idiot" (p.322)

Swann is too busy making love out of nothing at all. He recognizes that his recent behavior is "foreign to his nature" (p.323) but he imagines himself in love. He goes so far as to "cease to be able to even think of her, so busy would he be in the search for pretexts which would enable him not to leave her immediately" (p.324). He turns her into what he considers a classic beauty by continuing to imagine her as Botticelli's Zipporah, and when it comes to the final moment of consummation, he begs her not to speak but to give only signs, perhaps because her voice will give her away for what she is...not much different from the shadowy figures of women who approached him in the dark on the same street where later he finds her, Odette. Even the act itself is disguised as something else when they persist in referring to it (sex) as doing a cattleya (p.331). By giving it a different name he is convincing himself that this is a "pleasure which had never before existed" but it's also a pleasure which has to "create" (p.332).

Swann fights with himself. He knows in his mind that Odette is nothing special, that her "qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in her company" (p.335) but we see him losing the battle, and the first hints of jealousy when he thinks of her existing outside of the time they have together. He already recognizes, and we are warned, that this love is sinking like the moon (p.338), the only problem, which we find soon enough, is that he goes down with it.

Art and life: In a way Swann ruins his life because he isn't actually living it. Instead he is living in a reproduction of the art he loves so much. He has ceased to see the world at all for what it really is. This may be the exact opposite of art being a means of saving history, or moments in time, and of providing a more pure form of experiencing existence, now art is getting in the way of experiencing life as it really is.

Cool stuff

I love that, different from Combray, Paris being a real place Proust has peppered the text with references to real locations.
The Café Anglais, and the Maison Dorée and Tortoni's on the Boulevard des Italiens (p.327) where Swann searches for Odette

"and the life of Odette at all other times...appeared to him, with its neutral and colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Wateau" (p.340)

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

2011-09-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

An honest journalist is under fire for libel and must leave his post as editor of the magazine he founded. In the aftermath he is hired by a Swedish business magnate to ghost write his autobiography and to research the thirty-plus year old murder of his grand-niece. He is helped along the way by the hero and title-character.

The good mystery and a healthy dose of suspense kept me riveted, but the book's greatest strength is in its characters. I love an author who can draw characters without breaking out of the story and Larsson does this well. Even better the personas are believable and their decisions form fitting even while they stretch the definitions of morality, responsibility, and consequence. This is what I would call an enjoyable light read, but Larsson demands a little more of the reader as he lightly takes on corporate corruption, and more heavily tackles violence and abuse. What makes us who we are, and what responsibilities do we have are some of the questions we are left with in the end.

That, and a light romantic cliff hanger, will drag some of the curious, and the hooked, right into his next book.

Book 31 on my way to 52 in 2011

Swann in Love, pp.303-320: the sonata, Odette, and art

2011-09-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

Beginning with "Greatly to Mme Verdurin's surprise, he never failed them."

Swann is already starting to lose his footing with the Verdurin's group because he is too well connected (dining with the president of the Third Republic and the prince of Wales).

The Sonata in F has become the symbol of the relationship between Swann and Odette, and as that changes, so does Swann's perception of the Sonata.

"but Swann thought that he could now discern in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware of how vain, how hollow was the happiness to which it showed the way." (p.308)

Swann would like to hear the other movements of the piece, but Odette urges him to be happy with what he has already heard. Having already read Swann in Love before I see this as foreshadowing of the difficulties he will ultimately face: Swann wanting more from her, Odette being unwilling to give him all of herself.

Swann visits Odette at home, where she lives on a street of cookie cutter row houses, an area with connections to prostitution at least in the past. She sets the stage with perfectly placed lamps and flowers and ornaments from the far east. Everything about her is fake or duplicitous. She likes the flowers only "because they had the supreme merit of not looking like flowers," (p.312) and by continually using English and decorating her home in the fashion of the Far East she is denying her French heritage. Even her handwriting is British, which hides its hint at "an untidiness of mind and will-power" (p.314).

Swann is being untruthful with himself, too, as he tries to convince himself that Odette is more attractive than he finds her. He compares her to figures in art, which he apparently does with many people he knows. About this M says:

"perhaps, also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the need to find in an old masterpiece some such anticipatory and rejuvenating allusion to personalities of today." (p.315)

which makes me think of earlier references to art being the stabilizer and means of preservation in architecture and the like, and here we see it possibly as the stabilizer of moral character, especially as regards Odette.

In fact, while Odette seems to drown herself in the current fashionable, Swann is doing his best to align her with the classical art of the fresco of Zipporah, even to the point of denying the artist's, Alessandro de Mariano's, popularized and fashionable name—Botticelli—which he, or our narrator, does vehemently.

Cool stuff

"and what a nuisance it had been not having one on the day of Gambetta's funeral." (Mme Verdurin, p.304)
Léon Gambetta was a statesman of the French Third Republic from 1881 until his accidental death in 1882 (at 44 years old). He was a moderate Republican and a great orator whose funeral became a well attended event. Proust treats it here as just another show.

"You shall have it int ime for the 'Danicheff' revival. I happen to be lunching with the Prefectof Police tomorrow at the Elysée...at M. Grévy's" (Swann, p.304)
I will guess that Les Danicheff refers to the play by Alexandre Dumas, first performed in 1876.

The Elysée (Palace) is the current home of the French president. It came under government usage during Napoleon's reign in 1808, then passed through many stages of political use, becoming the official residence of the French president during the third republic.

Jules Grévy was president of the French Third Republic from 1879-1887.

Swann, regarding the Sonata: "as in those interiors by Pieter de Hooch which are deepened by the narrow frame of a half-opened door" (p.308)
Pieter de Hooch was another Dutch painter from the 17th century who focused on middle class life, like Vermeer.

"Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to whom people more willingly give his popular surname, Botticelli" (p.314)
Zipporah is depicted in two frescoes in the Sistine Chapel: one by Perugino, and this one by Botticelli:

Review: The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo

2011-08-29T18:22:00.000-07:00

A mouse and a rat both fall in love with a princess and a story of chivalry, revenge, and heartbreak ensues. Despereaux is a misfit in his own mouse world and is banished to the dungeon where he expects to meet his death. Roscuro is a misfit in his own rat world, but finds only rejection in the world of light above, and returns to the dungeon thinking only of revenge. Mig, the unloved peasant who is too simple to either love or seek revenge, wishes only to trade places with the princess. We hear their stories separately first, then they all come together to finish the tale. The story is generally charming, but while the beginning seems promising DiCamillo continually interrupts the flow of the story either by jumping without warning to another time, place, and character, or by playing the interrupting narrator. With so many disruptions it can be hard to stay interested, but the underlying messages, such as "have courage" and "dare to be different", are obvious, and the rich language makes the book a pleasant enough read.
As a parent I think this is a fine book to read to a young child, but I was disappointed by the quality of the story and writing. At age five Calvin was completely capable of understanding the the story as read to him, but would not have been able to read it fluently enough on his own to make it worth while.

Swann in Love, pp. 281-304: Swann at the Verdurins, the satire of the salons

2011-08-26T17:51:00.000-07:00

Beginning with "Dr. Cottard was never quite certain..."

More on the Verdurins' "little group".

Dr. Cottard is a hilarious caricature, completely lacking grace and confidence in any social setting ("he was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room" p.282), which is almost the opposite of Swann, who is comfortable everywhere.

Saniette has lost favor with the group and is soon to be booted, most likely because he is too deep and has too much of a soul, and thus does not fit in. He "burbles" his speech in a "delightful" way, which is the opposite of the pianist's aunt (the "concierge") who slurs her speech to hide the fact that she knows nothing.

Mme. Verdurin seems to feel more loyalty to (from?) the gifts in her home that came from the "faithful" members of her group. I can only assume that she has some gifts that are from "faithfuls" she has dropped or been dropped by. She even seems to have some sort of a love affair with the fruit carved on one of the chairs. The language is so sensual at that moment that there may be something I'm missing, or we may just be seeing a character trait of Mme. Verdurin. She can have more control over inanimate objects and without risking rejection?

Then Swann and the Sonata in F. Swann has become lazy in life: he refrains from forming opinions or taking part in society and has ceased to have any goal. On p.298 he is described as "morally barren", and he is not even working anymore, as he long ago gave up writing his paper on Vermeer. Now the Sonata in F has given him back some life, "indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation" (p.296), somewhat like the effect that viewing the three steeples has on young M and his struggle with writer's block.

The Sonata also serves well as an analogy for life and involuntary memory: difficult to assess the first time through, the impressions come on faster than they can be discovered, it leaves the listener the "architecture" by which it can be assessed on a second listen. Much like a second look at life through our memories, and Swann's immediate recollection of the strains in the Sonata bring to mind M's sudden flush of memory upon tasting the Madeleine cake.

"But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the succeeding or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us."
•••
"And so scarcely had the exquisite sensation which Swann had experienced died away, beofre his memory had furnished him with an immediate transcript, sketchy, it is true, and provisional, which he had been able to glance at while the piece continued, so that, when teh same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer impossible to grasp." (p.295)

But while the "little clan" can tell him the name of the work and the composer, they are unable to discuss it beyond that. In reality the composer and piece are fictional, but there has been some discussion about their models.

Swann seems to have passed the test and been accepted into the little clan, although the Verdurins completely miss his character, believing him to be lacking depth. Mme. Verdurin does tell Odette that she may bring friends like that any time she wishes, though, implying a lack of respect for fidelity, an odd trait for a woman who demands complete loyalty from her "subjects" as she does now from Swann ("provided he doesn't fail us at the last moment." p.304), but this is not the first time we've seen her as the hypocrite.

Satire of the salon. Proust is poking fun at the Salon lifestyle in which he actually took part himself. The the members of the little clan can barely talk to each other, what with the aunt and Saniette mumbling, Mme Verdurin using one figure of speech after another while Cottard does not understand them in the least and misuses them on his own, and Odette sprinkling her speech with English. They neither understand nor care to understand art and music, even if they have their own artist and pianist among them. Since Salons were gatherings intended to inspire artistic endeavors and the exchange of knowledge, the Verdurins make a great satire.

Cool stuff:

Sarah Bernhardt was a French actress from the 19th century on into the 20th.

Swann in Love, pp.265-282: Swann, Odette, and the Verdurins

2011-08-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

Beginning with the first sentence of Part Two, Swann in Love

I want to love everything about this work, but with this section I am at a loss. Since all the rest of the work so far feels justified, based on the truth of memories and the seeking of them, the transition to this section, which is the retelling of a story once told to our narrator, feels rather awkward to me. The story within a story has never been one of my favorite literary styles or tools, and I can only hope that the remainder of the work does not feel this clumsy.

The Verdurins and their friends are described a little later as being "among the riff-raff of Bohemia" (p.281), which is fitting with their patronage of the artist and pianist, with their acceptance of the "demi-monde" and the supposed "concierge", and with their disdain for the more conservative lifestyle of the upper class. Proust describes them as "the 'little nucleus' or 'little group' or 'little clan'," and they do make up their own society, with their own set of rules and hierarchy, and it's a group that would not be allowed to join the larger salons of higher French society. Disdain=jealousy?

Pages 265-269 are a richly comedic and ironic introduction to the "little set" of the Verdurins. Mme Verdurin declares that all other houses (salons) are boring, but at her own she keeps a tight reign over even what music can be played, evening dress is not allowed, and there "was never any programme for the evening's entertainment" (p.266). But for claiming so blasé an attitude, really Mme Verdurin is afraid of losing her "faithfuls" and this drives her to extremes. If I knew more about French society I might say that the Verdurin set was a caricature of the larger salons.

In a bit of foreshadowing, we are told that outsiders were allowed in only after being given a sort of test, and that "if he failed to pass, the faithful one who had introduced him would be taken on one side, and would be tactfully assisted to break with the friend or lover or mistress" (p.268)

We learn a lot more of Swann's character, mainly that he frequents, or at least is welcome in, the high society of the Faubourge Saint-Germain to which none of the Verdurin clan would be admitted, and that he is attracted to lower class women. Swann himself seems to be a dichotomy of good manners and vulgarity, since he is loved by so many and has been adopted by the nobility, yet is drawn to the lower classes, has no respect for class divisions, and has no scruples about asking for indecent favors from decent people.

Swann's taste in women appears to be exactly opposite his taste in art, "for the physical qualities which he instinctively sought were the direct opposite of those he admired in the women painted or sculpted by his favourite masters" (p.271). Again with the time, memory, art, and perception; a real person brings with them additional assaults on the senses and will alter perception even of physical beauty ("even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone" [p.23], see notes p.35-58), something which is illustrated well with Odette.

Odette, as we've already heard, is one step away from being a demi-monde. She is well dressed and lives life as she wishes, she is a faithful in the bohemian circle of the Verdurins. According to the notes in my book her speech in the original is peppered with phrases written in English, such as "fishing for compliments" on p.269, and when she refers to Swann as "smart" and mentions his "home" on p.276. In my printing these phrases are in italics.

When Swann meets Odette he does not immediately find her attractive, so for someone who picks his mistresses based entirely on their looks she is an odd choice. This brings to mind the discussion of reading versus living, and the stages of removal from the senses in order to achieve ideal perception versus perception of the truth (pp.110-121). Something is always in the way of our knowing the truth about anything—ourselves.

M blames Swann's odd choice on his stage of life at the moment of meeting Odette, a "time of life, tinged already with disenchantment" (p.277), because at this stage, in looking for love, "we come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest." (p.277). He is creating his own reality, and that give credence to Proust's search for lost time, because if we are different at different stages, then looking back at any moment in life our memories will be tainted by our current person and the effects that person has on our perceptions of those moments from our past. To really remember them we must go back and recapture them as they were.

