I only read three titles during the TBR challenge, which seems pretty shabby as these things go.
1. The Well Educated Mind - Wise Bauer
2. In the Shadow of the Law - Roosevelt
3. The Splendor of Letters - Basbanes
# 1 and 3 were from the original list and #2 was a substitution. I got distracted, pure and simple. Or else I sought to be distracted. I was reading (but mostly other stuff, based on what is here on the blog...)
Carl V. of Stainless Steel Droppings stopped by and expressed a hope that I would give other works by Oscar Wilde a try [see his comment here]. He recommends Wilde's plays to me and, for what it's worth, Carl, I have read and thoroughly enjoyed many of his plays. I have read The Importance of Being Ernest multiple times since I was in middle-school and have read An Ideal Husband and Lady Windemere's Fan with equal enjoyment.
I rather suspect that I simply need to give Dorian Gray a second read. Based on my brief foray into the context of Wilde's novel, he was making a point and to be fair to him as an artist, I need to review and re-evaluate whether he succeeded. Some interpretations of Dorian Gray propose the idea that Gray makes a Faustian bargain and that Lord Henry is simply the figure of Mephistophiles. As I've thought about this book the past two or three days, I have decided that Lord Henry most likely represents the knowledge we have about the universe based on our own investigations and observations. Basil, as the great artist, represents that which we know in other ways -- what we strive for, what we want to believe, what we hope to be true. Dorian's story (and Wilde's) is best understood as the author trying to work out through fiction the difficulties of balancing the two ways of understanding the world around him. Yes, one needs to be aware of Wilde's sexual appetites and the trouble such behavior represented in Victorian society. That element, only obliquely referred to in the text, is part of what makes Dorian Gray's stunted understanding and self-destruction so vivid. Gray never finds a comfortable way of living in his world (hence his constant need to rush home and reassure himself as to the condition of the portrait) and neither apparently did Wilde ever come to accept his own divided life. It's a most painful book viewed in that context. My negativity was a response to that pain coming through on the page.
I need to know more both about the book itself and about Wilde's experiences as an author. As I understand it, the publisher insisted on Wilde making certain revisions to The Picture of Dorian Gray so as to make the final text more palatable to the marketplace and it would be useful to know exactly what sections were added or modified before making any final judgment. It would make sense for me to seek out a decent biography of the man.
So it isn't really that I don't *like* Oscar Wilde or that I truly believe that Elizabeth Gaskell was a nicer person than he was. They were two people living fifty years apart in time with different experiences of life. She was a vicar's wife and largely comfortable in her situation; he was something else entirely. I need to get a better handle on the man and the context of the novel.
Which raises another question that some of you may find interesting -- should judgment of a novel be based solely on the reader's experience of it, without reference to the context of the work? Or ought we to try to get as complete an understanding of that context as possible, ie. by investigating the author's personal situation and intent? Any thoughts? I'm talking about leisure reading, not reading as part of a formal educational process.
Just a brief blog entry to note that I'm about five or six chapters into Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell. We've already seen death, destruction by fire, and the misery of disease in those first chapters, but the distance maintained by Gaskell in her narrative as well as the inner strength of her characters keeps it manageable. I've encountered one lengthy intrusion of Gaskell's social philosophy (as Didi notes, this is a social justice novel), but I seem to mind it less given her general sympathy towards those on both sides of the class gap. The misery of Dorian Gray and the bitterness of his creator left something of an after-taste, so I wasn't sure I was eager to encounter the grim realities of Victorian England again.
What I'm really saying is that based on the most shallow comparison of two utterly disparate pieces of fiction, Mrs. Gaskell seems to me to be a much nicer person than Oscar Wilde. (The poor man's been dead for more than a hundred years, and yet sadly, middle-class conformists, such as myself, are still abusing him and his work. Artists suffer, you know?)
Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Author: Oscar Wilde (bio at Wikipedia)
Copyright: Originally published 1891, (falls in public domain; full text at Project Gutenberg). I used the Modern Library/Everyman's Library edition, published November 2000.
Genre: Fiction/horror
Length: 254 pages
Summary: This short novel is about the influences that shape one's choices in life (and ultimately one's soul) for good or ill. Art, truth and beauty are personified in the characters of Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wottan, and Dorian Gray. While movie screenwriters have reduced the story to one of a portrait that reflects the corruption over time of a young man's nature, a close reading of the book offers a somewhat bitter commentary on the forces that influence social standing and behavior. Wilde points out how readily we permit socially-imposed constraints to color public perceptions of an individual's level of personal virtue. The Picture of Dorian Gray might serve as a prime example of an author's examination of what John Mullen refers to as 'character' as social phenomenon. As Gray increasingly disregards social constraints and the consequences of his personal behavior on those around him, the secret of the portrait that displays his wickedness becomes an increasing burden, both terrorizing him and isolating him from those whose true regard might have helped and supported him.
Extract: Two extracts are offered below, the first being from the opening page of the book and the other from Chapter 11, about mid-way through the book:
(a) From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.
