It’s one of my very favourite novels, which I have loved for most of my life.
I first encountered it when I was very little in an anthology my grandfather gave me, and instantly identified with Maggie of the rough unkempt hair who cuts her hair off when she’s criticized. I was so taken with the Apocrypha she mentions that I put it on my birthday wish list, not realizing that the Apocrypha was in the Bible.
I really loved the Mill on the Floss when I was 15 and 16 and read it several times. I so identified with Maggie, tortured, sensitive misfit, too clever, too unusual for her small pond who grows into a beautiful and intelligent woman. Her hot-headed father loses his temper, his health and his fortune, and the family is reduced to poverty.
She find relief during this period of poverty in spiritual adventure. She reads The Imitation of Christ, and becomes a withdrawn pietist, finding real thrill in prayer and scripture study and meditation. Which, oddly, and perhaps this is a romantic idea, makes her attractive to men, especially since she blossoms into a beauty.
I remember crying over the scene in which Stephen Guest, a rich young man, who is engaged to Maggie’s rich cousin Lucy falls in love with her. They row downstream, losing track of time, and spend the night together (in separate rooms, which no one believes.) When they return, Maggie is ostracised. Stephen begs her to marry him, but she refuses. I was full of admiration for Maggie. Most young women in her place would have escaped poverty with a young man they were fond of.
Her beloved, narrow-minded unimaginative brother Tom also shuns her. Maggie dies rescuing him during a flood.
The characters are so vividly drawn that they will stay with me forever. Her weepy Aunt Pullet, her pushy, stingy Aunt Glegg, her scaredy cat mother, her pompous brother Tom, her hot-headed doting father, her first lover, Philip Wakeham, her unbelievably sweet cousin, Lucy.
A wonderful novel, everyone, every girl in particular, should read. Somewhat autobiographical in both the period of religiosity, and the period of shocking society as George Eliot had a long and happy “marriage” with a married man. And this was the Victorian era!!
Wikio
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
We are listening to this in the car with a good deal of pleasure and laughter. It is eerily familiar. Now none of us are autistic or have aspergers. However, we are pretty logical, and intellect-dominated rather than emotion-dominated. For instance, we would probably all be T on the Myers-Briggs for Thinking, rather than F for feeling.
So we couldn’t help laughing when Christopher’s father tells him that his mother died of a heart attack. Christopher asks, “What kind of heart attack?” His father, infuriated says, “Christopher, this is not the time to be asking that sort of question!” But Christopher wants to know if it was an aneurysm, or embolism, or just a regular heart-attack. We laughed because it is the kind of question that 3 out of the 4 of us at least would ask in a similar situation.
An autistic savant, Christopher offers a combination of a relentlessly logical mind with very little understanding of how society or the adult work operates. Many children are like this. Most learn; some do not.
Postscript. Now finished listening to it. Though bits are tedious–how Christopher gets to London etc–it is a most moving book.
I like his parents’ care and concern for someone who apparently has no feelings for them, nor any concern beyond himself and self-protectiveness. He does not some ethical concerns like “It is not good to kill dogs” and “one should not tell lies,” but no understanding of love for others. When he describes what love is, for instance his father’s love for him, he says, “Love is when you cook someone’s food, and wash someone’s clothes, and tell them the truth.” His parents are nevertheless fond of him, as one is fond of a totally selfish toddler. Christopher is now 15, but since he has not grown up morally or imaginatively, they are as fond of him as when he was three.
Interestingly, people who behave like Christopher does would have been institutionalized in the past before they was much understanding of autism. Christopher is an autistic savant. I wonder if tuning out so much of reality enables an intense focus on aspects of it. Christopher is very good at both maths, physics and chess like my husband and one of my daughters. Extreme excellence in one sphere always comes at the cost of other spheres being underdeveloped, I think. The question is how excellent, how underdeveloped.
The book is probably so successful because autism or extreme neuroses are probably on a continuum and many people will find echoes of their own neuroses and hang-ups or those of their family in Christopher.
If nothing else, the combination of extreme cleverness and extreme naivete does make you laugh.
Wikio
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The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
This novel is a truly astonishing act of ventriloquism.
Ishiguro, doomed to be a perpetual outsider in England, by virtue of race, has used the outsider’s gifts of ventriloquism and distance to produce an extraordinary study of aspects of the English.
Stevens, the perfect English butler, looks back on a life he cannot bring himself to admit was wasted. He served, with unwavering devotion, a man whose sympathies were with the Nazis, who inexplicably dismissed the Jewish housemaids, for instance. He struggles to bring himself to admit to himself that he has sacrificed his own chances of happiness on the altar of duty, professionalism and loyalty to a master who deserved none of the above.
