A thought on Emma

Yes, I know there are quite a few crazy Austen fans out there, what with titles like Mr.Darcy Takes a Wife and  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comming out every other year I wouldn’t have guessed!

Seriously, though, I have always enjoyed reading Austen (over and over again) so imagine my chagrin when I didn’t like Emma. Yet, how long ago was that? Well, quite a while, let me tell you. All the back in High School actually (not too long considering I’m only in my 20s), but to be honest, I can tell you I never really gave it fair shot. I skimmed and I made a brash judgment…the size of it was daunting back then so I “got it over with” just to say “Oh, Emma? Yes, of course, I read it.”

So, silly.

Well, you may say I’ve seen the light since then, and nowadays I take my sweet time reading. I’ve realized it’s not the size, the number of pages of a particular book that will necessarily prolong your time to finish it, but the material, the weight and depth of the actual work. It is what you are reading rather than the number of pages you are reading…sometimes, sometimes you just plain and simple can’t get into it. But the short and long of it is, I’ve recently been watching the latest Masterpiece version of Emma on PBS for the past two weeks (it’s done in parts – the last of which airs 2/8/2010) and I find it witty and very enjoyable.  I can’t believe I missed that aspect about the book while reading it! Thus, I plan on re-reading Emma by Jane Austen…though i’ll wait a bit, let the effects of the TV version wear off.

The joys of rediscovering a book! …though it be through one’s own fault that one missed it the first time.

The Girl with Glass Feet Notes

Ida is a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, slowly turning to glass. The transformation starts first with her feet. Having no answers she sets off to where she initially heard of “glass people” – to the island of St. Hauda.

Here, I like the description of the light, of how, Midas, a shy young man who does not see photography as a job, hobby, or obsession but as “simply as fundamental to his interpretation of the world as the effect of light diving in his retinas,”  – of how he chases the light with his camera. The light is made out to be alive, a being, running, eluding Midas.

He turned back to her, wondering if she might have seen it. It was on the rock beside her, beamed through a hole in the clouds.
“Shh!” He spent half a second aiming, then took the shot.

I don’t like magical, fairy-like tales, but this is delicately written (so far), more with an aura of magic, of other-worldliness than the actual existence of it that is mysterious…luring.

Teaser Tuesday

The Girl with the Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

“So,” she said, pushing her straw around the glass, “this man I’m looking for…His father is Japanese. There can’t be many Japanese names on the island. His name is Henry Fuwa.”

Midas looked at her eager, fascinating face and wanted to turn into a wave so he could spill away. (p.30)

A Fair Maiden – Hopeless

It’s hopeless. I really can’t get into it. It holds no interest, no spark or that awe-struck, horrific pull that Oates’ other works had for me, though I have to say I haven’t read much of her work, mostly two or three of her novellas and a handful of her short stories, but those…those had drawn me in like fish on a hook.  Maybe that’s the type of writing I appreciate by her – short fiction.

I can’t really pinpoint it, not a literary expert here, but, for me at least, the story of A Fair Maiden, the characters did not ring true. There was a falseness in it all, an insincere undertone, a “I don’t care, this is just a story, a few empty words strung together” feel about the book – not that Oates felt that way writing it, but as a reader I feel that way reading it. I can’t finish it, I won’t finish it and thus I won’t judge the work as a whole, in detail, or in it’s final form, though not being able or not wanting to finish a work after several attempts speaks for itself.

Sometimes it’s the mood, the level of a reader’s maturity, but after being unable to read people can come back to a previously unfinished work with interest. I’ve experience that, though I don’t believe that will be the case here, but then again, you never know. What is a certainty today becomes an uncertainty tomorrow – happens even with one’s reading experience.

Meanwhile, I enjoyed reading the short story, He Swung and He Missed by Nelson Algren, which I think I’ll re-read to get a better feel for it. Also, I’ll be starting The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw – hope I get into it.

It’s so hard to find a good book, a book that just draws you into itself like a being. Alive.

Reading Oates

So, I’m reading A Fair Maiden. Giving it a fair shot. The few works I’ve read (Rape, “The Skull,” and “The Girl with the Blackened Eye”) by Joyce Carol Oates I’ve greatly enjoyed, but the last work I tried to read by her, Little Bird of Heaven, disgusted me to such a point early in the book that I would not continue. That was a disappointment as I was looking forward to the particular work. What was the turnoff? Oates makes the main character, an adolescent female, sexualize her parents actions towards her. A goodnight kiss from her father is described as “wet” and the incident radiates with sexual tension. Also, there’s a crazed and passionate scene in which the girl’s mother hugs her and…well suffice it to say I couldn’t bring myself to appreciate such descriptions. I closed the book in disgust finding it unnecessarily…perverted.