(b) At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gipsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass and charmed-- or feigned to charm--great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's grace, and Chopin's beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear.
Essentially, this is not for the faint of heart. If you read either of the above extracts (neither of which is longer than two sentences and neither comprising a full paragraph), if such caused you to blanch at the purple prose, the style of this novel will not appeal. I suspect that modern readers will consider that Wilde's storytelling was far better suited to the dramatic form. His epigrams shine out in a play; they get buried in prose.
Also Relevant: I can't tell you why I picked this up -- maybe because it was short, maybe because I'd enjoyed the gothic novels I read last fall and thought I'd like this, maybe simply because I was enamoured of the Everyman's Library binding. Suffice it to say that I did not enjoy the book. I finished it as an intellectual exercise, but not as a particular fan of the work. I was tempted to agree with the Victorian critics who found it poisonous. It's clearly social commentary with some validity to its observations, but the worldview depresses and/or disheartens.
Wilde presents a horrifying and scathing view of the social environment, but offers no recommendations or solutions for finding one's way out of the maze. Based on what little I know of his life, that's possibly due to his own failure to find any acceptable path for living in his society but The Picture of Dorian Grey is still horrifying (and Gray's portrait is the least of it).
I can see why we consider this a classic work. Wilde articulated well the perils of promoting self-actualization without instilling some measure of moderation or constraint - the human ego runs amuck. It doesn't make for a pretty picture.
I suppose we *could* send copies to Paris Hilton and the rest of her crowd. But then like Dorian Gray, I would have to wonder whether I really performed such a service out of good intentions.
Title: Swing
Author: Rupert Holmes (official web site)
Copyright: 2005, Random House (ISBN 1-4000-6158-0, hardcover with CD)
Genre: Mystery
Length: 358 pages
Summary: California, September, 1940, jazz musician Ray Sherwood is in town to play a gig at the Hotel Claremont. His abilities as an arranger are enlisted by musician-composer Gail Prentice, winner of a recent musical competition. Her composition will be played at the Golden Gate Exposition by the Pan-Pacific orchestra and she needs Ray to work out the appropriate scoring for each instrument. Ray, traveling with an enormous amount of (emotional) baggage himself, agrees to at least listen to the work before making any firm commitment, but that's all it takes to thrust him into the flow of an international intrigue. Minutes later, he witnesses a young woman's fall to her death at the exposition. Subsequent events in the story expose him to injury and blackmail, while his past threatens his present connection with Gail. It's all ever-so-RKO- movie stuff. The back story unfolds somewhat slowly in the first third of the book but gives way to more of the mystery in the second third. Puzzles abound as the scope of the crime gets revealed in the final third but the abruptness of the final resolution may leave some readers unsatisfied. Characterization throughout is good.
Excerpt:
I openly studied her face, seeing her in a new light even as the sky grew ominously dark. Take twenty years from her, fill her with giggle water until she's juiced, let an honest smile cross her features and yes, she might have been one of my conquests back then.
"I understand that you might dislike me," I said.
"Oh, you're much too kind to yourself," she said, taking a Pall Mall from the clutch bag she carried.
Also Relevant: The excerpt above should give an indication of the slight resemblance here to a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel. Unfortunately, Holmes' style isn't as literary as Chandler's or as hard-boiled as Hammett's. Holmes' greatest success in this novel is the sharp turns built into Swing. Particularly in the final third of the story, he ends a chapter with one amazing revelation, only to reverse your sense of where things are headed on the opening page of the next chapter.
The book's theme is coping with death and/or the threat of imminent death. The references to Nazi aggression in World War II and the treatment of Jews in Europe is a constant thread in the story.
This was a selection for the Township Library mystery group and they seemed to like this one. One gentleman was familiar with the setting of the novel and brought printouts from Google Maps to show the rest of the group. (The exposition's Treasure Island became a naval station during the War). Everyone enjoyed the swing band sound of the CD, but the claim that one can pick up clues to the mystery by listening to the music was deemed to be *quite frankly* bogus. The entire novel had originally been intended as the basis of a Broadway musical, but the death of the author's daughter infused the music he composed with such sadness that Holmes shelved the project.
Rupert Holmes is an award-winning lyricist and writer for the Broadway stage, including The Mystery of Edwin Drood and that wonderful AMC television series, Remember WENN. He has been nominated for an Edgar this year for his play, Curtains. He is most immediately known to a broader population as the composer of the TV theme song for The Partridge Family and the hit pop song Escape (The Pina Colada Song) which was a major hit back in 1979-1980. Just as most of us would acknowledge that song as fun but not perhaps the culmination of musical achievement, we can say pretty much the same of this book. Enjoyable, but not what one would likely call literature in its highest form.
More: A review from the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times' Marilyn Stasio's review of Swing
I can't recall whose blog directed me to John Mullen's How Novels Work, but I'm actually finding it quite useful. I'm only a chapter or two into it, but it's definitely written at the right level for me and the content is readily applicable to the material I've got before me.