It is an interesting study of painful repression and reserve which has become part of the personality to the detriment of happiness.
The novel is a remarkably accurate study of an English type from an immigrant, and of an era of history before the author’s birth. When you factor in Ishiguro’s perfect pitch, and the pervading elegaic atmosphere of sadness he admirably conveys, you have, in my opinion, a great novel.
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A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Well, I have finished this gargantuan novel, and I must admit that I wish I had not embarked on it. It made me sad.
A Fine Balance is the story of four unlikely intertwined lives in Bombay. There’s Dina, a Parsee lady whose doting father dies, leaving her at the mercy of her brother, Nusswan, who get the house, money and power. There are suggestions of sexual abuse. Dina makes an unlikely “love marriage” which gives her the few happy years of her life. Her husband dies while crossing the road to buy icecream for Nusswan’s visiting children
Her school friend entrusts her beloved son Manceck to Dina, while he is in college in Bombay. Meanwhile, two “untouchable” tailors escape the violence and bullying of their village, the casual and traumatic murders of those who do not vote as the landlords tell them to, by coming to Bombay. There their hope drains away. They are evicted, the slums they sheltered in are destroyed.
Dina attempts to keep afloat in her rent-controlled apartment by signing up to produce clothes for a school friend who has an import-export business. She hires these tailors. When their houses are destroyed, they stay permanently. However, on a late evening trip, they are rounded up by the police and forcibly sterilized to keep to official quotas set by Indira Gandhi who attempted to foist Chinese style population control on India’s unruly population with results that are still the stuff of nightmare.
They return to Dina who has now lost her contract. Her lodger’s friend, Avinash who attempted to rally college students against police repressions is arrested and dies in custody. The four of them hole up together for a while. Dina’s landlord attempts to evict her, and with the help of “goondas” (India’s equivalent of the mafia) succeeds.
The novel ends with Maneck returning from the Gulf. He visits Dina who lives with her brother. She is nearly blind and is pretty much their servant. Her sister-in-law gallivants around town, while Dina does the housework. “Since you are here, why keep a servant?” her brother asks. Dina escapes from her grief in mindless domestic work for her brother. The tailors are now beggars. Avinash’s family is crushed, living with regrets,
Dina gently reproaches him for not having written. Crushed by all the sadness he sees, he steps into the path of a train.
I suppose it is a story of the invincible human spirit surviving against all odds, but I find it very sad and depressing. Life is about so much more than survival.
I long for some redeeming vision, some faith, some sense of purpose, some vision of life beyond survival. It is a very sad and depressing novel. It does paint an accurate picture of an era in India’s history which I remember well, though I was a teenager at the time. However, it was a sad and tragic era–like this book
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Annie Dillard–An American Childhood
Annie Dillard–An American Childhood
A magical moment in a writer’s life is when you read a book–and realize the similarities between the writers’ subject matter, and your own raw material. You think, Hmm, I could do this. Then you look at the writer’s structure. Simple, huh? And think, I could do this. And so on. And then you try…
Patricia Hampl’s A Romantic Education was one of the books which got me started on writing memoir. Another was, oddly, Midnight’s Children–with the idea of doing with non-fiction what Rushdie did with fiction. Yet, another on these books which functioned for me like golden keys was
Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood.
Annie grew up in Pittsburgh, and I grew up in Jamshedpur, India. Both of them were steel towns. Both childhoods were intense, though she had a broader canvas and more outlets for her intensities–all the books she could read, microscopes to examine pond life etc. What struck me about Dillard’s book was how she creates a memoir out of the relatively ordinary childhood of a gifted, intense, extraordinary girl.
Short chapter after chapter describes the blisses of her childhood–books, of course; childhood friendships, stamps, rocks, nature, writing poetry, struggles with doubt, eschewing Christianity.
Hmm. Hers was one of the first memoirs I read (as opposed to autobiography) and I still love its structure. So, a memoir can be constructed like this—each chapter of roughly 3 pages devoted to an intense experience or passion–celebrating what Wordsworth called “spots of time.”
Patricia Hampl–A Romantic Education.
Patricia Hampl–A Romantic Education
One of the magical moments in a writer’s life is the moment when you read something with a sense of recognition--I can do that too!! Seamus Heaney describes his unpleasant adventures with frog spawn and tadpoles in a poem called “The Death of a Naturalist.” –the naturalist he now knows he will never be.