I don’t know. It’s odd really, but I was able to read Rape by Oates just fine. Sure, there were descriptions in there that were nauseating, but I didn’t not find them wasted or perverted. Actually, I found even the most disturbing details in that work to be important for the work, adding insight and quality to it, but Little Bird of Heaven….I couldn’t even get through the first chapter in that one. Perhaps, it’s the incestuous aspect the turned me off, come to think of it, that’s just it! Thinking back now I’ve realized some of the books I’ve put down unfinished and disgusted had incestuous material in it. The Color Purple, Precious, and now Little Bird of Heaven. No matter their literary quality, fame, and/or importance I simply cannot bring myself to read such material. Everyone has their deal breaker and that, apparently, is mine.

A Fair Maiden, however, does not contain any incestious matierial that I have come across so far and, thankfully, I don’t think the rest of it will either. I’m glad for that.

Stuck – The Return of the Soldier

I finished The Return of the Soldier a few days back. The story, the writing has been lingering in my mind. I think, it’s not there anymore, when out of nowhere I find myself silent and thinking of certain passages, running them in my mind again and again. I want to write about it – something final. Close the book. But then nothing comes to mind. I don’t want to say I like it, that wouldn’t be enough, and I don’t want to say I love it because it would essentially be saying nothing – like I have nothing better to say or can’t be bothered writing something genuine. I don’t just want to write about it.

I can’t seem to…let it go. Does that sound right? Let it go? Can you actually get stuck, hung up on a book? Odd. But possible I suppose.

Here I am. I’m hung up, you see, on this book. I’ll write about it or maybe i’ll let this one be. I think it may mean something to me…not quite sure. I’ll mull over it.

In the meantime, I just fininshed the short story He Swung and He Missed by Nelson Algren. It pulls you in from the very start, but I suppose a short work would have to do that, pull in you early cause it’s only so long. Anyway, it was a good read. About a man’s honor and pride, but you see it wasn’t a harsh or boisterous presentation of his honor and pride, it was silent and gentle. It was actually humbling to read. Left me pondering over the whole thing a bit, but i’ll write about that…later.

Book Alert

Title: In the Company of Angels
Author: Thomas E. Kennedy
Pages: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

When one realizes that an American writer with great acclaim abroad has never had his works reach his country of origin it strikes one as very odd and it is – very odd. How is it that a writer such as Kennedy, who is praised for his uncanny understanding and writing of human nature, experience, and emotion by likes of Junot Dìaz  and Andre Dubus – how is it that just such an exalted author’s work has never published here in the US, in his own country? And now that one of his works is being released here – why has it taken so long? Curious, indeed.

In the Company of Angels, due out March 16, 2010, is the first volume of Kennedy’s four independent novels known as the “Copenhagen Quartet.” The story is of Bernardo “Nardo” Greene, who, while imprisoned and tortured by Pinochet’s regime for teaching political poetry to his students, is visited by angels who tell him that he will have a life again, a life of beauty and love. Thus, Nardo, at the age of forty-nine, comes to Copenhagen to heal and begin life anew. Searching, seeking the same as Nardo is Michela Ibsen, survivor of spousal abuse, lost after the death of a child. Together over a summer the two struggle to heal, forgive, trust, and find beauty in a world, in a life that has proved more cruel than beautiful.

Recommended in a review by Library Journal as a great choice for those who enjoy literary fiction, In the Company of Angels, is a much anticipated novel.

Review Citations:
• Library Journal 10/15/2009

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome is a less sensational work than Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, but Wharton’s writing was, as I was glad to find out, still captivating albeit here with a lesser impact, still, however, with the same lure as when I first read The Age of Innocence. It is her particular brand of the sophisticated, sharp observant writing that is the real draw.

The story takes place in the fictitious, bitter cold Starkfield, Massachusetts and centers around the character of Ethan Frome, who in the prime of his youth gives up his educational ambitious to care for his family’s farm and ailing mother after his father’s untimely death. Frome, though young and restless, is still a man and in the face of responsibilities puts aside his own desire to study, explore the world, and enhance himself to instead settle down and scratch a living out of farming. It is a life of disappointment for him. However, we do not meet Frome in his prime, in his youth. We are introduced to him instead by a nameless narrator who is in Starkfield on business expecting a short stay, which in unceremoniously extending due to a snow storm in which he, captivated by Frome, finding him “the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he [is] but the ruin of a man,” unearths the tragic turn-of-events that stole from Frome his spirit.

Frome, when we first meet him, is fifty-two and physically scarred due to a “smash-up” which left him lame and looking “as if he was dead and in hell.” He is presented as a lonely, tragic man whose spirit has turned inwards within itself not only by his personal tragedy but by the cold of the dull, suffocating, and burdensome life of many a Starkfield winters.

