Pasternak, Maupin, Morton, & More

BORIS PASTERNAK:  Ann Pasternak Slater, a writer, translator of Tolstoy, and the niece of Boris Pasternak, crucifies the new translation of Dr. Zhivago in her hard-assed review in The Guardian.  Since no one dares to question the superiority of award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, her declaration that their new translation is clumsy and too literal is shocking.

Slater says:

"It's instructive to check Volokhonsky-Pevear's English against the Russian. Its painful ineptitudes can regularly be defended by a Russian source. Yet the original isn't inept. It's simply been badly translated. Pasternak's Russian is packed, concise, colloquial and muscular. Volokhonsky-Pevear's English is prosaic, flabby and verbose. It often renders Pasternak's more philosophical passages incomprehensible. It's far worse than the compact, natural and always lucid prose of Hayward and Harari."

I am enjoying this new translation but do find it dense in parts. Occasionally I skip back to the old Haward-Harari translation.

My main problem, however, is not with the translation but with the design of the Pantheon edition:  the 513-page book is enormous, there is too much print on the huge pages, and I would much prefer, though this sounds trivial, to see more readable print on, say, 1,000 pages.

TALES OF THE CITY:  Armistead Maupin's Mary Ann in Autumn:  a Tales of the City Novel is new on the bookshelves.  I love this series; maybe it's time to reread it.  In this review in The San Francisco Chronicle, the reviewer, however, has a few problems with the characters' age.

"The Castro in 2010 isn't nearly as much fun as Russian Hill in 1978, and Collingwood Street cannot compare with Macondray Lane. To make matters worse, Anna Madrigal in Armistead Maupin's new book, "Mary Ann in Autumn," is old - when we first meet her she is lying on the kitchen floor having what she calls a little snooze - and Mary Ann Singleton is 57. Lord, what would Laura Linney think of that?"

Of course we loved fresh-faced Mary Ann from Cleveland and her rapturous adjustment to the mores of San Francisco in the '70s, but the change is inevitable.  I personally am looking forward to her middle age. 

KATE MORTON:  Kate Morton's The Distant Hours will be out next week.  I loved The Forgotten Garden, a mystery with fairy-tale overtones about three generations of women, which was also partly a homage to The Secret Garden. I am looking forward to this new one.  Publisher's Weekly says:

"A letter posted in 1941 finally reaches its destination in 1992 with powerful repercussions for Edie Burchill, a London book editor, in this enthralling romantic thriller from Australian author Morton (The Forgotten Garden)."

CLEOPATRA:  Reviewers in The Washington Post and The New York Times have praised Stacy Schiff's new biography,  Cleopatra:  A Life , but two other biographies were published earlier this year, Duane W. Roller's  Cleopatra:  A Biography, and Joyce Tyldesley's Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt.  Too many biographies means I won't get around to any of them.  

And that's all for this week, folks!

The Winds of Heaven

I may have read Monica Dickens' The Winds of Heaven when I was a child.  I had the oddest sense of deja vu as I perused this entertaining novel curled up under the blankets--with the heat off as it is in the '50s by day--enjoying an afternoon's dalliance and escape into the undemanding world of middlebrow novels.   Some of the characters and geographical details seemed inexplicably familiar.  Didn't I know the lonely fat salesman of beds who writes formulaic thrillers, the imaginative but solitary girl who is rejected by her parents, and the friendly, garrulous, carousing middle-aged woman who runs the hotel? 

But I didn't remember the main character, Louise Bickford, so I couldn't have read it, could I?  Maybe I mixed it up with D. E. Stevenson's Mrs. Tim Takes a Job or with one of Monica Dickens's other novels?

If you don't know Monica Dickens's work, it's time to get acquainted.  Dickens, a great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, is the author of a humorous masterpiece, One Pair of Hands, published in 1937 and never out-of-print. I laughed over this witty autobiography of her jobs as a cook-general, which she embarked on after getting kicked out of drama school. She also wrote several good novels, my favorite of which is The Heart of London.  She founded a branch of The Samaritans in the United States after many years of volunteering for this depression hot-line and drop-in center in England.

It is no surprise that Dickens the Samaritan can write a sensitive novel about social issues without shrieking about it.  No one cares much about older women, and that is Dickens's point in this quick, slight novel about aging without money. Her portrait of Louise Bickford, an unlikely 57-year-old heroine whom no one cares about, is sympathetic and realistic. 

Loitering in a tearoom while waiting for her daughter to pick her up, Louise muses about the sophisticated Londoners and how she appears to them.

"Louise was always much concerned with how people were thinking of her and summing her up; not knowing that a small, middle-aged woman with stubby features and hair no longer brown and not yet grey usually goes unnoticed."

But someone does notice her.  Gordon, the fat man, begins to talk to her in the tearoom, and he gradually over the course of some months becomes her dearest friend.  She is thrilled to meet a writer of mysteries--which her daughter very much disapproves.

Louise is a widow with no money. No one cares much about her since her husband died.  She lives part of the year with each of her three daughters, moving from one daughter's home to the next, spending the winter in a friend's hotel.  Her officious daughter, Miriam, is a busy, traditional lawyer's wife who wants her children to move in the horsey set.  Eva is a self-absorbed actress in London.  Ann lives on a farm and does little except sit on the couch and read novels.  She snaps at her mother constantly. None of them wants responsibility for Louise.

How exactly does one get free of family?  This is not the age when older women get jobs at McDonald's.  Louise's daughters are horrified when she talks about getting a job at a department store.  It is a class thing. They don't want anyone to know they don't want their mother.  Poor Louise's only real freedom from family, though it is not quite that, occurs during the winters at her friend's hotel, and that is certainly a mixed blessing.  She is an inconvenience, hustled away to live in a tiny, cold back room when the hotel fills up or her friend wants to woo new guests, and she does not make friends in the lounge.