Quotes
"If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends—usually the painter who was in favour there that year—would 'spin,' as M. Verdurin put it, ' a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter,' and especially Mme Verdurin, who had such an inveterate habit of taking literally the figurative descriptions of her emotions that Dr. Cottard (then a promising young practitioner) had once had to reset her jaw, which she has dislocated from laughing too much." (pp.266-267) Bring on the hilarity.

Cool stuff:
Vermeer of Delft, or Joannes Vermeer, was a 17th century Dutch painter who focused on domestic scenes from the middle class. No wonder, then, that he was a focus of Swann the art critic.

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.251-265

2011-08-18T18:59:00.000-07:00

Beginning with "how often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the Guermantes Way"

These are the final pages in part I, Combray and they bring us almost full circle to the narrator's thoughts at the beginning of the work, as though backing out from the more focused view to the more general one at the beginning.

After seeing Mme Guermantes in the church M returns to lamenting his impotence as a writer. He is afraid that he has no talent for his chosen profession and can find nothing to write about. It isn't until a return trip from a walk along the Guermantes Way that his writers block is broken and he writes a snippet on steeples in his view (the steeples of which he writes, not of Combray, are a trio—originally just two, and then a third attempts joins them—bringing to my mind the social triangle). He is relieved to be able to write again. It is a writer's epiphany.

He finishes the description of the Guermantes Way by linking it to feelings of "melancholy" because on nights they take that route, being late after such a long walk his mother is not free to come put him to bed. This is a break in the night-time routine upon which his happiness is dependent. The Guremantes Way embodies the dichotomy between utter happiness and desperate melancholy.

Some meandering thoughts...
I see another difference between the walks now, too, the first (Méséglise or Swann's Way) being connected more with sensuality, the second (Guermantes) with his intellectual (and social?) pursuit, or at least that's how they were depicted in his descriptions. Méséglise is sensual, lower class, country, French, stormy. Guermantes is intellectual, upper class or nobility. So while the Méséglise Way is a confirmation of all that is French and home, the Guremantes Way is what separates him from home and mother and comfort.

And then we're out in his more vague memories and ideas again, with a reminder of the madeleine cake and tea, and a preface to the upcoming memory, "a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born" (p.262).

And finally we leave his sleep walking mind through the same door by which we had entered it, only instead of his confusion over which room he is half asleep in, now the room's true features are coming into focus with day. He is awake and memory is dawning?

Review: His Dark Materials triology, by Philip Pullman (a review of sorts)

2011-08-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

Setting all issues and agendas aside, this is a beautifully written young adult sci-fi story. I found myself falling in love with Lyra and her friends right from the beginning of this tale. Like many series I enjoyed the first book the most, but unlike others my interest had not seriously waned by the very last sentence, and now that I've finished I'm even looking into reading Pullman's additional works with these characters. They seemed so authentic, so believable, even in a universe acceptable only via suspension of disbelief, that I just fell in love with them each immediately.

The scenes, the suspense, the characters—all were rich and imagination grabbing throughout. The series is a calling together of many a myth and many a mystical culture, all given a physical meaning and existence. It is the story of an orphan who finds she has a purpose, and family, as she travels through an earth that is mostly foreign to us. Her journey is full of honor, magic, and love, and as she progresses we see her beginning to grow up. There is witchcraft, quantum mechanics, religion, death, sensuality. There is war, Armageddon style. There is love, there is a coming of age, but what could have become sappy or uncomfortable was written with sensitivity and authenticity so that it never crossed that line. The story is woven tightly and well, and it never let me drift away.

It has been said that Pullman's story is just shy of propaganda—the atheist's C. S. Lewis I think I've read—and with each successive book a message does become more obvious. It is with sharp literary skill that he doles out revelations of the symbolism and understory in carefully measured amounts. The final book is the most clear in terms of agenda, and not everyone will be comfortable with it, and The Golden Compass could conceivably be read as a stand alone, albeit with a rather plot hanging ending.

Books 28, 29, and 30 on my way to 52 in 2011

The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells (a review of sorts)

2011-08-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

I am not a big reader of science fiction, and haven't had much of an introduction to nineteenth century science fiction. I picked up this book because I've always been curious about Wells, and after reading The Map of Time I thought now was as good a time as any to discover him. At just over a hundred small pages, it's a quick read, but there's a lot packed in, namely imagery and symbolism revealing the social stresses of a time when industrial advances were forcing the issue between socialism and capitalism. Though written in symbolism the social commentary is so obvious as to be almost distracting, and the hero makes so many leaps in his mental discovery that the story is increasingly discredited. But Wells is offering a good, light story, too, quick to read and enjoyable as just that—a brief story. In addition, reading it now felt almost like a sci-fi rite of iconic passage, and I'm glad I did it.

Book 27 on my way to 52

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.233-251: Guermantes Way,

2011-08-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

(pp.233-234) M compares his remembering the town in its historic setting to art as a means of preservation. pp.54-56 of Proust in Venice, by Peter Collier is a great commentary on Proust's themes of art and memory. It brings us back to the grandmother's desire to buy art in a state as removed from the original as possible. I connected this to needing to be removed from reality in order for the senses not to get in the way (mentioned by M earlier when reading in the garden at Combray), but Collier treats it as a symbol for the preservation of memory—the original crumbles but is preserved in engravings (like those from the grandmother of The Last Supper) or paintings (St. Marks in Bellini's Procession In St. Mark's Square):

"The vertiginous spiral of Proust's metaphor presents the very substance of the Combray memory (the grandmother's artistic prejudice) as the spiral mental structure ensuring its own perpetuation, through transformation into a more lasting aesthetic form" (p.56, Proust in Venice)

Compare to the moment a little later on (p.236) when he is called by the ruins of old battlements to imagine Combray as "an historic city vastly different, gripping my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups", most specifically remote, half-concealed images. These ruins have not been preserved and he can only imagine them as they were, or take them now as they are, overrun by nature.

We are now traveling with M along the Guermantes way. It is strikingly different from the Méséglise way almost immediately: descriptions of the Méséglise way include peasant girls and general, wild landscapes, while the Guermantes way brings to M's mind "the rumble of the coaches of the Duchesses ode Montpensier, de Guermantes and de Montmorency" (p.234) and also the various counts and lords and abbots of long ago (p.236). And where the Méséglise way seems practically pornographic, or at least bawdy, by comparison the Guermantes way seems clean and refreshing with its views of THE steeple and the Vivonne (Loire).

Neurasthenia (p.238) is an archaic psychiatric diagnosis of nervous exhaustion. It was often associated with the upper classes, and was possibly psychosomatic. On p.238 M mentions it with reference to Léonie, but Proust is said to have had neurasthenia (see The Diseases of Marcel Proust in Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, Part 2, by Bogousslavsky and Hennerici) and I'm starting to see a parallel drawn between them. When he mentions the illness it is with a desire to shake it, a feeling of helplessness, and later he says, of the Vivonne, "how often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose" (p.240) giving a picture of a man who felt trapped in a sick body (which could be the asthma and neurasthenia, or could be the homosexuality, as viewed during that time).

M has two goals he wishes to reach along this walk: the source of the Vivonne, and Guermantes, itself, for a view of the noble family. The ancestry of the Guermantes family, is equally as impossible to find, but M attributes it to the legendary Geneviéve de Brabant (of the magic Lantern) and Gilbert the Bad, who, being legends, are timeless. He sees them in the tapestry and windows at the church of Combray, and it is at the church where he finally gets his first glimpse of the real Mme de Guermantes. He is disappointed, of course. She is too like a normal woman. But he reminds himself of her legendary heritage and looks for signs of her nobility and perfection, which of course he finds, and he "fell in love with her" and plants in his mind a connection between them, believing that she saw him and will think on him later.

Passages of note:
"satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water's edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway-station, yet keeping none the less like some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East." (p.237) he's talking about buttercups in the field, but I can't help noticing the railway-station reference, which I feel has some sort of significance in the work. Or maybe it doesn't.

Cool stuff:
Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc was the French architectural antithesis of John Ruskin. While Ruskin advocated restoration of buildings to their original states, Viollet-le-Duc restored buildings to a finished state, not caring whether they still resembled themselves at that point or not. Proust was a fan of Ruskin.

Gentile Bellini's Procession in St. Mark's Square

And of course DaVinci's The Last Supper

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.211-233:Méséglise: sensuality, sadism, and guilt

2011-08-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

Begining with "Since the Méséglise way was the shorter of the two that we used to take on our walks round Combray..."

Several pages here are a description of Méséglise and reference to Roussainville. Méséglise is the walk that corresponds more to regular French life (as opposed to high society the Guermantes way). Proust gives us deep descriptions of the nature and architecture of the walk (of the church of Saint-André-des-Champs he says "how French that church was!" [p.212]) He describes for us the carvings of the church, relating them to the people of Françoise and Théodore (both of the lower French classes), and also to the "country-women of those parts" (p.213). The people, the countryside, the architecture are all immeasurably French.

Years have passed. Léonie has died and M is allowed to walk by himself while his parents handle her estate. If he was innocent or naive when he met Gilberte in the pink Hawthorns, he is now "in touch with" his sensuality ("my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire no longer had any bounds" [p.220]), and he seeks its fulfillment on this walk, looking for girls to hold behind every tree and ruin, but mostly in Roiussainville "into which I had long desired to penetrate," (p.220).

He begs Roussainville to send him a girl (from what I imagine to be a phallic "castle-keep" rising from the landscape) while he masturbates (for the first time) in his room at Combray.

"I could see nothing but its tower framed in the half-opened window as, with the heroic misgivings of a traveller setting out on a voyage of exploration or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which for all I knew was deadly—until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail smeared the leaves of hte flowering currant that drooped around me." (pp.222-223)

It's even better in the purely Moncreif translation:

"...an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my body." (p.217 volume I, Chatto & Windus uniform edition)

But before these particular descriptions (of sensuality and masturbation) we are told that our narrator is now of age, but not yet disillusioned (pp.221-222), which is an intermediate step between the innocence of the earlier encounter with Gilberte in the hawthorns and the even that follows at Montjouvain.

Coming upon Montjouvain, the house of M. Venteuil, on one of these solo walks M witnesses a scene between Venteuil's newly bereaved daughter and her lesbian lover. He refers to this as the incident that formed his impression of sadism. Though he's talked about homosexuality before (in reference to the same girl), this would be his first witnessing of it, and here again a picture is drawn of homosexuality being a divide between the daughter and her father; she brings shame to his house and his memory, her willingness to take part in the affair is like spitting on his image.

But M is still certain that her father would have continued to love her, would have continued to see the good in her, and I can't help but hear a parallel between this and relationship Proust believed he had with his own family. At the same time he is certain that she wishes she could be different, or at least escape her connection to the good of her father, but she is too like him, and I wonder if here he (Proust) talks about himself, or if it is a reference to M's guilt over the masturbation, or both. Mlle Venteuil's, or M's, or Proust's, the guilt is there.

"It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. And as, each time she indulged in it, it was accompanied by evil thoughts such as ordinarily had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify with Evil." (p.232)

Cool stuff:

An article about the different translations

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.204-211: M. Vinteuil and homosexuality

2011-08-02T19:08:00.000-07:00

Beginning with: "Once in the fields, we never left them again during the rest of our Méséglise walk."

M. Vinteuil, whose daughter is a lesbian, has a house along the Méséglise Way. Proust himself was a closeted homosexual, but he has written his narrator as heterosexual, an arrangement that will allow Proust to explore the place of homosexuality in a wider social context.

Here the reference to homosexuality is with regards to parental shame, ruin, and death. But while society blamed the daughter for her father's death (due, they said, to a broken heart), they also admitted that M. Venteuil continued to love his daughter very much, even allowing her supposed lover to live in their home. This would seem to make society, and its harsh judgement, actually to blame for Venteuil's demise.

"And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less." (pp.208-209)

"But when M. Vinteuil thought of his daughter and himself from the point of view of society, fromt he point of view of their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, when he was bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely the same terms as the most hostile inhabitant of Combary; he saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he now looked up" (p.209)

There may also be a comparison drawn here between the fall of M. Vinteuil, due to his daughter being a lesbian, and the fall of Swann, due to his chosen wife being of dubious morals. Both have been cast out by a judgmental society.

Notable passages:
"On my right I could see across the cornfields the two chiselled rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, chequered, honeycombed, yellowing and friable as two ears of wheat." (p.205) This makes me think of Proust's love for Ruskin, and Ruskin's fourth tenet, the one regarding beauty which says that architecture should draw from or reflect nature (post).

Cool stuff:
Xavier Boniface Saintine (p.206) was an 19th century French writer.

Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre (p.206) was a Swiss artist who spent much of his life in France. The piece to which M refers is probably Lost Illusions, with the moon "silhouetted against the sky in the form of a silver sickle."

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.192-204: Gilberte and sensuality

2011-07-31T21:20:00.000-07:00

Gilberte is the daughter of Swann's his unsatisfactory marriage to Odette, and by all accounts she seems to be taking after her mother (but I didn't think about that that until my second read, actually).

M meets her by accident when his family is walking along "Swann's Way" by her house, but it begins with him practically conjuring her:

"I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a miracle, Mlle Swann appear with her father, so close to us that we should not have time to avoid her, and should therefore be obliged to make her acquaintance" (p.192)

because she was said to be out of town, so this almost makes her like a ghost, or a spirit, or a figment of his imagination.

The meeting of Gilberte is one of my favorite parts of this volume (Swann's Way). It is full of imagery, and a dichotomy of language that is stunning. M's description of the white hawthorns (p.194) draws a comparison with the church of Combray, which I believe we will find is a main point of comparison throughout the work. The terms are architectural, and religious, but become increasingly sensual, a "hedge that resembled a series of chapels," "flowers heaped upon altars," light passing "as through a stained glass window," melds with other references like "the Lady-altar," "glittering stamens," "delicate radiating veins," "fleshy whiteness."

