I've spent a despairing two weeks with Mary Helen Stefaniak's The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia. My new system is to browse at B&N, Borders, Amazon, and the local icy independent store and select new novels which haven't been reviewed yet. I was damned if I was going to read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story after the pre-publication party heralded them as masterpieces. Franzen doesn't need my review, and my husband has delivered a blow-by-blow commentary on Super Sad. (I probably will like Shteyngart, though, because it sounds vaguely science fiction-y and I'm the one in the family who likes that).
Here's the problem with reading books we dislike: what is our time worth?
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| Mary Helen stefaniak |
I should have known better than to try The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia. I read part of it at the store and rejected it as poorly-written, but it made the September Indie Next List, and I was in the mood to read a corny teaching story. The first 200 pages are charming, if you suspend disbelief in Miss Spivey, an eccentric, moody, liberal new teacher who arrives in Threestep, Georgia, in 1938 and changes everyone's lives forever. Yes, that alone would be enough to put me off under normal circumstances. A completely unreliable character, Miss Spivey introduces the class to the unexpurgated Arabian Nights and alienates some of the conservative students, talks constantly of her travels to Baghdad, plans a Baghdad Bazaar for the school, and then brings "Negro" children into her school one day, apparently determined to get fired. Although she is fondly remembered by the dogged narrator, 11-year-old Gladys Cailiff, she is disliked by many: Mavis Davis, a religious student who hates Miss Spivey, tattles on her inappropriate relationship with a student, Gladys's teenage brother. Then Miss Spivey, upset by the promulgation of her betrayal of trust, disappears during the bazaar; the novel, however, rambles on, and Miss Spivey's influence is long-lasting. May, Gladys's sister, tells a never-ending camel story she learned from Miss Spivey--a long tale that is supposed to mirror the structure one of the Thousand and One Nights. Finally I skipped 50 pages to the last chapter because it became clear I would have to do the editing that was somebody's job at Norton. Why can't mediocre books be limited to 200 pages?
Stefaniak's book is okay, but not good enough for me. This is the kind of book that might appeal, say, to an Oprah reader. Her writing is simple and a bit ham-handed, and the attempt to see the world through the eyes of a Southern child detracts from any semblance of realism. Gladys isn't Scout, and Stefaniak isn't Harper Lee. Stefaniak also adds a dash of Miss Jean Brodie: Miss Spivey is extremely unlikable, but perhaps that's because she is so vain.
Here's what my husband and I have been wondering: why do we finish books we dislike, bowing to the expertise of editors who are afraid to edit, edit poorly, or accept the books through the patronage system. Couldn't better books be published?
Another thing: I do feel I was led astray by blurbs on the back of the book. If you can't trust Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Clyde Edgerton, whom can you trust? Of course they're probably all friends, so what can you do?
P.S. The best thing that has come out of this is that I've ordered a book by Lynne Sharon Schwartz I missed.
P.S. The best thing that has come out of this is that I've ordered a book by Lynne Sharon Schwartz I missed.
7 comments:
Have you read May Sarton's The Small Room? The Slaves of Golconda will be discussing it at the end of the month and as a teaching story I think it will be much more to your tastes.
I've become more and more determined not to finish books I don't like. My time is worth more than that, especially when there are so many good books to be read! If a book is short and not so good, I may end up finishing it, only because by the time I decide I want to quit I'm nearly done and won't be wasting much time anyway.
SFP, I'll look for The Small Room.
Teresa, you're right. Our time IS worth a lot, and it's silly to apply the work ethic to finishing books. Not all books are equal, and certainly not all books are aimed at the same audience. I THINK I just like to write down a book in my book journal as finished. Maybe I should start writing three-fourths and let it count for something...
"why do we finish books we dislike, bowing to the expertise of editors who are afraid to edit, edit poorly, or accept the books through the patronage system."
I try, not always, to finish a book I don't like because a redeeming quality, if found in a spadeful of dirt, sparkles in proportion to the labor I spent unearthing it. Of course, I'm reminded of Spinoza's "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. Which I hope to apply to Ulysses again one day, as I always fail that bad boy at about the midway point, sadly. It's the only book I cannot finish — so far. Cheers, Kevin
If only The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, were Ulysses...
The classic I want to read is Moby Dick. I loved what I read of it, lost my copy, and by the time I found it again had moved onto something else. The whiteness of the whale...
I'm trying to think of books that I finished that I disliked, and I think it's always been in the context of bookgroups or in response to a trusted reading friend's recommendation (sometimes we just don't like the same books). But sometimes that's worked out well for me too; I trudged through Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook but ended up having a fantastic discussion about it that rather up-ended my initial response to the book as a solitary reader. It's not something that comes up often, though, as I manage to find an infinite number of books that I do like.
I agree that the number of good books is infinite.
In Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag, the heroine reads bits and pieces of books and rarely finishes them, ehivh irritates her abusive husband. Erdrich suggests that the woman has control over what she reads, not allowing others to dictate to her what she should get out of a book.
I thought this was an interesting point of view, especially since Erdrich is also a bookseller.
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