Chapter Two is entitled Narrating and almost immediately he started talking about first-person narratives. Apparently Henry James had rather strong attitudes towards this approach towards informing the reader, calling it 'that accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy'. (see page 42). Mullen goes on to mention how popular this narrative style has become in recent decades. This caused me to pause and mull over the fact that the mystery I'm currently reading this month (Swing) has been told in the first person.
Mullen talks about multiple narrators, such as those used by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone. And he makes reference to the powers of recollection Defoe ascribed to his narrator, Robinson Crusoe; that put me in mind of Gabriel Betteredge, of course, and I wondered whether I ought to have been more aware of the depth of detail recollected in his narrative there.
Essentially, reading How Novels Work has been rather serendipitous in driving me to piece together my reading this month.
My #2 Review for the Winter Classics Challenge
My list of titles for this challenge appears here.
Title: Silas Marner
Author: George Eliot [ biographical info from Univ. of Virginia ]
Copyright: 1861 (Novel falls into the public domain); I used the Borders Classic hardcover edition, ISBN 1-58726-164-2, copyright 2005 Ann Arbor Media Group, LLC. Full text available here.
Genre: Fiction
Length: 172 pages
Summary: Falsely accused of theft and deeply shaken by the resulting distrust in his community, Silas Marner leaves his urban environment and moves to the rural village of Raveloe. Because of his slightly odd appearance and his intense sensitivity, he withdraws from community and approaches life from the perspective of a hoarder, a miser. He is however still an innately honest soul. Circumstances bring a daughter to him and in the interests of taking care of a child, he is forced to interact with his world in new ways.
Conversely, Godfrey Cass is the fortunate son of the local squire. Blessed with most of life's advantages, he makes bad choices. The consequential deceit that follows wreaks havoc on the lives of those around him and, in the long run, robs him of life's emotional treasures that he might have had.
Essentially, Silas Marner is a character study of two individuals whose paths in life direct them to different ends. Eliot contrasts the good and evil in choices made by two very human characters.
Extract: Silas himself was feeling the withering desolation of that bereavement about which his neighbours were arguing at their ease. To any one who had observed him before he lost his gold, it might have seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any subtraction but such as would put an end to it altogether. But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence was broken down -- the support was snatched away.
The above extract from Chapter 10 is actually a fair sample of Eliot's writing. Her sentences do tend to run long with lengthy clauses inserted into them. I can understand why the style is somewhat disconcerting to high school students. (In my day, this was a fairly standard high school assigned text, but I don't think that's true any more.) Those who speed-read may get the high points of the relatively simple plot but I suspect they will miss Eliot's intention in presenting the story. Casual readers may also want to be aware that Chapters 6 and 7 have a good deal of dialect in them which will also slow the pace (although you couldn't ask for a better text rendition of English lower-class existence in another century).
Also Relevant: Eliot is good, no doubt, but I must say that she doesn't speak to me across time the way other writers from the nineteenth century do. She's very realistic in the rendition of her characters which I liked. Silas Marner is the opposite of what many today demand of their chosen heroes; he's not physically attractive and he seems to be incapable of standing up for himself. On the other hand, we see him as a loving single parent which tends to make him more sympathetic as a character. Eliot's explanation of why he withdraws from society and the forces that drive his re-entry into Raveloe society struck me as entirely plausible and certainly, one roots for the underdog. Knowing that he's been badly treated by a number of people elicits some hope in the reader that Marner will somehow succeed against the odds. Having said that, he's not a particularly interesting person; he's basically taciturn by nature and too isolated and/or withdrawn to hold our attention.
Godfrey Cass, by contrast, is well-situated in life, but lacks an internal moral compass. Unsure of his father's approbation, he is deceitful because of his emotional insecurity. This causes him to wreck the lives of those women who have the misfortune of joining their lives to his.
I *think* there are a number of things going on in the background. Eliot may well be presenting the lower-classes and rural life as having a claim to inherent superiority over the life found in urban settings. Otherwise there's no purpose to the narrative framework she employs, showing Marner's life in Lantern Yard before he adopts Eppie and then offering the contrast in his view of Lantern Yard when he returns there late in life with Eppie. I am not sure that I buy any of these views by scholars and critics. There is a repeated theme of violated trust in the tale and the human need we have for that trust from those who we care for and who know us most intimately.
It arrived this week in my part of the country. We went from having days in the 50s and 60s to having the temperature plunge down into the twenties and, with wind chill, even into the single digits. Hence the need for my new dress coat (with which I am very pleased) and which makes me appear to be just as fetching as this sweet young thing.
Travelsmith is a very nice place to shop!
So now I'm sitting inside the house with books and with hot chocolate. Because birthdays, business trips, and a forthcoming Annual Conference can be wearing....[Note that crumpets from Wolfermans help one cope as well. Hot *buttery* crumpets with jam.]
One could waste a whole lot of time playing this. You click the mouse on groups of three or more cubes to make them disappear. Then the blocks rearrange themselves so you can zap some more of them. I think the point is to bring your blocks down to as few as possible. (Turn the sound on and the experience is vastly enhanced...)