M lingers near the hawthorns, "breathing in their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in [his] mind (which did not know what to do with it)." He is virginal, or at the very least naive. And the flowers are white and pure, teasing him almost, "offering [him] the same charm in inexhaustible profusion, but without letting [him] delve any more deeply".

But for sensuality that's nothing compared the pink hawthorns he finds, or the reference to pink sugar, or pink cream cheese. If white is the color of purity, and red of passion, then pink is the color of budding sexuality, of pubescence. It hints at the freshness of youth and virility found in rosy cheeks and good health, but also at the beginning of menstruation, or the loss of virginity. Keeping that in mind these pages read almost like a dirty joke.

"the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. For my own part, I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries." (p.196)

And my favorite, about the pink hawthorns:

"High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender shafts rose in a forest from the altar on major feast-days, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a bowl of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the thorn-brush which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could do so in pink alone. Embedded in the hedge, but as different from it as a young girl in festal attire among a crowd of dowdy women..." (p.197)

And the question comes to mind, is this as sensual as it is, the nature as laced with sex as it is, because these are memories, and M has already shown us that no memory is without our own imprint of emotion upon it, and M was, at this time, pubescent himself, his memories from the time all tainted by the first flush of his own sexual awakening?

After standing a while in these sensually pink flowers, he meets, or rather stumbles upon, Gilberte. His memory of her, too, is tainted by his thoughts at the time. She is pink—her hair is pink, her freckles are pink, and he admits he always remembered her blackeyes as bluer because he could not "reduce a strong impression to its objective elements" (p.198).

M is already impressed by Gilberte, and by her mother. He does not understand the social mores that make his family snub her, and he is in love with the idea that Gilberte shares dinner with is favorite author, Bergotte. Seeing her now he takes every movement of hers to be contempt for him and for his family. But Gilberte, by association with the pink Hawthorns, has been drawn as at least subtly sexual, and the "half-hidden smile" she gives him while trying to avoid notice by the adults, and the "indelicate gesture" she sends him may be less contempt, more flirtatious? Gilberte's mother, after all, is behind her on the lawn with her lover, while Swann is away in Paris.

M comes to feel an obsessive reverence for Swann and for Gilberte as for the Hawthorns, an attention that may mimic the obsession Swann feels for Odette (which we learn about later in the volume, but which obviously happened before the birth of either child).

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.186-195: The two ways

2011-07-29T19:12:00.000-07:00

Beginning with "We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie a visit before dinner" (after a break in the text).

Proust's descriptive language, drawing the picture of the setting sun, is remarkable.

The two ways to walk, the Guermantes Way and the Méséglise Way (Swann's Way), M says are "diametrically opposed" and are irreconcilable.

"But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind which not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes." (p.189)

M sees them as ideals of their types (Méséglise as a plain view, Guermantes as river), and refers to them as sacred soil. They are also the namesakes of two volumes of the work, so I am looking to them as major symbols.

Guermantes way is the longer of the two walks, and Guermantes is also the old noble of the area. It is the walk they took the least. To M Guermantes "meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator or the Orient." And if the Guermantes way is intended as an ideal, perhaps a class ideal, then we get a bit of foreshadowing when M tells us "I was to know it well enough one day, but that day was still to come" (p.188)

Méséglise way, or "Swann's way," is a shorter walk that goes in the direction of Méséglise-la-Vineuse, and along which they pass by Swann's estate. It may be a commonly traveled road because M mentions seeing people in Combray whom they assume have come from Méséglise-la-Vineuse. Taking the Méséglise way is a relaxed walk, and they talk to people and tradesmen along the way.

With regards to Swann's estate: "My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects the appearance of the place was still the same,, an dhow far it had altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann on the day of his wife's death" (p.191)
On their first walk by the land in some time because they refuse to go near it when the young Swann's wife might be present (because of the bad marriage) M might mean a comparison here between the old regime, when the decidedly middle class elder Swann was respected and devoted to his wife, and the new regime, when the younger Swann has risen in status, but has married beneath him, making both a socially bad and an unhappy match. Each generation sees a dying off of their parents' morals, and this was a time of class mobility for the French.

Notable passages:

"Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann's parents; but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work; certain places persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own special sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference," (pp.191-192)
Man vs. nature?

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.165-186: Another Françoise, and M. Legrandin

2011-07-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

Beginning with "One Sunday, when my aunt had received simultaneous visits from the Curé and Eulalie..." (bottom, p.165)

M. Legrandin. We met him back on pp.91-92, as the launcher of "furious tirades" "at the aristrocracy, at fashionable life, at snobbishness." Now we see "a Legrandin altogether different" (p.175), actually a social climber, it would seem. He snubs the family on a number of occasions. M dines with him alone and he claims to be a Jacobin, but M senses duplicity in him.

"But what I did understand was that Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said tha the cared only for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and in their presence was so overcome by fear of incurring their displeasure that he dared not let them see that he numbered among his friends middle-class people, the sons of solicitors and stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must come to light, that it should do so in his absence, a long way away, and 'by default.' In a word, he was a snob." (p.180)

Legrandin is really playing two people, one for the middle class and one for the upper, landed, or noble class, and for each he pretends to hate the other. There is implication of social mobility here, a characteristic of these years in the third republic. This also harks back to M's earlier reflection: "even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people." (p.23).

Legrandin is also another example of the social triangle, this time a man caught between two classes of people, trying to maintain relationships with both while keeping the other unawares.

Françoise the cruel (p.170) Another view of Françoise, as the chicken brutalizer and insensitive head maid, except that she would apparently lay down her life for her own family, and really goes to great lengths for Léonie as well (although that could be said to be for her own family in the end).

And M brings things around so neatly, that the scads of asparagus mentioned earlier (several times, but most notably in an exchange with Léonie on p.79 "What, Françoise, more asparagus! It's a regular mania for asparagus you've got this year."), seemingly in passing, comes back on p.173 as a cunning plan of Françoise's to be rid of one of the kitchenmaids, who is allergic to it.

Cool stuff
Paul Desjardins (quoted by Legrandin on p.167) was a French philosopher who knew Proust and his family intimately.

Balbec is modeled off the real world Cabourg.

Notable (?) passages

"But what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet—still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed—with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like on of Shakespeare's fairies) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume." (pp.168-169)

There is no ode to asparagus like this one, and perhaps Proust can be quite the humorist

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.151-165: habit, hawthorns, M. Venteuil

2011-07-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

Habits/routines. The household at Combray lives by strict routine, the breaking of which leads Léonie to become very upset. In the situation of the kitchen maid's confinement, her crying out during the night disrupted Léonie's rest and led to nightmares that terrified her. The household is so dependent on routine that neighbors ask before they do things that will break in on it.

The Combray routines are so intricate as to have regular variations that become part of a "uniform pattern upon the great uniformity of [Léonie's] life." (p.153). Saturdays are an example of this because, being a market day, lunch is served an hour earlier. The family is dependent upon the routine which is not just lived, but greeted and discussed like an active presence in their lives, and even has the ability to seemingly alter time:

"The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After lunch the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when someone, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, 'What, only two o'clock!' on registering the passage of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire...the whole family would respond in chorus: 'Why, you're forgetting we had lunch an hour earlier; you know very well it's Saturday.'" (p.154)

The Saturday change in routine has the effect of uniting the family against outsiders who know nothing of it. They refer to outsiders as "barbarians," speak to them with ridicule, make fun of them between themselves. This gives the characteristics of a group mentality, like a clique.

But there's a softer side of habit that makes it attractive. M defines this for us, humanizing it further, upon returning home from a long walk with his family:

"And from that instant I did not have to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where for so long my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Habit had come to take me in her arms and carry me all the way up to my bed like a little child." (p.160)

And still it is as though Léonie wishes to be rid of her need for habit. Every week she longs for the variety that Saturday brings, and even more than that M implies that she has "exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is" (p.161) even though she does not have the energy to bring it about. She is a slave to her habits. In fact, it is her habit of illness that is weakening her:

"And I have no doubt that then...she would extract from the accumulation of these monotonous days which she treasured so much a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, momentary in its duration but violent enough to compel her to put into effect, once for all, one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial to her health but to which she could never make up her mind without some such stimulus." (p.161)

Hawthorns. MP falls in love with them at the Month of Mary (May) devotions, when they are used to decorate the church. This, and their white color, gives them almost a holy meaning, but MP also recognizes their origin in nature:

"I could sense that this formal scheme was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery." (p.156)

And also sees in them "a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant and vivacious."
(p.156) a vision that, having read the volume once, I can say is foreshadowing of another young girl amongst the hawthorns.

M. Venteuil and daughter at church. M. Vinteuil is a piano teacher whose wife is now dead. He will not socialize with Swann because of Swann's "most unsuitable marriage" (p.156). His daughter is described as "boyish" and "robust" with a "mannish face" (p.156-157)

On their way home MP's father takes them on a detour. MP's mother has no sense of direction and relies entirely on his father to get them home. We have seen this before, her deference to his "superior mind" (on p.12).

On their walk M compares the gardens to the art of Hubert Robert (p.159). Perhaps I should have labeled this art and nature, but I'll file it under art in life.

And I see that Léonie is fueling the fire between Françoise and Eulalie by feeding each of them false fears about the other, which in turn goes to convince even her of Françoise's unfaithfulness. Although it would seem that it is all untrue, and that Léonie as a character is just full of a morbid quality that makes her imagine the death of her family so that she can morn them, and makes her imagine infidelity in her servants so that she can be cruel to them.

Cool stuff:
Hawthorn in flower (photo by David Hawgood on Geograph)

Hubert Robert (p.159) was an 18th century French artist. He painted "fashionably dilapidated gardens" for clients.

Proust and the paradox?

2011-07-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

Stumbled on this NPR article—Where is Now? The Paradox of the Present, by Adam Frank —thanks to facebook today and thought it was particularly worth sharing. Harks back to these pages/this post from a few days ago.

An excerpt:

"Signal travel time constitutes a delay and all those overlapping delays constitute an essential separation. The inner world of your experience is, in a temporal sense, cut off from the outer world you inhabit.
Let's take a few examples. Light travels faster than any other entity in the physical universe, propagating with the tremendous velocity of c = 300,000,000 m/s. From high school physics you know that the time it takes a light signal moving at c to cross some distance D is simply t = D/c.

When you look at the mountain peak 30 kilometers away you see it not as it exists now but as it existed a 1/10,000 of a second ago. The light fixture three meters above your head is seen not as it exists now but as it was a hundred millionth of a second ago. Gazing into your partner's eyes, you see her (or him) not for who they are but for who they were 10^-10 of a second in the past. Yes, these numbers are small. Their implication, however, is vast.
We live trapped in our own now."

From Where is Now? The Paradox of the Present, article by Adam Frank at NPR

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp. 139-151, The Curé, and Joas and Athalia

2011-07-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

There is a break in the writing and we return to a description of Sundays in Combray.

Léonie's Sunday is defined by church times and times for medication (and the two are inseparable). Habits that cannot be broken or she is unsettled.

The Curé visits at the same time as Eulalie. MP says of him: "an excellent man, with whom I now regret not having conversed more often, for, even if he cared nothing for the arts, he knew a great many etymologies" (p.142). In fact, the Curé seems to abhor all the things about the Combray church which MP holds sacred, such as the windows and the tombstones of the abbots. But then, like MP, he does seem most interested in their genealogies, and their etymology. He goes on about them comically and without breath for five pages until he "had so exahausted [Léonie] that she was obliged to send Eulalie away as well" (p.147).

Before Eulalie leaves, Léonie gives her some money. This is part of their Sunday routine, their habit, and Françoise does not approve. Though it is suggested she wouldn't begrudge money given to wealthy friends, Françoise sees Eulalie as "no better than" herself. The situation seems a comical one, with both Françoise and Eulalie believing the other to be receiving more than herself. MP implies that Françoise sees Eulalie as a usurper (Joas seeing Athalia).

Cool Stuff:
A Random Walk—Illiers-Combray

Vocabulary:
Rogation days (p.141) are religious designations.

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.121-139, Bergotte, and Swann and his daughter

2011-07-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

This is basically an auto-biography, and because I am tired of writing "our hero" or "our narrator" I am going to refer to the teller of the tale as MP from now.

(p.121) Apparently the arrival of French soldiers marching through on a training exercise can throw the household, or at least the household's servants, into a tizzy. I find it interesting that their movement through the streets is compared to that of a swollen river, as though there is no stopping them, no slowing them, and as though there is no thought, no planning, in their movement.

Bloch is the friend who introduces MP to the (fictional) author Bergotte. He is a bit of a nihilist, having no interest in the quantifiable world and insisting that poetic lines would be "finer if they meant absolutely nothing". He is Jewish, like Swann (and Ephrussi), something of political note in that day thanks to the Dreyfus affair. Bloch is banned from the family home for telling MP that his great-aunt was a kept woman, but not before tells him "(a piece of news which had a great influence on [his] later life, making it happier at one time and then more unhappy) that no woman ever thought of anything but love, and that there was not one of them whose resistance could not be overcome." (p.129) Foreshadow much? Also notable, the "kept" great-aunt was previously mentioned as being bound to duty and convention, and MP insinuates later that Bloch's impression of her was incorrect ("but in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly" implying previous falsehood [p,129])

Bergotte is a fictional character, an author. Since names of several real writers are also used I can only imagine that this creation will have some meaning throughout our tale (and perhaps the same goes with the earlier relation of actors). MP is obsessed with Bergotte. He mentions Bergotte's writing about nature, architecture (cathedrals), and literature, holds his opinions as godly, and refers to his writings as "mirrors of truth" (p.133).