However, the converse is also true. Anne Sexton writes about how she heard John Berryman read his poems aloud when she was 28, and how she realized in that moment that she was a writer. Marc Chagall tells how he discovered his artistic vocation while watching a fellow student draw. “How do you do that? ” he asked.” It’s easy, you blockhead,” the student replied. (Chagall, a working-class Jew, studied in a school for Russian children because his mother had bribed the headmaster). “Get a book from the library, and copy the pictures.” The library? Chagall persevered, and, well, became Marc Chagall.
One of my own moments of recognition–of reading something which came very close to my own experience, and what I thought were my abilities to render it happened when I read A Romantic Education by Patrica Hampl. The Catholic family united around enormous meals, with food a shorthand for love, power, competition… The childish sense of snugness in such a family. I still remember phrases several years later, “Come Eat,” the cri du couer of middle Europe. Falling asleep watching the talismanic figure of a wizard on a coffee tin.
Trish describes her Catholic upbringing in a convent school, her love of beauty, her attempts at writing poetry, and then a trip to Czechoslakia, where her grandmother, who worked in Minneapolis as a housekeeper was originally from. She renders golden Praha beautifully– I made a mental note to go there one day, and well, I am writing this from Prague.
However, the Iron Curtain has blown away since she wrote her book, and it is a different, plusher Prague. Poverty is not good for the human spirit, and I am glad the genteel older man who picked us up at the airport and drove us to our hotel no longer suffers from it. The Prague Trish describes with women offering to exchange rings with her as a token of friendship–exchanging worthless trash for her grandmother’s garnet ring; women squeezing favours out of her in exchange for promised sausage (which never appears)– has apparently gone with the wind, and good riddance.
Father and Son by Edmund Gosse: a Memoir of Science and Faith
Father and Son by Edmund Gosse, a Memoir of Science and Faith.
Father and Son by Edmund Gosse is a deeply moving Victorian memoir, full of Devon, the sea, tidal pools, and religion!
Gosse’s father Philip was a distinguished naturalist. (One finds traces of Gosse as Oscar in Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, while Oscar’s father is most certainly modelled on Philip). He had a childhood split between two enthusiams–tidepooling, and the Devon beach, and Christianity, a narrow, sectarian, relatively joyless version of it–that of the Plymouth Brethren.
Gosse was a type of a Eminent Victorian, who lives in and for science, science and faith. He writes in his journal of his beloved wife–“E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica”—an amusing conjunction which Edmund described as demonstrating only the order of events: the boy had arrived first.
Gosse movingly describes the rapture with which his father greeted Charles Darwin’s newly published theories. They made perfect sense to his mind, and his scientific instincts. It was like all the pieces of a jigsaw falling into place. But then he realizes the contradictions with Genesis. He decided if what there is a contradiction between what his knowledge of science tells him is true, and what his knowledge of scripture tells him is true, the former must be wrong. Making himself the laughing stock of the Royal Society, he argues against the theory of evolution.
Gosse, a sensitive, literary teen and his father are increasingly at odds as it becomes clear that Gosse will never follow in his father’s steps and become a lay preacher. Gosse eventually becomes a distinguished literary critic, while, movingly, maintaining cordial relationships with his father, obeying the ancient law of that the bonds of close family relationship are not lightly to be broken, as he puts it.
A charming memoir, and the first psychological memoir to be written, where the main action and drama is within. As such, it is still a very interesting exemplar of the genre of the memoir, the genre of little things lovingly backlit (as opposed to the autobiography).
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
I really enjoyed the spare elegance of this memoir. It is a New Yorker style memoir, much like Nabokov’s “Speak Memory,” and I must say there are worse things than New Yorker style memoirs.
Each chapter was originally a self-contained (and well-paid) essay published in the New Yorker. Together they tell the story of McCarthy’s life. She was orphaned early, and brought up by her mother’s uncles and aunts. They were odd, abusive, particularly disliking the articulate Mary. She describes being framed by an sadistic and weird Uncle, and then being strapped by him.
Finally, a “health and safety issue” leads her Seattle grandparents to rescue her, and she moved from a claustrophobic, loveless controlling world in Minneapolis to an elegant, affluent home in Seattle. Love is still missing; however, she goes on to an elite boarding school she finds stimulating, and where she comes to life.
Mary McCarthy is a brilliant woman (Randall Jarrell’s totally hilarious portrait of Gertrude from Pictures from an Institution is based on Mary McCarthy) and this memoir is probably her best work.Clear, elegant writing, like a well-sanded bit of wood, an unself-pitying story-telling style, lots of telling detail, well-honed sentences which make you sigh, they are so perfect. A lovely glimpse into a vanished world
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