Frome, before his “smash-up”, at which point he is narrating the tale, is married to his older cousin, Zenobia (Zeena) Pierce, who out of need rather than charity takes in her orphaned relation, Mattie, to take care of her in place of a hired girl. However, Mattie is not an adequate worker but Frome has by now become infatuated by her lively innocence, youth, and passion for life. Zeena, sensing her husband’s attraction to the girl, is threatened and spitefully, under the guise of needing a hired girl to help around the house, makes plans to turn out Mattie. Zeena, though does not realize the reason behind the couple’s attraction. Mattie’s personality triggers in Frome his own confined youthfulness, awakening a desire to fully live life, and with Mattie under his roof he glimpses innocent, happy moments, though they are mere daydreams and fantasies.

“He did not know why he was so irrationally happy, for nothing had changed in his life or hers. He had not even touched the tip of her fingers or looked her full in the eyes. But their evening together had given him a vision of what life at her side might be…” (p.98)

Thus, when Zeena unveils her intentions the emotions and chaos they provoke are unexpectedly rash and strong leading to a disastrous and tragic result in which love buckles under the sad circumstances of life and the unlucky Frome ends up doubly burdened.

Ethan Frome is a very dramatic story, perhaps a bit too dramatic for my taste, but that drama serves well for the nature of the tale. Frome is man trapped by duty, responsibility, while within him lives this great desire to enrich himself with the world, with ideas, studies, and art, and when a chance at happiness is dangled in front of him, an internal escape from the cold sterility of Starkfield he longs to live it only to realize, tragically, that life cannot be forced into the way we want it, we cannot all escape. At first I felt the plot line to be silly, however that silliness conveys the childish innocence of the couple in love whose little fantasy succumbs to reality, and it is that very aspect of silliness that makes their reality all the more stark, bold, and tragic.

A short, classically well-written piece that has a great theme and concept.

Teaser Tuesday – The Return of the Soldier

Random page, random lines from The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West.

That meant, I knew, that he loved the life he had lived with us and desired to carry with him to the dreary place of death and dirt the complete memory of everything about his home, on which his mind could brush when thing were at their worst, as a man might finger an amulet through his shirt. This house, this life with us, was the core of his heart. (p. 7)

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

The adolescent life of Marguerite Duras merged with fact and fiction – A girl of fifteen in 1930s Indochina, her memoirs and reflections of childhood, society, family, and her primitive “loveless” affair.

There is no order in The Lover by Marguerite Duras. Just paragraphs separated, each painting small pieces of memories from one life. There is the childhood in poverty with the open and spacious house; the family with the depressed mother, the ruthless but useless eldest brother, and the delicate younger brother; and then there’s “the Chinaman.” The thirty-something Chinese lover who is her sexual outlet, her financial means, and her rejection of society.

We first meet the character, who could be Duras, could be just a fictitious character, or a mix, in old age. She is speaking, showing us in her brief but complex paragraphs how’s she aged, how she had actually aged long before the years and time had taken it’s course.  These first few paragraphs in the book are the core beauty – they are what draw you in. The story then takes off to the sweltering hot days of summer, the quiet and tense family dinners, the shadow that comes over the mother taking her from her children. Then, again, the paragraph changes time and place – jumps, it takes a while, but while you read it the story oddly flows. The girl is on the ferry in shoes she can’t remember, a small silk dress, and a man’s hat. A man approaches her nervously and she goes with him, continues to go with him. Everyone turns a blind eye but still scrutinize her. The mother, the brothers, the teachers, the people on the street – everyone watches this young girl and she in turn watches everyone else watch her.

The Lover is written in deep prose, and in a manner as if someone just stopped, stopped everything and observed the world, the lives of others, and their own life from afar. The person lived, took in air but did not live to experience, rather just to write. Doubtless, there is emotion in the book but even that is a sort of observation.

Writing-wise the prose was flawless. The use of the words, the delivery, the impact…I just kept re-reading several passages.

I could get it wrong, could think I’m beautiful like women who really are beautiful, like women who are looked at, just because people really do look at me a lot. I know it’s not question of beauty, though, but of something else, for example, yes, something else – mind, for example. What I want to seem I do seem, beautiful too if that’s what people want me to be.

However, I have to say I did not particularly enjoy the main character. I found her to be a childish young girl who never really grew up despite her adult-like behavior and insistence that she was wiser beyond her years. That and the girl’s ranting against her mother, for whose affection she seemed starved, became quite tiresome, so much so, that I found myself rushing to finish simply to be able to get it over with.

The prose was worth reading and appreciated, the storyline of the girl’s lover and his emotions toward her are written in a deeply genuine manner, but overall I’m glad to be finished.