"I had no doubt that [his opinion] would differ entirely from my own, since his came down from an unknown sphere toward which I was striving to raise myself [and] if I happened to find in one of his books something which had already occurred to my own mind, my heart would swell as though some deity had, in his infinite bounty, restored it to me, had pronounced it to be beautiful and right." (p.132)

Swann compares Bloch to a "Bellini portrait of Mahomet II" (p.134) (because Swann compares life to art a lot) and tells MP that he knows Bergotte well, that Bergotte's favorite actress is Berma (the one fictional writer loves the one fictional actor mentioned in the book).

More on Swann. He also likes Berma, and Bergotte. MP refers again to Swann's reluctance to express an opinion. I'm seeing this as a major character trait. He qualifies things only through their relation to art pieces. Does this remove him from feeling them? Is it similar to the grandmother's desire to have many layers of art between herself and a physical thing? MP does also imply that his mother and grandmother commit the same error.
Swann's wife is said by some to be having an affair with M. de Charlus. The daughter becomes an object of adoration for MP because she is friendly with Bergotte. Because of this, Swann's daughter becomes the woman in MP's dreams, standing on Cathedral steps, sharing with him his love for architecture and Bergotte.

Passages to remember:

"'Are there any books in which Bergotte has written about Berma?' I asked M. Swann.
'I think he has, in that little essay on Racine, but it must be out of print. Still, perhaps there has been a second impression. I'll find out. In fact I can ask Bergotte himself all you want to know next time he comes to dine with us. He never misses a week, from one year's end to another. He's my daughter's greatest friend. They go and look at old towns and cathedrals and castles together.'" (p.137)

Cool stuff:
(p.122) 1870 was the Franco-Prussian War which ended the second empire and led to the third republic.

(p.124) Bergotte is a fictional author, while Alfred de Musset was a real 19th century French author, and Jean Racine was a French playwright from the 17th century. Racine wrote both Athalie and Phédre (p.131)

(p.125) "cher maître" means "dear master".

(p.134) Bellini's portrait of Mahomet II:

Review: The Map of Time, by Félix Palma

2011-07-23T21:47:00.000-07:00

I have to start by admitting that this book was a big disappointment to me. The cover, the synopses, the reviews all had me ready to read a book about the mysteries of time travel. Instead, set in late Victorian era London "The Map of Time" gives readers a bit of a love story, a bit of mystery, a bit of science fiction, even a bit of biography, but it fails to fully develop any of these aspects and left me feeling cheated on all fronts.

Palma does a fine job of setting the Victorian stage. Historical fiction lovers will gobble up references to locations, people, and current events that almost disrupt the flow of the story by being too frequent and without impetus. The writing itself is Victorian in flavor with a flowery prose and the faux pas of author intrusion, which I found distracting. Other than that I find the book difficult to sum up or review because it's just not cohesive. Divided into three stories it relies on common characters, mainly the character of H. G. Wells, and the concept of time travel, to make it into one, but it just feels like the author is attempting too many things. The several pages devoted to Joseph Merrick, for instance, have no importance other than planting the scene firmly in the late 19th century and setting up a brief red herring in the form of a magic basket that isn't magic.

There are hints throughout the book of a greater discussion—a deeper meaning—but the allegory is left incomplete. References to class discrepancy, gender issues, and colonialism are present but never expounded on and leave the reader hanging. And if I started enjoying the book in the last 50 pages I can only say that I wish the first 500 had been so engaging. Some people will really like this book, and for a light read it isn't bad, I just can't give it a rave review.

Book 26 on my way to 52 in 2011

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.110-121

2011-07-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

Proust (or our narrator) meditates here on symbolism and allegory in the Seven Vices of Giotto de Bondone with reference to the pregnant kitchen maid, who Swann compares to Giotto's Charity. This is another example of art in life (a comparison drawn by Swann). She may also be a symbol in the discussion of class, but Proust is writing out the allegory for us here. The images painted by Giotto to display the seven vices are entirely ignorant of what they symbolize, making them pure in the task. The kitchen maid is likewise unaware of being a symbol of charity, or of the lower classes. And much, much more.

On reading, also a form of art in life. Proust tells us a book can be internalized, while the physical world can only be sensed: "When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it..." (p.115), and with regard to people "A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift." (p.117). And yet he seeks the truth as imposed by the real world, only to be disillusioned (p.119).
This sends me back to the description of the grandmother's assignment of value to art. The more removed from the original, the greater value she gave it. In giving the narrator pictures of famous architecture she sought to "introduce, as it were, several 'thicknesses' of art: instead of photographs...she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not depicted them" and sought photos of the art depicting the actual architecture. (pp.53-54)

Reference is made to "the dream of a woman who would enrich me with her love" (p.118) which makes me think of the woman invading his dreams in the very beginning ("Sometimes, too, as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, a woman would be born during my sleep from some misplacing of my thigh." [p.3]), but might actually reference his mother, since we know Proust believed his mother and grandmother to have been great source of support and enrichment in his life.

An ode to Sunday afternoons at Combray.

Cool stuff:

(p.110) Giotto's Charity, by Giotto de Bondone, part of the Seven Vices

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.91-110

2011-07-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

We meet M. Legrandin. He is an engineer by trade, and a writer in his spare time. His job makes him more middle class, as opposed to Swann who is able to sometimes work on writing, sometimes do nothing, but the narrator's family considers him a gentleman of the "noblest and most delicate manner." All excepting the grandmother, that is, who thinks him unnatural, and we already know her affinity for the natural. Legrandin thinks highly of our hero's intellectual abilities, saying to him "You have a soul in you of rare quality, and artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs." (p.93)

Théodore is a wealth of information, being in regular contact with everyone in town because he is cantor and grocer's assistant, and what does everyone need? Food for the spirit and food for the physical body.

Eulalie is a retired maid or lady's companion and is now a regular visitor of Léonie. Eulalie's visits to Léonie are another example of habit, and of the discomfort of broken habits, since Léonie suffers greatly when she doesn't come or when she comes later than usual.

Uncle Adolphe, our hero's grandfather's brother, seems to have a love for theater, or at least for its women, and for "ladies of another class," as well. Our narrator's family will not associate with these women, but he sneaks an opportunity to do so and is disappointed to find that the actress (?) is not unlike other women. He is bothered by the fact that an immoral person could be so disguised as normal. Our narrator seems drawn to what is considered immoral, and yet repulsed by it.

The narrator's adoration of actors, even though he has yet to see a performance, is an example of obsession. It also fits into his tendency to compare life to art.

Social Triangles
Definitely a recurring theme. The narrator witnesses a triangle between Adolphe, the actress, and "the grand duke" that somewhat resembles (foreshadows) the triangle we see later with Swann and Odette. Also, the narrator is caught in a triangle that includes also his parents and his uncle, a triangle that because of miscommunication robs them all of each other's company.

Notable passages
"...thinking of the weary and fruitless novitiate eminent men would go through, perhaps for years on end, on the doorstep of some such lady who refused to answer their letters and had them sent packing by the hall-porter," (p.103) Foreshadowing/Swann

Interesting stuff:
Morris Columns (p.100) are cylindrical advertising structures on the sidewalks of Paris, a place for paper ads to be displayed. According to this article they've been a part of the Paris landscape for over 150 years, and their numbers have been (controversially) cut back in the last few.

Opéra-Comique (p.100)
Comédie-Française (p.101)

Diamants de la couronne and Domino Noir (p.101) are both works by Daniel Auber from the mid 19th century.

(p.102) Got, Delaunay, Febvre, Coquelin are real 19th century French actors, and I can find reference to a M. Thiron and Maubant as well.

(p.102) Sarah Bernhardt, Bartet, and Madeleine Brohan are all real 19th century French actresses. Jeanne Samary is also a real actress from the time, and was additionally a mistress of Renoir, showing up in many portraits, including the Luncheon of the Boating Party, which also includes our friend Charles Ephrussi (Swann). Art, mistress, Ephrussi...

I can find no reference to a Berma of the French theater, though.

Vocabulary
Blue (p.108) according to my book notes a blue, or bleu, is an "express letter transmitted by pneumatic tube (in Paris)"

A few thoughts on John Ruskin

2011-07-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

Proust greatly admired John Ruskin, and spent about 10 years, from about 1895 to 1905, studying and translating some of his works, publishing a French translation of Ruskin's "The Bible of Amiens", which is a very detailed description of the Cathedral of Amiens of decorated gothic style.

Proust also claimed to know Ruskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture" by heart, a work that was about the philosophy of architecture as well as its physical study. From Wikipedia, Ruskin's seven "lamps" (or principles) of architecture are:

Sacrifice – dedication of man's craft to God, as visible proofs of man's love and obedience
Truth – handcrafted and honest display of materials and structure.
Power – buildings should be thought of in terms of their massing and reach towards the sublimity of nature by the action of the human mind upon them and the organization of physical effort in constructing buildings.
Beauty – aspiration towards God expressed in ornamentation drawn from nature, his creation
Life – buildings should be made by human hands, so that the joy of masons and stonecarvers is associated with the expressive freedom given them
Memory – buildings should respect the culture from which they have developed
Obedience – no originality for its own sake, but conforming to the finest among existing English values, in particular expressed through the "English Early Decorated" Gothic as the safest choice of style.

And Proust was heavily influenced by the philosophies and writings of Ruskin, so if we look at the descriptions of the Combray church again...

No. 4 Beauty—the church is given human traits time and time again, bringing to mind the idea that man is created in God's image, so likening the church to man certainly seems like "drawing ornamentation...from his creation".

No. 6 Memory—the church not only respects the culture from which it has developed, it is inextricably linked to it, at least in our narrator's mind. Biblical culture (Esther), French historical culture (Merovingian), Combray culture (Guermantes), and the culture of the masses (the peasant class) are all part the building itself, if not in the images on the windows, then in the erosion of the flooring.

No. 7 Obedience—the church conforms by being defined by history, and by being susceptible to erosion at the hand of habit. It is also described frequently as Gothic.

The church at Combray (pp.80-91)

2011-07-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

In the second section of Swann's Way we arrive in Combray, described for us as "no more than a church epitomizing the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherdess gathers her sheep, the woolly grey backs of its huddled houses, which the remains of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting." (p.65)

The church dominates Proust's memory of Combray, and 11 pages of Combray II (pp.80-91) are dedicated to its detailed description. The first five pages to the church itself, the next six to just the steeple. The careful attention given to the church makes it a self-contained example of themes found elsewhere in the work.

Time/history/past
The church seems to belong to all eras, and a lot of time setting words are used to describe it: "primitve," "age-long repetition," "mediaeval style," "silver antiquity sparkling with the dust of centuries," and "Merovingian darkness," and reference is made to people and legends from the past, like the King Charles VI cards, Esther, Saint Eloi, and Sigebert. An historical figure or aspect is assigned to every part of the church.

"all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time—extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant..." (p.83)

In "Romancing the Cathedral", Elizabeth Nicole Emery explains this as the narrator's or, as she calls him, the hero's appreciation for the church only through its connection to history and people from history. This reminds me of his grandmother's attraction to antiques over contemporary, useful items. And in fact, his grandmother turns out to be a fan of the church and its steeple in ways that the other characters are not (p.87)

Class
As I noted before, the church seems to be a unifier of class as well as time. It is visited for ages by peasant-women, houses the "noble dust of the Abbots of Combray," and the narrator and his family are middle class, (pp.80-81).

Art in life
The church personified. I remember that later in Swann's Way people are often given the qualities of art, but here the art, or architecture, is being given many human qualities:
• The dust of the long dead noble Abbots is related to the flooring (p.80)
• Proust tells us that at moments the church is "more human somehow" (p.81)
• One window "had taken on the shimmering of a peacock's tail, then quivered and rippled in a flaming and fantastic shower that streamed from the groin of the dark and stony vault down the moist walls, as though it were along the bed of some grotto glowing with sinuous stalactites..." (pp.81-82).
• It is equated to "coquettish" "grown-up sisters" and a "peevish and ill-dressed younger brother" (p.83)
• It is "...raising up into the sky above the square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to see him still; and thrusting down with its crypt..." and "guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault" (pp.83-84)
• "The church! Homely and familiar, cheek by jowl in the Rue Saint-Hilaire...a simple citizen of Combray.." (p.85)
• The tower windows are placed symmetrically "with that right and original proportion in their spacing which gives beauty and dignity not only to human faces..." (p.86)
• It is "like a solid body" while "the apse, crouched muscularly..."

Habit
Church is, of course, a regular habit for those who take part. Its sessions help define Leonie's days, and the narrator's, really much of the town's. Its visibility creates additional habits as well, such as looking for the steeple when traversing the town, or upon arriving.

"The old porch....was worn out of shape and deeply furrowed at the sides...just as if the gentle friction of the cloaks of peasant-women coming into church, and of their fingers dipping into the holy water, had managed by age-long repetition to acquire a destructive force..." (p.80)

Habit has previously been portrayed as a destructive force in its breaking, such as the disruption in the narrator's habitual night-time rituals bringing him grief.

Interesting links
Someone's pictures of the church at Illiers-Combray.

More Info
Ashlar (p.83) is stonework prepared for masonry.

Lethe (p.91) was one of the rivers of Hades.

Swann's Way, beginning Combray II, pp. 65-83

2011-07-11T20:09:00.001-07:00

A description of Combray, using terms such as medieval and primitive (p.65) creates a direct connection to the distant past. (A bit on Illiers-Combray on this site and also on Wikipedia.)

A re-mentioning of the magic lantern (p.65) and Golo and Geneviéve de Brabant (p.66)

We meet Léonie, the narrator's great aunt (his grandfather's cousin) who, when he was a child, gave him the madeleine cakes that later trigger his memories of her home. She is an invalid (self-proclaimed?) "perpetually in a vague state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety." (p.66) She never leaves her room, she claims to never sleep. She is associated with death or illness, and with God or church—She loves the taste of the "dead lime leaves or faded blossom" (in her tissane), and by her bed is"a table which served at once as dispensary and high altar, on which, beneath a statue of the Virgin and a bottle of Vchiy-Célestins, might be found her prayer-books and her medical prescriptions..." (p.70)

Memories, descriptions, again very linked to a sense of smell (pp.66-68, and previously noted in the stairway in Combray I).

