Books, books, books
Aug. 1st, 2012 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
decemberthirtyI have a bit of catching up to do in the book department! Here are a few things that I read while I was away:
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
The first half of this story collection is made up of stories that grew out of Munro's research into her own family history. The book begins in Scotland; then Munro follows her ancestors across the Atlantic and writes about their lives as they settled in Canada. The second half contains stories that seem to be based on Munro's own childhood in southwestern Ontario in the '40s. It's never entirely clear (in either section of the book) what is fact and what is fiction, but I found that I didn't much care.
As a whole, the book is a bit uneven. The title story was the best by far, a long (at 60 pages, more of a novella than a short story), intricately plotted account of the voyage from Scotland to Canada made by one branch of Munro's ancestors. There are quite a few characters, each with their own agendas and perspectives, and Munro does a tremendous job bringing them to life and managing the various tensions between them. The rest of the stories, unfortunately, paled a bit in comparison. But many of them were still good, and certainly worth reading. I liked the book's long-view approach to history, its acknowledgement of the impossibility of ever truly knowing the past, its reflective tone, and the loose structure of many of its stories, more closely tied to the movements of memory than the need for a climax and a denouement.
The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster
Oh, I do love Forster. This book will not replace Maurice or A Room with a View at the top of my list of favorite Forster novels, but I still enjoyed it a lot. Like most everything by Forster, The Longest Journey is a comedy of manners on the surface, and underneath it is a serious investigation of an individual's struggle between succumbing to the safety of conformity and struggling to maintain an authentic identity. Rickie Elliot begins as a Cambridge student and, although he's not the brightest member of his social circle, he is still free to enjoy the relatively loose student lifestyle: writing short fictions about nature, staying up late talking philosophy in his room, and enjoying what seems to be a deeply coded affair with his friend Ansell. After Rickie leaves school, however, it becomes more difficult to stay true to himself--so difficult, in fact, that he loses sight of who his true self even is.
Ever since I read and fell in love with Maurice, it has been hard for me to resist seeing everything else by Forster through the lens of that book. Obviously this is partly due to the powerful effect that the book had on me, but I think it also stems from the knowledge of Maurice as Forster's secret manuscript; it's so easy for me to imagine it throbbing away in hiding, a toothache that Forster could always feel and that influenced everything else he wrote. Of course it might not have been like that, but that doesn't stop me from thinking of A Room with a View as a heterosexual version of Maurice, and now The Longest Journey seems to me to be what Maurice would be if it had been written from Clive Durham's perspective. Perhaps I would be a better reader if I could do a better job of letting each of Forster's novels stand on its own, but in this case I think a good deal of my appreciation for Rickie's pathos came from connecting him to Clive.
So it was not my favorite Forster novel of all time, and the ending was strange and surprising in ways that I won't spoil but didn't exactly love. Still, I love the way Forster wraps me wholly in his world whenever I read him.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
This book was recommended to me by my friend Krista, and the premise sounded fascinating: it's a book-length meditation on the color blue, written partly as a means of exploring what color is and what it means, and partly as a way for Nelson to process an experience of heartbreak. Nelson draws on her background in both poetry and visual art, as well sources as diverse as Wittgenstein, Goethe, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell, Billie Holliday, etc, to help her think and write about her love for and attraction to the color blue, the connection of blue to grief, pain, suffering, and the implications of these abstract ideas when they occur in an actual human life. To that end, Nelson intersperses her musings on color with short snippets about her relationship with a former lover and about a friend of hers who is paralysed in an accident.
See what I mean? It does sound fascinating, and to an extent, it is. But I am just too much of a fiction reader--I need my philosophical questioning grounded in a narrative, or else I feel my attention wandering. So my favorite parts of Bluets were the bits about Nelson's personal life, particularly her injured friend. Those sections seemed beautiful and moving, but much of the rest of it left me cold. I also think I wanted a bit more from the language. Oh well.
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
The first half of this story collection is made up of stories that grew out of Munro's research into her own family history. The book begins in Scotland; then Munro follows her ancestors across the Atlantic and writes about their lives as they settled in Canada. The second half contains stories that seem to be based on Munro's own childhood in southwestern Ontario in the '40s. It's never entirely clear (in either section of the book) what is fact and what is fiction, but I found that I didn't much care.
As a whole, the book is a bit uneven. The title story was the best by far, a long (at 60 pages, more of a novella than a short story), intricately plotted account of the voyage from Scotland to Canada made by one branch of Munro's ancestors. There are quite a few characters, each with their own agendas and perspectives, and Munro does a tremendous job bringing them to life and managing the various tensions between them. The rest of the stories, unfortunately, paled a bit in comparison. But many of them were still good, and certainly worth reading. I liked the book's long-view approach to history, its acknowledgement of the impossibility of ever truly knowing the past, its reflective tone, and the loose structure of many of its stories, more closely tied to the movements of memory than the need for a climax and a denouement.
The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster
Oh, I do love Forster. This book will not replace Maurice or A Room with a View at the top of my list of favorite Forster novels, but I still enjoyed it a lot. Like most everything by Forster, The Longest Journey is a comedy of manners on the surface, and underneath it is a serious investigation of an individual's struggle between succumbing to the safety of conformity and struggling to maintain an authentic identity. Rickie Elliot begins as a Cambridge student and, although he's not the brightest member of his social circle, he is still free to enjoy the relatively loose student lifestyle: writing short fictions about nature, staying up late talking philosophy in his room, and enjoying what seems to be a deeply coded affair with his friend Ansell. After Rickie leaves school, however, it becomes more difficult to stay true to himself--so difficult, in fact, that he loses sight of who his true self even is.
Ever since I read and fell in love with Maurice, it has been hard for me to resist seeing everything else by Forster through the lens of that book. Obviously this is partly due to the powerful effect that the book had on me, but I think it also stems from the knowledge of Maurice as Forster's secret manuscript; it's so easy for me to imagine it throbbing away in hiding, a toothache that Forster could always feel and that influenced everything else he wrote. Of course it might not have been like that, but that doesn't stop me from thinking of A Room with a View as a heterosexual version of Maurice, and now The Longest Journey seems to me to be what Maurice would be if it had been written from Clive Durham's perspective. Perhaps I would be a better reader if I could do a better job of letting each of Forster's novels stand on its own, but in this case I think a good deal of my appreciation for Rickie's pathos came from connecting him to Clive.
So it was not my favorite Forster novel of all time, and the ending was strange and surprising in ways that I won't spoil but didn't exactly love. Still, I love the way Forster wraps me wholly in his world whenever I read him.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
This book was recommended to me by my friend Krista, and the premise sounded fascinating: it's a book-length meditation on the color blue, written partly as a means of exploring what color is and what it means, and partly as a way for Nelson to process an experience of heartbreak. Nelson draws on her background in both poetry and visual art, as well sources as diverse as Wittgenstein, Goethe, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell, Billie Holliday, etc, to help her think and write about her love for and attraction to the color blue, the connection of blue to grief, pain, suffering, and the implications of these abstract ideas when they occur in an actual human life. To that end, Nelson intersperses her musings on color with short snippets about her relationship with a former lover and about a friend of hers who is paralysed in an accident.
See what I mean? It does sound fascinating, and to an extent, it is. But I am just too much of a fiction reader--I need my philosophical questioning grounded in a narrative, or else I feel my attention wandering. So my favorite parts of Bluets were the bits about Nelson's personal life, particularly her injured friend. Those sections seemed beautiful and moving, but much of the rest of it left me cold. I also think I wanted a bit more from the language. Oh well.