More on Françoise, and her service to the family (first to Léonie, then the narrator's), and her own family, and the narrator's mother is kind to her, asking her about her children and grandchildren (I remember she also asked Swann about his daughter during the dinner). (pp.71-72)

The church at Combray: ancient, visited for ages by peasant-women, housing the "noble dust of the Abbots of Combray" that are "themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter", and the windows all "so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery antiquity sparkling with the dust of centuries" (pp.80-81).
Two things about this: A return to the concept of transmigration(?), and a mention of class. Françoise was also noted as a peasant earlier, but the narrator and his family are middle class, and the Abbots are referred to as noble. Church as the great unifier? Time as the unifier of class?

Guermantes: since the name heads a whole volume of Proust's work, it might be worth noting its arrival on the scene, from inside the church at Combray, as part of the stained glass depiction of "the coronation of Esther (tradition had it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the features of one of hte kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of Guermantes whose lover he had been)" (p.82)

Side note: Interesting History on cards
Proust describes one of the church windows as "composed of a hundred little rectangular panes, of blue principally, like an enormous pack of cards of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI" (p.81).
From tradegames.org.uk "The earliest references to cards in Europe are mostly in France (the records of King Charles VI show that he bought 3 packs in 1392). These original cards featured four suits (Cups, Swords, Coins and Batons) of 14 cards each - there was an additional card in each suit - the "Cavalier" or "Mounted Valet", the lowest of the four court cards."
Some believed the cards of Charles VI to have been among the first decks of tarot cards, but more recent belief is that they were simply playing cards, tarot cards having been invented about 100 years later.

Passages of note
"...the pleasure of finding that these were sprigs of real lime-trees, like those I had seen, when coming from the train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered indeed, precisely because they were not imitations but themselves, and because they had aged. And as each new character is merely a metamorphosis from something earlier, in these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time;" (p.69, with respect to the lime-blossom for making Léonie's tissane).

Vocabulary
antimacassar (p.67, noun) small covering on the backs and arms of upholstered furniture to prevent wear.

priedieu (p.67, noun) a desk used for kneeling in prayer.

Book review: The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor

2011-07-11T12:08:00.001-07:00

The women of Brewster Place have ended up together in place and time. They are not necessarily friends, nor are they necessarily enemies, and at first look the book seems to be a collection of their individual short stories, but look more closely and it is much, much more. Though each of these women comes to Brewster Place with a story in tow, each with their own cross to bear, the book as a whole is less about their individuality than about their need to unite and claim their rightful place in the world.

In "The Women of Brewster Place" each character, seven women and one man, has followed her own road to come to the projects, to Brewster Place, where they have been shut off from the growing and modernizing world behind a wall erected long ago by those in power in the city, those who you can bet were neither African American or female. The women arrive carrying burdens, in many cases burdens that they have created for themselves, or have at least accepted, and further cripple their own strength by fighting amongst themselves, allowing the world to drive wedges between them. The end of the story shows them finally combining their strengths to tear down the wall once built by the outside world and release themselves from the cage they had been put in.

The thread of the African American story is strong Naylor's writing—stronger here than in Bailey's Cafe, but not so strong as in Mama Day. Shades of segregation and hints at abuse, and abuse of power, as well as the debate between embracing the culture of ancestry versus the culture of inheritance, all of these issues are very real, and Naylor brings them to life with her characters. But some critics have accused her of sidestepping the African American issue, of not making a real statement. And they may be right, but I don't think it's a matter of unwillingness, I just think she's writing about something else. While Gloria Naylor is often considered one of the most talented writers of contemporary African American fiction, the empowerment of women is also a common theme for her, and that is where her statement lies. She is writing about African American women.

Of the seven women we meet at Brewster Place, five have allowed themselves to be controlled or hurt by men or by their gender roles: Mattie by her son, Etta by her need of a man, Cora Lee by strict confinement to traditional gender roles, Ceil in the traditional sense by an abusive man, and Lorraine by both gender expectation and by male fear. And these women have more or less accepted their places, and are harassed not only by the world but by each other as well. They are trapped by their inability to change their situation.

Ben is their biggest hurdle. Though the janitor seems innocuous, he is the connecting piece between the neglectful, possibly abusive, landlord, and he has been there almost as long as the wall, is part of the wall as we see in the end. And it is because, at the behest of his wife, he refused to take action that his daughter suffered repeated rape and abuse at the hand of a white man. He allowed his wife's acceptance of that man's right to their daughter to stop him from acting, and when his daughter found her own strength and left, he lost her. Now he, and the wall, stand between the women of Brewster Place and their ability to find their strength and stop accepting the abuse, because that would lead to their leaving him just like his daughter. Lorraine is the first of the women to get to know him, and she sees him for what he is. After Ben is gone the women find their strength and they take the (rest of the) wall down together.

The characters of Brewster Place are expertly drawn, and the symbolism is woven finely throughout. Naylor's hallmark voodoo-like mysticism makes a short appearance at the end, and might be readable in the very beginning of Mattie's story as well, but I'd have liked to see more of it. I don't think Brewster Place is as tight a narrative as Naylor's other works, and the stories are not as neatly threaded together as they are in Bailey's Cafe, but The Women of Brewster Place is a beautiful novel and most definitely worth reading in its own right.

Book 25 on my way to 52 in 2011

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp. 53-65 (end chapter, Combray I)

2011-07-10T19:58:00.000-07:00

Up to the this point we've floated through time and space, the focus narrowing as we went and finally landing on the evening in Combray when the narrator was sent to bed without the kiss, waited for his mother, and suffered a loss of innocence when she gave in to his nervous tendencies.

Proust calls this "voluntary memory" (on p.59), an attempt to use the mind to recall the past, an attempt that he says will be incomplete and leaves the past as a "residue", as "dead".

Next he tackles "involuntary memory", which he equates to the beliefs of the Celts that "the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object" from which we can set them free by recognizing and naming them. I could find no evidence of Celtic belief matching this to the letter, but I did read a bit about their beliefs regarding animation/reincarnation/transmigration and there's enough similarity to go with.

So after this, his illustration of reclaiming lost time, of being transported, by recognition of the past via a petite madeleine cake, only the memory of the past is in himself, not in the cake. The cake only triggers the memory. And where before he remembered nothing but the staircase, he now remembers everything about Combray.

End chapter, Combray I (Overture, in the older translation)

Vocabulary:
vicissitude (noun, p.60), change or variation in the course of something

tisane (noun, p.63), aromatic or herb-flavored tea

On George Sand, and incenst

2011-07-08T07:01:00.000-07:00

"I was only too delighted, and Mamma went to fetch a parcel of books of which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which they were wrapped, any more than their short, wide format but which, even at this first glimpse, brief and obscure as it was, bade fair to eclipse already the paintbox of New Year's Day and the silkworms of the year before. The books were La Mare au Diable, Francois le Champi, La Petite Fadette and Les Maitres Sonneurs." (pp.52)

"La Mare au Diable", "Francois le Champi", "La Petite Fadette" and "Les Maitres Sonneurs" are all works of George Sand.

George Sand was the pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804-1876) lived and wrote during the 1848 revolution that ultimately brought about the third republic. She started life in a pretty standard way for time period, married and had two children, then left her husband in 1831. From there she diverged from the customary; She wore mens clothing, she openly smoked tobacco, and she lived an independent life prolific in writing and love affairs. She was a contemporary and lover of Chopin and Musset, among others, and a close friend of Flaubert. I have not read any of her works, but understand from their synopses that she wrote often about romantic affairs and used her novels to paint a picture of French customs and class and gender discrepancies while paving the way for stronger female literary characters. Again, since I haven't read them this is speculation based on summaries I've read here and there.

Two Sand factoids interest me most with regard to Proust. First, that some of her works may have challenged traditional gender roles, the word lesbianism having been thrown around some. We'll see that in "Search" as well. Second, that she wrote strong female characters into her novels, including one, in "The Country Waif", that ends up having a love affair with, and marrying, her adopted son. The word incest comes to mind, and so does Proust's very strong attachment to his own mother. That The Country Waif is the exact novel his mother reads to him on the night she spends with him in his room should not be skipped over. Beginning on pg.16, in his book "Proust, Beckett, and Narration", James H. Reid discusses the narrator's mother and her reading on that night.

Stage 4, incest and silence... from "Proust and the Sense of Time", by Julia Kristeva

p. 16 of "Proust, Becket, and Narration", by James H. Reid,

George Sand on Wikipedia

George Sand on AMSAW

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp.35-58

2011-07-06T17:43:00.000-07:00

At a dinner party our young narrator is sent to bed without being able to say goodnight to his mother. Swann is the dinner guest, and we meet Francoise, a house maid, who is described as uncompromising and ancient and devoted to the family.

A connection made between narrator and Swann: "As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as he ;" (p.39) Foreshadowing/social triangulation

Our narrator has a nervous nature. This is played out in his waiting anxiously for his mother to come to bed so he can ambush her, on the stairway outside his door, into kissing him goodnight, even at the risk of angering both her and his father. Here, as he waits in the hall, memory is linked with sense of smell, and again with the inflexibility of place—the staircase as a horrible location because it signified the separation from his mother.

When he meets his mother his father arrives soon after, but gives him no punishment. In general the narrator believed his father to be hasty or unfair, which left him somewhat afraid of his father, or uncertain ("Even at the moment when it manifested itself in this crowning mercy, my father's behaviour towards me still retained that arbitrary and unwarranted quality which was so characteristic of him..." [p.49-50]), but he does not doubt that his father loves him.

He is reunited with his mother, who spends the night reading (George Sand novels) to him in his room, but his victory at this moment is actually a loss of innocence, which he writes "brought me of a sudden to a sort of puberty of sorrow, a manumission of tears. I ought then to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first abdication on her part from the ideal she had formed for me..." (p.51)

In regard to the books we learn more about the grandmother, who is strongly connected to the past, to the old, to the un-useful.
She "could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than n the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth." (p.53) And when forced to buy something "useful" "would choose antiques, as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own." (p.53)
She prefers the antique to something more conventional and useful. Even in books she has chosen for him George Sand novels which he accuses of being "regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque..", and she prefers ancient depictions of place as well, avoiding photographs in favor of prints (or photographs of prints) or artists' renderings.

Art in life
"...[I] would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence." (p.35)

Art imitating life is not always accurate, as images of paintings of locations (Venice) do not always portray them accurately.

Time and memory
Perception is a part of reality. Is it immovable? Movement through the class system, for instance, breaks the concept of immobility in reality, but perception of class is maintained, as when we meet Francoise:
"refinements of etiquette which nothing in Francoise's background or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, as is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or The Quatre Fils Aymon." (p.37-38)
Francoise may in reality have changed class status, but yet she holds onto her original status as immoveable. This way she is a blend of past and present.
The Miracle of Theophilus and the Quatre Fils Aymon are both French textual works from the middle ages, another blending of time periods like the references to Golo and Genevieve de Brabant.

And in reference to Swann, immobility of perception:
"said my great-aunt, 'what a change I find in Swann. He is quite antiquated!' She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him." (p.45)

Compare this to the immobility of perception of a person's character or physical appearance mentioned on p.23 (always the same for one, never the same for any two people), and of physical space on p.5: "perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them."

And the difference between the physical state of something, and its state in our memory is revisited often, like here in the staircase as he stands with his mother before his father arrives:
"Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished...It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell mamma to 'Go along with the child.' Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased;" (p.49)

Love as pain
Our narrator loves his mother so much that he suffers for the emotion. We spend the latter part of this section mired in his anguish over a missed goodnight kiss, and then suffer with him a loss of innocence even after he receives it. Love is pain and suffering, because even when achieved it cannot atone for the struggle, or it cannot live up to the desire.

Then Swann is "much less unhappy of late" because "he no longer loves that [his wife]." (p.45)

And the role of the social triangle:
"Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to influence a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone." (p.41)

Vocabulary, etc.:
viaticum (p.36, noun) 1. Communion as given to a dying person, 2. provisions for travel

desuetude (p.53, noun) 1. The state of being no longer used or practiced

Benozzo Gozzoli was an Italian Renaissance painter from the 15th century, but I was unable to find an image of the print or painting mentioned (of Abraham and Sarah, p.49)

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp.15-35

2011-07-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

Ah, holiday weekend, you sucked away the extra time I usually get when I'm not the only adult in the house. Thankfully beach time, fireworks, and good beer were worth it. But I'd wanted to read 100 pages over the weekend and I only squeezed in 10 before the work week returned.

Class issues
We meet the eponymous Swann. The narrator and his family appear to belong to the middle class, and while Swann used to belong to this set as well, he appears to have risen a half class or more in popularity. We are told that this elevation of his position escapes the family's knowledge because "middle class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied..." (p.19) and we are also given distinct examples of how this was untrue in a reality where class was more fluid. Swann is the obvious example, but then the narrator's great aunt provides a second: she is described as being "the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle 'common,'" (p.21). And later, the grandmother is said to feel that "distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position," that a tailor was "the best and most distinguished man she had ever seen" while "a nephew of Mme. de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house [was] 'so common!'" (p.25)

A comment about titles: "[my great-aunt] had actually ceased to 'see' the son of a lawyer of our acquaintance because he had married a 'Highness' and had thereby stepped down—in her eyes—from the respectable position of a lawyer's son to that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly, to whom, we are told, queens have sometimes shown their favours." (p.26-27)

Some philosophy
Swann's place in society sets up a narration on class but also on the nature of self and perception. The narrator reflects on our being seen as different to each person of our acquaintance, that "even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people." (p.23)

And referring not only to this philosophy, but the concept of memory and fluid time, the existence not of a Swann who was different, but of a different Swann, and also a reference to art as life: "this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my youth, and who in fact is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a picture gallery in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the similar tonality—this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon." (p.24)

A bit of humor
As the dinner party gets underway, the party that will separate the narrator from his mother earlier than he would like and will deny him that goodnight kiss in his bed, we are introduced to the grandmother's sisters, who are perfect caricatures of old biddies from earlier novels. Their attempts to thank Swann for a gift of wine and to mention his having been written up in a recent newspaper article suffer from such "a wealth of ingenious circumlocution, that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed" (pp.29). And their meaning may be subtle, but their method is not, so we are treated to a scene of satirical humor, while Swann is left "in some bewilderment." (p.33)

About Swann
Swann is purported to have been fashioned at least in part after Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art historian and collector

I admit to being disappointed that he wears his hair in the Bressant style (p.17), better known today as a mullet. But I also wonder if this isn't part of his characterization (by which I mean as a patron of nineteenth century pop-culture—theater, art, politics—not as a hillbilly).

He frequents the Jockey Club and the Faubourge Saint-Germain, and hangs out with folks like the Comte de Paris and the Prince of Wales, so he is popular with the elite French society, the haute bourgeoisie and the upper class or nobility, such as it is.

He lives on the Quai d'Orléans, and I found a great article about that here which describes this as the "perfect place for Swann, connoisseur, collector, writer marqué who once imagined he would publish a study of Vermeer." (p.19)

He has made a disadvantageous marriage, at least in the minds of the narrator's family, possibly on the grounds of pregnancy, and he has a daughter.

Vocabulary:
Ferruginous (p.16, adj) 1. Containing iron oxides or rust. 2. Reddish brown; rust-colored.

Other passages/quotes worth noting:
p.20 "when challenged by them to give an opinion, or to express his admiration for some picture, he would remain almost disobligingly silent, and would then make amends by furnishing (if he could) some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung, or the date at which it had been painted." (a character trait to which I think we return later)

Proust on the beach

2011-07-03T22:57:00.000-07:00

Whenever I go on vacation I imagine myself with lots of extra relaxing and reading time, but that time never seems to materialize. We ended up taking an impromptu three day vacation, on which I lugged my ancient library copy of In Search, and on which I managed to re-read about 10 pages, and all of those on our last day at the beach. When I think of beach books Proust does not usually make the cut.

Review: The Royal Book of Oz

2011-07-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

First of all, this book, in most forms, is credited to L. Frank Baum, but this is not merely misleading, but completely incorrect: The Royal Book of Oz was written by Thompson after Baum's death. This is what I've read in many places, and certain newer versions of the book do properly credit the real author, but even without having been told nothing could have been more obvious than Baum's absence upon reading the book. If the writing style alone hadn't been a dead giveaway, then the characters having gone through complete personality changes probably would have done the trick. Ozma as cross? Dorothy as annoyed? The Wogglebug as rude and haughty? Though there were hints of their former selves, these were not the characters that we'd come to know and love, a change that was our biggest disappointment. And this was not the smooth and enchanting writing style to which we had become accustomed, either. Though Thompson does include some witty remarks and word play that will be enjoyable to older readers, some of her sentence formation—especially around the speaking of characters—is on the complex side for younger readers to follow. This is a far cry from Baum who, though writing at the turn of the century and with a style did reflect this, was still accessible for the younger set. And you might be tempted to wonder if the book would have been better were I treating it as its own thing, but first, she didn't write it as its own thing—she even published it under Baum's name!—and second, her style is choppy even when held up entirely on its own. This book was a huge disappointment to me, and though Calvin said he enjoyed it fine, for the first time Calvin he not asked me to get the next Oz book "right away", so I think we'll be taking checking out a new series for now.

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp. 1-15

2011-06-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

An hour with the book and my computer and that's all the farther I got before it was time to make dinner.

Overview:
The state of memory, space and time fluidity. Where is the narrator, and when? Is he young? Old? An invalid? Is he remembering his fear of his uncle or is he remembering the instance of that fear? Or are these things the same? (Ahhh...waking up and thinking you are somewhere else. But he describes it so much more eloquently.)

Our narrator (our Proust) is searching for his memories, and the narration seems confused and wild, but it's actually following a very careful order. He begins by reaching wildly and time and space are confused, then he slowly settles on more distinct places, times, and people, and we see him go from vague memories to more specific stories (and finally he tastes the madeleine cakes, which trigger the next set of memories, and so on, but I'm not there yet on this second read).

From within this twilight state he mentions place names and people, possibly in foreshadowing or a roadmap: locations such as Combray and Tansonville, Balbec (Is it a hilarity or a commercial ploy that someone named their anti-aging cream Combray?), and people like Swann.

My own, possibly silly, thoughts:
His grandmother reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that great French philosopher who embraced nature and believed children should be allowed to run around in downpours and go barefooted in winter.

Some things to pay attention to?
Travel or the train station (pp 2, 10)
the mother/son relationship (pp 6, 15)
the magic lantern (pp 9-10)
Genevieve de Brabant and Golo (pp 10-12)
The social triangle

The magic lantern was a new one on me, and so was the story of Genevieve de Brabant and Golo. I don't know if we'll see a return of the lantern later in the book, but I found it interesting as a tool melding the distant past (Merovingian) to the present. And Genevieve is the wife and mother, falsely accused by Golo of infidelity with him against her husband, who is to be put to death but escapes and is aided by a roe deer in caring for her son. Later she is cleared and re-accepted by her husband. There is an obvious link here to the mother/son relationship, and possibly also to that between mother and father/husband and wife, and our first example of the social triangle.

Then there is his grandmother whose sister keeps tempting his grandfather with liqueurs he shouldn't have, thus creating unrest between the husband and wife (p.13-14), another social triangle.

And the narrator's familial relationship, the son insinuating himself between the mother and father, and sometimes additional guests taking a place as well (pp.15+), more social triangles.

Passages/quotes worth noting:
p.1-2 "I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveler would be hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that will still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again."

p.8 "Habit! That skilful but slow-moving arrranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable."

p.12 "...while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb [my father], looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind."

p.15 "Sometimes when, after kissing me, [my mother] opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her 'Kiss me just once more,' but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to give me this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd..."

A little background work

2011-06-27T17:37:00.000-07:00

Marcel Proust lived in France from 1871-1922. The work is semi-autobiographical, with a degree of self awareness (pg. 291, "So Swann reasonsed with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the 'first person' in the dream, and another...").

Proust is writing about France during the French Third Republic after the fall of the second empire and Napoleon III. It was a time of political uncertainty but artistic growth. Though the landed nobility was abolished during the French Revolution, use of French titles returned with Napoleon III, and Proust uses these titles often in "Swann's Way", where he has a lot to say about the class situation of the time.

Interesting stuff: The Infamous Proust Questionnaire

It's all about the mom.

First things first

2011-06-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

I actually started reading In Search of Lost Time a few weeks ago, and finished the first volume, "Swann's Way", this weekend, but I'm going back to the beginning to try again. Why? Because when I started on this project I didn't really know what to expect. I knew I was entering the modernist era, I'd heard that it was among the first of those works to evade the constraints of linear time, and I'd read the Wikipedia article on Marcel Proust, but like taking Lamaze classes to prepare for childbirth, it wasn't until I got into the first throes of labor that I realized how little those preparations actually did for me. I was dull through the start, and I'm sure I missed a lot. It took me until about half way through "Swann's Way" to start appreciating the work, then I found myself falling in love with it and unless I go back I won't know for sure whether it was the book or myself that was slow to warm up. Plus I've come to the conclusion, after this first taste, that Lost Time is worth absorbing, not just reading. That's where the notes and the research come in.

The version I started reading is titled Remembrance of Things Past (a translation I understand Proust detested) and was published in 1934 by Random House, translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff (see note below). In this version the seven volumes have been condensed into just two. The copy I am reading actually belongs to the library, which will keep me reading at a steady pace since they will want it back (according to the obsolete borrowing card in the back it has been on their shelves since at least 1955, and I think that's pretty cool). In my own library I have a beautiful twelve volume set, the 1939 uniform edition published by Chatto & Windus in England, a gift from my husband and son that I can't quite bring myself to pour over or leaf through. Thankfully the library's copy was available (and has been sitting on the shelf waiting for attention for over a year, so I don't expect a lot of competition).

I believe this worth mentioning because this is a big work; it will take me a long to read and will generate a lot of posts and I will likely note page numbers often, making the version relevant.

I'm going to jot notes as I go. They will be anything from definitions of words to my own comments on the writing style or story, sometimes they'll be summaries, and now I can even link to comments found elsewhere on the web, something I couldn't do in my handwritten notes.

Proust will be a journey. I am aiming to finish In Search of Lost Time by the end of the year so that I can count it toward my reading goal. Time to get started.

**(7/10/11) The version I've switched to reading as of now, although I'm likely to compare the two from time to time, has the translated title In Search of Lost Time and is the 2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition, translated by Moncrieff and Terence Kilmart and revised by D. J. Enright. In this version the work is in six volumes. The page numbers I list will be from this version.

Finding time for Proust

2011-06-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

About this blog
This blog is going to be about books. More specifically, it is going to be about the books that I read. I write about almost every book I take in. I have always kept reading journals, and some of my more loved paperbacks are mercilessly marked up. But there is only so much paper I can justify using in a year, plus the idea of tagging my thoughts for later access really appeals to me, and so I am starting this blog. I am not a writer, I did not study English or literature in college, and I am not a book critic, but for me reading is like eating, where ingesting a good book nourishes me and leaves me energized for the other parts of my life. And, like some foods, some books demand more attention, more enjoyment, than others, and some need to be chewed really, really well before anything can be gotten out of them at all. I like to do that with the books I read—to really chew them up and really taste them, and in doing so I write about them.

Reading 52
I set a goal for myself this year. Starting in March, because I'm always behind, I set out to read 52 books, an average of one book per week. I was once a voracious reader, and years ago this would have seemed like not much of a goal, but now I am a wife and a mother, I am homeschooling my five year old, and my time seems too often not to be my own. I read a lot with my son, and we review the books we read on our blog, but only too rarely was I reading for myself. So I set the read 52 goal to make myself take the time to read, even if sometimes that means less sleep, or a late dinner, or a messy house. Thankfully my family is understanding.

About the blog title
This isn't to be solely about Proust, but I just started reading In Search of Lost Time and, because I could already see the large volume of notes I'd be taking, it was my impetus for starting the blog. Proust isn't the beginning or the end, he's just where I happen to be right now.

9/1/2011—I have now added all my book reviews from earlier in the year to this blog, dated accordingly, so that I'd have them all in one place. Organization is good.

Review: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

2011-06-15T17:56:00.000-07:00

I'm not really the right person the review this book—it's not really my type—but I picked it up for a little light reading break from Proust, and light reading it really was. Really a collection of three different stories, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs is absurdist humor of a dry English variety. What it lacks in depth it fails to make up in other arenas, except for maybe the relatively happy, if sappy, ending. I don't think I'll be trying any more of his books, but if I'm looking for another one-night read I just might.And I hear that if I'd picked it up as an audio track I'd be listening to Hugh Laurie as the reader, and that might have been funnier.

Book 24 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Day, By Elie Wiesel

2011-06-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

I have now completed my tour through the trilogy that is not a trilogy. Day is the third of Elie Wiesel's books that are named with vague time references. As far as I can tell these books are lumped together because a) they are all written by the same auther, b) they are all about the same subject matter, and c) they do follow life chronologically even if they are not all about the same person growing older. Day is about a middle aged man (?) who has just been in a serious accident and is recovering. It is the symbolic final chapter in what is a loose story of life after concentration camps—the chapter in which our hero (who is different in every book) is struggling for a final time with his images and view of life and death. The accident itself brings this struggle to a head by almost, but not quite, ending his life, and then bringing him into contact with his antithesis: a doctor who loves life completely and without caveat. While I was not a big fan of Dawn, I was able to enjoy Day a little more, if enjoy is the right word for such a dark book.

Book 23 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Dawn, by Elie Wiesel

2011-06-04T18:06:00.000-07:00

I have seen this book referred to as part of a trilogy, including Night, Dawn, and Day (also sometimes titled The Accident). Night, which I've already read and reviewed, is a memoir, so imagine my surprise at finding that the second book in the "trilogy" is a fiction. That was my first disappointment. The book spans just one night in time as the young man waits for morning, when he will have to kill a British officer in the name of the fight to free Palestine from British rule. During this time he is visited and spoken to by the ghosts of many people from his past. The story might have been fine—the struggle of a young man to come to terms with the sum of his existence—but for the use of trite symbolism and meaningless poetic text. Wiesel's clipped, contemporary writing style is what saved this from being a complete loss for me.

Book number 22 on my way to 52.

Review: Night, by Elie Wiesel

2011-06-01T18:04:00.000-07:00

This book cannot truly be reviewed. I've read reviews calling it "poignant" and others calling "touching" while still others have complained either that it did not provide enough information or that it portrayed the inmates as "too much like animals", or too inhuman. Maybe these people failed to realize that this isn't a reference book on concentration camps, nor a literary work of death and survival. This is one man's memoir of a frightful history, the writing is completely human, the subjects drawn as he saw them then. Wiesel's writing is crisp, even terse sometimes, yet the language is poetic even when frightening. The story is told probably as it was lived—in a percussive fashion, jumping from one punctuating moment to the next, and yet it avoids becoming a collection of short anecdotes and remains a cohesive, depressing telling. Because it is a journey into a mind as much as a concentration camp the percussive style is authentic and natural. This book does not warrant a review because it is exactly what it should be, because it can only be exactly as Wiesel would write it.

Book 21 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson

2011-05-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

In the Garden of Beasts, by history writer Erik Larson, came out just a few weeks ago. It may be the most recent book I ever review. I rushed to grab it in part because of a Border's coupon, but also because I absolutely loved Larson's Devil in the White City. In Devil, Larson uses succinct but eloquent writing to tell the story of Chicago's World's Fair from the perspectives of the fair's architect, Daniel Burnham, and, conversely, the fair's serial murderer, H. H. Holmes. Devil read almost like a novel, flowing neatly even as it jumped between the two perspectives, and at the end not only had I enjoyed it, but I was newly acquainted with Chicago, the fair, and with these two men, as well as others. I highly recommend Devil to those who enjoy history and historical writing.

In the Garden was a disappointment to me. Here Larson is focusing on Berlin during the rise of Nazi power, mainly from '33-'37. As in Devil he aims to paint a picture of Berlin through the eyes and actions of two individuals, namely William Dodd, ambassador to Germany during these years, and his daughter, Martha. The story does not flow as well as in Devil but feels choppy. Much of the book is actually about Martha, perhaps because so many of her letters and diaries are available, as she flits from love affair to love affair and political ideology to political ideology. She is shown as promiscuous and silly for most of the book, so I was surprised when Larson described her as "not precisely a hero but certainly a woman of principle", in his closing pages. In that case the history told here seems to be more about women's lib and sexual freedom in the personage of Martha, although she is a weak heroine even for these causes. Other than that, the tidbits and tales about Nazi Germany are of course not new, but it was interesting to see them through the diaries and writings of people there at the time.

Book 20 on my way to 52.

Review: Shogun, by James Clavell

2011-05-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

An historical fiction of epic proportions, James Clavell's Shogun brings true honor to that often over-assigned literary genre. And clearly I'm a big fan. Set in Japan in the year 1600 this is not only the story of an English sailor trapped in foreign lands, a story inspired by real-life naval pilot William Adams, but is even more importantly a story about clashing cultures and beliefs. The setting is expertly drawn, as are the characters and the political and religious situations of the day. Plenty of suspense, violence, and intrigue offset the to-be-suspected softer tale of a hero coming around to retract his initial hasty judgement of an unknown people, the time honored theme of man against self. And there's an even softer tale thrown in, a romance that, if it seems somewhat forced and unrealistic at times, is to be forgiven because of its symbolic value in the greater scheme of the novel. I enjoyed every page of this book, and can only hope that the second in the series is as good.

Book 19 on my way to 52.

Review: Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin

2011-05-13T18:10:00.000-07:00

When I added this book to my list of must-reads I imagined it would be something like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a work I greatly enjoyed. But while Lawrence's Chatterley is a striking modernist novel about class systems, gender disparity, and sexuality with many well written and daring erotic scenes, Nin's Delta of Venus is its opposite. This is a book filled with daring erotic scenes, with many well written stories about class, gender disparity, and sexuality thrown in. Delta of Venus is actually a collection of short works written by Nin for a collector of erotica. Her instructions were to eliminate poetic writing in favor of heavily descriptive sex scenes, but Nin melds description and story telling artfully. Her writing, her tendency to delve further and further into the relationships and personal emotions of her characters, reminds me Lawrence's handling of prose, while her characters' sexual abandon reminds me of Martin Amis's more recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, about the feminist and sexual revolution of the 1970s (which also harks heavily back to Lawrence). This book probably isn't for everyone—there is sex on every page—but Nin is credited with giving literature a language for sex and sensuality, and I think for giving women a place in that language as well. She continued what Lawrence started, and what society in general continued a few decades later.

Book 18 on my way to 52

Review: The Monk in the Garden, by Robin Marantz Henig

2011-05-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

The best thing I can say about this book is that I found it disappointing. Though put forward as a biography, in some places, like the extensive paragraphs on Mendel's (non)relationship with Darwin, it reads more like historical fiction. Many times, after reading page upon page of anecdotes, we are told that it couldn't have happened that way after all (but imagine if it had!) and I found myself wishing for the last 10, 30, even 60 minutes of my time back. Even after finishing the book I find it difficult to decide whether Henig admires Mendel or disdains him, which isn't altogether hard to understand since some of the scientific community is divided on this as well, but I kind of wonder why she titled the book so exclusively around Mendel when she spent so much of it either referring to him in the diminutive or talking about other great names from science altogether. In fact, the parts I valued most from this book were the tales about those other scientists, many of whom I knew less about than Mendel. I read this book for my library non-fiction book club (which meets next Tuesday) and I am interested to hear what others have to say about it, so maybe I'll come back and update then.

Book 17 on my way to 52

Review: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

2011-05-04T18:17:00.000-07:00

Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's deeply satirical answer to the Orwellian future Utopia. Huxley's is a world of drug induced contentment, genetic predetermination, and ingrained consumerism, all sold with a smiling face, and for the drugged population it's an easy sell. The ruling faction is aiming for stability, and beyond that they care not. The "if we could just keep people from moving, from researching, from developing" is a common theme is Ayn Rand's controversial hit Atlas Shrugged, and Brave New World is a manifestation of a future in which things have been stopped and are being controlled by those in power. Individuals are not allowed to thrive in this environment, but are shipped off to island isolated locations so that they cannot affect the surrounding society, or are driven to suicide.

This is a great futuristic sci-fi read, with a well-developed plot and characters and special treatment for the religion/science/consumerism discussion. Keep in mind the publish date of 1932, which makes the reverence of Ford and the prevalence of birth control even more meaningful. And what stood out to me was the flavor of nihilism throughout. And I really liked this book.

16 down on my way to 52.

Review: A Man Without a Country, By Kurt Vonnegut

2011-05-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

I enjoy reading Kurt Vonnegut, and if I had it to do over I would read this, his final book, only after I had read all the rest (which I have yet to do). The man has a talent for interesting humor into the most horrific of things, a talent he accounts for early on in this memoir of sorts, but this book ultimately reads like the final disgruntled rant of a disillusioned old man. Which, incidentally, it is, and he openly acknowledges it as such. It is Kurt Vonnegut, and that was the point of most of his work, but the difference here is the saturation of bitterness because it isn't embedded in a well written story.

Reading this there were many moments when I found myself laughing outright, others when I was nodding my head vigorously in agreement, and still others when I succumbed to frustration with the constant negativity. He repeats ideas, even phrases, throughout the book and there were times when I wanted to say enough already. It comes across as just bitterness, and that's a wasted emotion in my book. But every time I was about to set the book aside intending to never pick it up again, he would renew my interest with another fabulous observation or statement that got me hooked back in.

For many, especially the true fans, the people who grew up on Vonnegut's acerbic wit, this will be an enjoyable must read. And people who are one-hundred percent in line with his political views will enjoy it even more. I fall into neither of those categories, but I would still give it a three out of five.

15 down on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

2011-04-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

Journey to the End of the Night is like a travelogue of a journey into the darkest parts of the human soul. It is a dark, pessimistic, almost nihilistic work. Not written like a story, there is no plot to follow, and there are several sharp turns and hidden corners where, as a reader, you might find yourself digging deep to catch up. For all that, this is a great book.

I picked this book up originally because I'd heard it had influenced Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five and Heller in Catch-22. Liking both of those I decided to go back to their purported beginnings. It is easy to find Catch-22 in Journey, but that is only a small portion of the story, which begins in World War I France, moves to colonial Africa, with a strong flavor of Heart of Darkness (published long before Journey), then moves to the United States before heading back to France. This physical traveling, the moving around from continent to continent, aside from being part of the work's semi-autobiographical nature, mirrors the mental journey of Bardamu as he travels deeper and deeper into a dark human psyche. Céline examines the darkness of war, of capitalism, and of a shrinking world, touching on religion, science, gender relations, and madness as he does.

There is a lot more that can be said about this book, a lot more about symbolism and nuances, but those things are best explored by reading it. Céline was on the front of the 20th century literary movement, and his writing style is a mixture of descriptive prose and vernacular, is rife with satire, and has a rhythm all its own. My only disappointment is that I cannot read French because I think a lot can be lost from a book like this in the process of translation. I have also read that the newer translation is too contemporary and that to get a better feel for Céline's talent one must read the original translation by John H. P. Marks. That is now something on my list of things to do.

14 down on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Magic of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

2011-04-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

The penultimate book in the series as written by Baum. If there weren't another twenty-some more books widely considered as part of the Oz canon I think I would be very sad. As it is, I think I still am. I think it's possible to make these books feel fresh and new, even twelve books into the series, because anything, and I mean anything, can happen in Oz, so there are no contraints, natural or artificial, binding the author's creativity. Of course the plot line doesn't change all that much from book to book—there's only a handful of those to choose from here—but the intriguing and unique characters that fill in the bare bones of the plots are what make the books enjoyable one right after the other. The Magic of Oz is another winner for me, full of just enough adult-size humor to give depth to the child's fairy story. This is children's fantasy at its best.

Review: Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

2011-04-21T18:37:00.000-07:00

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference." - Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five

I was surprised by two things reading this book. One, I had no idea that this was the origin of the above quote. Two, this was a very different book from Cat's Cradle. I'm not sure why I expected the books to be more similar than they are, maybe I've read too many one note authors, but while Vonnegut's voice is still clearly present, the two books are talking about very different things in very different ways. Slaughterhouse Five actually reminds me a lot of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which I read last year and enjoyed. The post-modern anti-war flavor is strong in both books, and there's a pretty strong similarity between their loose play with time, too; These are not linear books. Catch-22 is more darkly humorous, though, like Cat's Cradle in that respect, while Slaughterhouse flirts with science fiction in a way that leaves the reader wondering what really did and did not happen. I love being left with that question. I also enjoyed the way Vonnegut called out the hypocrisy of war. I didn't care for this one as much as Cat's Cradle, and between them I think I liked Catch-22 better, but this was a good book. And it introduced me to the book I picked up to read next, Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, which I understand may have influenced both Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse and Heller's earlier Catch-22.

Book 13 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

2011-04-19T18:42:00.000-07:00

Vonnegut's writing is an exercise for the sharp, witty, satirical mind. Every page, every sentence. When I read (only when I'm reading my own non-collectors copy of a book, of course) I dog-ear pages, pencil notes in margins, and keep a running tab near the front for important page numbers, quotes, or connections between ideas. That was not really possible in Cat's Cradle because everything was worth looking into. I stopped the dog-earing after the first 50 pages because almost 25 of them were folded and it seemed pointless.

Obviously I really enjoyed this book, but that's my post-modern, dystopian predilection showing. Cat's Cradle is not a story book or a character study, it's more of an anthropological argument, and in fact it was this book that earned Vonnegut his masters degree where an earlier thesis had failed him. Science, religion, politics, patriotism, it all comes under fire here, and every shot is set up to make the reader laugh first, then think deeply. Vonnegut's disdain for blind patriotism and war is not hard to read here, but more deeply nuanced is his argument between science and religion. Blind pursuit of scientific knowledge leads right up to the book's doomsday ending, but while science, written as a heartless man, kills the bulk of life, religion is portrayed as a blatant lie intended to guide and ease suffering, in the end failing to do either. Middle of the road it is, then.

Book 12 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

2011-04-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

Like The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova's first novel, Swan Thieves, her second, is a mystery that is told through a variety of time periods and voices. Unlike The Historian, which is a fantastic retelling of the Dracula story, it makes no reference to mythical or folkloric components. Kostova's writing tends to be lyrical, descriptive, and she gives herself an easy subject for this in Swan Thieves: art. Swan Thieves is about works of art and artists and she writes on several of these, some real and some make-believe. And, as we wind our way through places, and places in time, discovering art and pasts and secrets, there is also a love story, or at least the bare bones of one.

There is a theme here of self discovery, and it's really a pretty good theme. Does one choose to follow a dream, and for how far? Does one live for self or for others in order to find fulfillment? The thread is there and it's an enjoyable under-the-surface discussion that gives the otherwise light book a little more depth. But the book has its flaws. The characters are not entirely believable, especially the main narrator and hero, Dr. Marlow. The majority of the book is spent solving a mystery that was probably solved by the reader in the first few chapters, and then wraps it up with a heavy dose of deus ex machina that rears its ugly head not only to solve the mystery but also to wrap up the character relationships. Still, it was an enjoyable light read.

Book 11 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Tin Woodman of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

2011-04-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

There are only two more books, after this one, left in the Oz series as written by Baum, and I am sad to see the end so obviously in sight. While there are yet another 26 books in what is considered the Oz canon, I am a sentimentalist, and it will be hard, and a little nerve wracking, to break into the Oz world as imagined by other authors. I am hoping that, if so many other Ozites consider these other books to be canon, we will be just as happy with them as we have been with Baum's vision, and certainly there are far more than 26 other Oz books out there, so selectivity did come into play. My fingers are crossed and my breath held as we near the end of Baum's road, though.

The Tin Woodman of Oz, though, was also a slight variation from Baum's usual, and I've heard that this, and the last two books in the series, are dark by comparison to his previous books of wonder. In the Tin Woodman, in fact, the reader is reminded of the Tin Woodman's somewhat gruesome past, and also meets his severed head, on the tinsmith's shelf, and many of his former body parts, now glued back together to create a different being. And, if these anomolies are not enough, there is definitely a thinly veiled question here about makeup of a soul, and the value of a body. Which, after all, is the real Tin Woodman, Nick Chopper? Is it the head, with the brain, the body, with the heart, or the new tin creation, with the memories, the creature we have all become accustomed to? There is really a lot of symbolism and imagery in all of Baum's work, much of it being politically motivated by the situations of the early 20th century, but this is perhaps the most striking, and the most demanding, of them all.

For all of that, however, much of this is naturally over a four-year-old's head, and since I did not see fit to draw attention to these complex themes, although I'm sure we could have discussed them, Calvin enjoyed this book as he has all the others: deeply and with great excitement.

Review: Beloved, by Toni Morrison

2011-04-10T18:45:00.000-07:00

I picked up the Gloria Naylor's book, Bailey's Cafe, just out of the blue, remembering how much I'd loved her previously, but that got me thinking more about African American fiction, and that led me straight to Toni Morrison. I had a copy of Beloved on the shelf, picked up from the library sale, so I went there next, which was fun for the compare and contrast. While they are both late twentieth century writers, Morrison's treatment of fiction is more classical, Naylor's more contemporary, Beloved takes place around the time of the Civil War, not the second World War, like Bailey'sm and Beloved offers both physical and meta-physical explanations while Bailey's is entirely other-worldly. Morrison is tackling the subject of self and slavery while Naylor is tackling its contemporary realization in the form of modern subjugation.

Toni Morrison is an enjoyable writer, but Beloved is not really an enjoyable book, nor is it meant to be. It's about slavery, after all, and the destruction it perpetrated. The book's characters, mostly former salves, fight to rid themselves of the past, but to deny the past is to deny one's sense of self and without self there is no future. To have any hope of future together they must first return to face the past they have so carefully left behind to live in a tenuous today with a non-existent tomorrow. As readers we begin the story somewhat lost, because that is where our characters are, and the book becomes more clear to us as life and self becomes more clear to them. It is this battle with the past, both real and imagined, that makes up the book. It's a depressing subject at best, but a well written comment on slavery and self, and like Bailey's there is much, much more to be said, to be studied and parsed, but that's where I'll leave it for now.

Book 10 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Bailey's Cafe, by Gloria Naylor

2011-04-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

"Godfather always said that he made me, but I was born of the delta...I had no choice but to walk into New Orleans neither male nor female—mud. But I could right then and there choose what I was going to be when I walked back out." -Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe

There is an Eve in this book. She is born of the earth alone, not born of man, and she is forced to make a pilgrimage. From the delta, the fertile womb of the earth, she walks to New Orleans, arriving caked in earth, stripped of the gender that has long been her assignment of sin. What she is when she walks back out is what makes this story a contemporary African American tale even more than the struggles endured by the rest of its characters, because she isn’t Eve of the bible and she isn’t the mother figure of European pagan beliefs. She is part earth, part magic, and she can conjure like a voodoo queen.

Eve's story is just one of many told here, but she is more ubiquitous than she at first seems, while the seemingly omnipresent personage of the narrator, Bailey, turns out to be just a supporting character. Bailey, after all, is Christianity's representative, and those in power get to write the histories, even those of contemporary Eve and her wards. Eve lets him tell it. That's the smallest of her battles. Religion as we know it, after all, and secular culture, are a man’s world, and Eve, as drawn by Gloria Naylor, has arrived to reclaim it.

I am a huge fan of Gloria Naylor's "Mama Day", which I read for the first time back in college and have revisited at least twice since, and Bailey's Cafe is another beautiful example of contemporary African American writing by this talented author. I love this book. I love its primal, driven message and the words with which it is told. Naylor's writing is clean and concise—she does not spend vocabulary on setting the scene, but uses every word to take the reader deeper into the lives of her characters, and her characters are most certainly deep. While at first glance, Bailey's Cafe is a handful of character studies tied together by a shared narrator, a member of their unique and mystical community, Naylor's real story is embedded in the depths of her characters and in the religious symbolism throughout. This isn't your run of the mill twentieth century religious symbolism, but a message about the violent struggle being played out between women, particularly African American women, and the patriarchal religions of the world.

Book 9 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Land of the Painted Caves, by Jean M. Auel

2011-04-02T18:49:00.000-07:00

Children were not separated from adults and regularly taught in an organized way. They learned by observation and trial of adult activities, for the most part. Young children were with a caring adult most of the time, until they showed a desire to explore on their own, and whenever they expressed a desire to explore on their own, and whenever they expressed a desire to try something, they were usually given a tool and shown how. Sometimes they'd find their own tool and try to copy someone. If they really showed an aptitude or desire, child0size versions might be made for them but they weren't toys so much as smaller-size fully functional tools.
...
Community activities always included children. They were all encouraged to join in on the dancing an d singing that were a part of various festivals, and some became quite good and were encouraged. Mental concepts like counting words were usually picked up incidentally, through storytelling, games, and conversation, although one or more of the Zelandonia would occasionally take a group of children off to explain or show some particular concept or activity.

From The Land of Painted Caves, by Jean M. Auel

Learning from life. There is no better description of this philosophy of education than above, and there will always be people who disagree, or who would argue that our times have changed so drastically since those days of prehistory that such learning is no longer possible, but when I read this passage from Auel's new book I marked it and had to go back and reread it. It was a like a mantra.

It was also the only really good part of her new book. I should have known that after such a long wait nothing could live up to expectations. Beginning in the very first chapter it is clear that the author has lost touch with her characters. They aren't as rich and well drawn in this book as in her previous ones. I wondered if that was part of the plan, since some of the story deals with difficulties in their relationship, but since it picks up right about where the last one left off, the change is sudden and doesn't feel like a natural one.

The book also suffers from increasing long-windedness. This was not unenjoyable in earlier books, when she was describing the landscape as our heroes traveled from place to place, but in Painted Caves we spend the entire middle section (the second of three) touring caves with them, and this is not a case of "no two caves are alike". Monotony and repetition. Monotony and repetition. We spend 25 pages touring one cave, at the end of which I was skipping paragraph upon paragraph of descriptions of strange animal representations and images of female genitalia.

Editing, or lack thereof, is another problem. Repetition has always been Auel's style, but in the past it was part of natural flow in the story while here it seems like a way to fill up pages and make the story seem thicker. As time passes I would expect our characters and the story to dwell less on the past, recapping less of the previous books, but we never get such a reprieve. And some of her "in-book" repetition ends up being contradictory. At one point in the middle of the first section our heroes come up with a seemingly brand new ingenious idea, which would be fine if they hadn't already discussed it at the beginning, and then at the end of the section the concept is revisited again as if it has already been worked out at a point before their second brainstorm. That lack of continuity happens more than once, but it isn't nearly as disruptive as the feeling that Ayla, our heroin, continues to be a source of surprise, and sometimes angst, to the people of her mate's cave. Even in the final section, after she has lived with them for six years, and even to her mentor of as many years. Really, they have to know her by now.

Part three of the book, the final section, is its saving grace. While it still feels contrived and disjointed, and while the characters are still missing the depth of personality we've been treated to in past books, there is at least somewhat of a return to a focus on social interaction. There is a strange feeling, though, when, now six years later, some story threads from the fifth book are picked up as though no time passed at all. This was okay with me—they are familiar and comfortable threads—but really they are out of place.

I didn't hate the book, but honestly if I hadn't read any of the first five I think I would have. The only thing that kept me engaged throughout was my previous attachment to the characters themselves. And if I read it again I might just skip the middle section. This is supposedly the last book for the series, but Auel leaves a door wide open at the end, and as our people begin dealing with the first flushes of monogamy she hints at a possible major twist. That's as close as I'll come to giving anything away, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a sequel at some point. I think she's threatened never to write again before anyhow.

Book 8 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Earth's Children Series, books 3-5, By Jean M. Auel

2011-03-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

The Mammoth Hunters is book three in Auel's Earths' Children series, and it makes a rather sudden jump to perpetually racy. For a people who existed before internet, TV, books, or games of any kind, I guess it would make sense that s-e-x was the only form of entertainment available to them, but I think she overdid it a little in this book. I may have spent more time cringing than reading. The story between all the spicy goings on is a good one, though. Auel moves a little away from the focus the time period and enters the realm of human relationships. She started this with the second book, of course, but this one takes it a step further. Cattiness, religious idiosyncrasies, power struggles, intolerance, it's not all that different from modern day society (not to forget that this is pre-historical fiction), except that, while men tend to be relied on for jobs that require strength and size, the groups are nearly matriarchal in form; they worship a feminine god and it's the women, and their lines, that bring status to families and even whole groups. It's an understandable arrangement since they have no means of knowing that men have anything to do with the creation of new life. Women are honored, revered.

The fourth book in the series is The Plains of Passage, and thankfully this was a return to the traveling and descriptions of the Paleolithic landscape and its flora and fauna, that I love so much. The fifth book, Shelters of Stone, is a little lighter on the sex, but heavier on the cattiness. It's a series, and each book builds well on the previous one, but reading them in quick succession like this has made it painfully obvious how repetitive Auel's writing can be, not just between the books, but within them. She phrases and rephrases feelings, memories, and actions all through the book, and I think each book got a little longer than the previous one because she recaps so much, and so often. That worked in my favor. I couldn't have finished all five books in one week, in time for the new release tomorrow, if I hadn't been able to skim so many pages of recap. But the characters are true and well defined, and the descriptions of life and land so well studied that these books are pure joy for me. Tomorrow Calvin and I will travel to Borders to pick up the sixth book, The Land of Painted Caves.

Books 4-7 on my way to 52 2011

Review: The Valley of the Horses, by Jean M. Auel

2011-03-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

In the ten years since last I read this book I had entirely forgotten about its rather racy last few chapters. If it weren't for the rest of the book and its vivid descriptions of the life and times of the Upper Paleolithic I'd be embarrassed to admit to reading it. On the other hand, while racy isn't my cup of tea, I do like a good love story.

This is a beautifully romanticized and vibrant depiction of prehistoric human life. It's long-winded at times, but I love the descriptions of the land and the animals that roamed it. My only complaint is amount of time spent on memories and on recapping what happened in the first book. If I'd never read the first book, or if there had been more than 3 minutes between when I finished the first book and started this one, I'd probably have been glad for the recaps, as it was I was able to skip over a lot of writing and finish the book sooner, which is good since I have about a week to finish the three remaining books before the new one comes out.

Book 3 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Clan of hte Cave Bear, by Jean M. Auel

2011-03-13T18:56:00.000-07:00

It had been about ten years since I first, and last, read this book. I picked up the series, The Earth's Children series, in my college years when it was an appropriate companion to my beloved anthropology and biology classes. I loved it then, and I love it just as much now. It was like meeting with a good friend after a long absence. This is the first book in Auel's series, and also the most pivotal. It's not as thick with beautiful descriptions of landscape and epoch as her other books because it is more of a character study, one that is crucial to the entire rest of the series. That's not to say that it isn't heavy on the long winded descriptions, and I know many find the book tedious, but it's her ability to draw the Paleolithic world and its inhabitants that draws me to the series.

Auel's sixth and supposedly last installment of the series is to be released on March 29th and I'm racing the calendar to see if I can re-read all five of the existing books before it arrives.

Book 2 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Tik-Tok of OZ, by L. Frank Baum

2011-02-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

We finished our most recent in the Oz series yesterday, The Tik-Tok of Oz. I have to say that this was my least favorite of the series so far. It fits in just fine, but it borrowed heavily from previous books, to the point that I felt it was just a rewriting or a recombination of earlier stories he'd already written. That being said, all the stories are really formulaic and that might be part of what makes them so enjoyable to the younger set—they know what to expect, and they are all equally fantastical and enjoyable. Calvin, for one, was not bothered by repetition.

Since I thought the book was somewhat of a bust I think my favorite part is Calvin's journal entry. When we started with this half a year ago I was spelling everything for him and still helping him form letters and the sentence structure to get his ideas out. He wrote this entry entirely by himself while I was running on the treadmill. I am completely in love with it.

More on our Oz journey can be found on our homeschooling blog under the tag Oz

Review: Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen

2011-02-08T18:59:00.000-08:00

The Natives, who have a strong sense of rhythm, know nothing of verse, or at least did not know anything before the times of the schools, where they were taught hymns. One evening out in the maize-field, where we had been harvesting maize, breaking off the cobs and throwing them on to the ox-carts, to amuse myself, I spoke to the field labourers, who were mostly quite young, in Swaheli verse. There was no sense in the verse, it was made for the sake of the rhyme:–"Ngumbe na-penda chumbe, Malaya-mbaya. Wakamba na-kula mamba." The oxen like salt,–whores are bad,–The Wakamba do eat snakes. It caught the interest of the boys, they formed a ring round me. They were quick to understand that the meaning in poetry is of no consequence, and they did not question the thesis of the verse, but waited eagerly for the rhyme, and laughed at it when it came. I tried to make them themselves find the rhyme and finish the poem when I had begun it, but they could not, or would not, do that, and turned away their heads. As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: "Speak again. Speak like rain." Why they should feel verse to be like rain I do not know. It must have been, however, an expression of applause, since in Africa rain is always longed for and welcomed.

—Isak Dinesen (The Baroness Karen Blixen), from Out of Africa

I think poetry can sound like rain, and I don't think the nature of this is really all that much of a mystery. Rain is rhythmic and flowing, and to me so is the greatest of poetry. But should some of our most celebrated poets be told that their meanings were of no consequence I think there might be a lot of broken hearts. That's not to say, of course, that a good silly rhyme isn't fun now and then. I'm not fond of them myself, but Calvin has been working out the business of rhyming for himself this week and I've heard many a verse about fleas with knees or dogs on logs.

My Somewhere in Time book club read Out of Africa for our February meeting (which will take place on Valentine's day just after the usual dinner hour—no romance for the weary). I had seen the movie but shamelessly never read the book. It's lyrical and beautiful. She writes with a rhythm that makes me feel Africa as much as think it. Having already spoken to one of the other club members I know she didn't like the book's non-linear layout, but I think this was an important aspect of the story and its message: if the stories were written linearly and connectedly would they not merely lead up to a final conclusion? The individual stories, and the individuals, after all, are the love in the work, not the epic as a whole. And the book certainly gets my love.

Book 1 on my way to 52 in 2011