Perhaps the most fascinating event is when Louise's son-in-law moves her into a dilapidated caravan on the farm.  Louise is thrilled, but the winter proves exhausting, cold, and bleak.  She does not become independent, as I had thought she might.

The novel is simple but well-written, the scenes in Louise's different homes vividly sketched , and the characters believable. This is not a great novel, but I enjoyed it.  I have to admit I was disappointed with the ending.  Freedom comes to Louise...well, I'll let you guess.

This is not in the class of, say, Barbara Pym's bleak Quartet in Autumn.  Dickens turns it into a traditional women's novel before the end--but, before that, she makes her point.

The Year of Reading Classics

Please visit my new blog, The Year of Reading Classics.

In addition to writing Frisbee, I have created this new blog to write a diary of my experiences reading classical literature, i.e., Latin and Greek literature.

I hope you'll enjoy my year of reading classics as much as I will.

Salley Vickers, Connie Willis, and What I'm Reading Now

Salley Vickers, a former psychologist and English professor, is a thoughtful novelist whose work may not be everyone's cup of tea. She writes lovely prose yet parts of her amazing novel, The Other Side of You, are necessarily dull to portray the colorless, emotionally crippled  narrator, David McBride, a psychiatrist, and his sad patient, Elizabeth, a failed suicide.   Eventually the novel metamorphoses into a suspenseful tale of psychological catharsis. Every line, dull or intriguing, is illuminating.  This is one of the most perfect novels I've read this year.

David, the narrator, known as Davey, is a moderately successful psychiatrist-psychoanalyst who does not expect too much.  Moderation is his hallmark and he is only moderately engaged by his wife, friends, and profession. This holding back has been an aspect of him throughout childhood and adulthood and seems to distance him from events. Traumatized at the age of five by the death of his older brother, who stepped out into traffic and was killed by a truck backing up, David has never recovered or quite found out who he is.  He reads Jane Austen--often, except in chick lit books, literary shorthand for someone who needs control--and tries to control the professionally forbidden human urges which lead him to wish to console his patients with pats on the shoulder.

"At that time, Jane Austen was my staple reading, a bulwark, I dare say, against my more disturbing professional encounters.  For me to think of someone as a character in Jane Austen was a compliment.  But, truth to tell, psychiatric patients are not really Jane Austen people.  The Austen world has its quota of narcissists, hypochondriacs, low-grade psychotics, and the marginally depressed.  But none would fetch up in a psychiatric unit."

His patient, Elizabeth Cruikshank, originally characterized as a dull, gray, and shadowy woman, eventually dominates the novel.  Pretty but wan, she has attempted suicide because of a love affair which she failed to pursue.  His comments on an index card describe her perfectly:

"Cruikshank, Elizabeth.

Suicide.

Elegant. Guarded.

Azure blue. Swallow.

A hinterland person."

And her story intrigues him.  She meets Thomas, the love of her life, a man she knew many years ago, en route to Rome on some family business.  She is middle-aged and married, unable to leave her husband, but the two soon become a secret inseparable couple.  Thomas is an art historian, an expert on Caravaggio, and the paintings of Caravaggio play a great part in the novel.  Because David, too, is a fan of Caravaggio, whose torturous paintings mean something to both of them, he is able to help her.

And he breaks the rules of psychiatry, as far as I can tell, by spending many hours with her one evening, even drinking whisky together, because he is so intrigued by her.  They do not have a sexual relationship.  Yet there is a strong bond between them.  Davey is a very kind man, loved by his patients, but this relationship helps to heal not only Elizabeth but to heal him.  And what happens is very surprising.  

I loved this book and want to read her newest, Dancing Backwards, the story of a recently widowed poet on a transatlantic cruise to New York.  I love cruise novels:  it all started with Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Hope.

Other reading:  I am finishing Connie Willis's All Clear, the sequel to Blackout.  Willis's ostensible time-travel World War II series reads as much like a compelling historical novel as it does science fiction. In 2060 Oxford historians travel back and forth in time; the main characters happen to be doing research on England in World War II. Her characters are unforgettable and their lives riveting, as they become more and more involved with the past: Eileen, a sensitive, responsible young woman, takes care of hoydenish evacuees in Lady Caroline's mansion and is quarantined for so many weeks when the children come down with measles that she somehow can't get back to 2060; Polly, determined to study Londoners' reactions to the Blitz, finds herself incredibly attached to the other people in the bomb shelter and to friends in a department store where she works; Mike is dropped miles away from Dover and ends up by accident at Dunkirk, where he believes he may have saved someone not intended to be saved and changed history; and Mary as an ambulance driver is uncertain whether she has been given the right times and days of bombings (so she won't be hit) or the false ones the government put out to fool the Germans. All are trapped in the 1940s, and All Clear wraps up the story.

What Else I'm Reading: I'm still reading Dr. Zhivago.  I absolutely love this new translation and hope to finish it soon though, as you can see, I have some other books going too.  I also look forward to watching the movie again.  

The Jolly Experience

"The Class,"an award-winning movie

I'm teaching two adult education classes this fall.  

It is not a career. One teaches these because of a passion for the subject, not for monetary rewards.  I don’t go in 9-5, fill out forms, attend union meetings, or deal with test scores.  My subject was cut long ago from most school curricula.   I talked my way into the adult ed program because I thought academic classes had possibilities.  

But I've had to do my bit quietly.  After my first class last fall, my superintendent was up in arms because I was teaching grammar.  I couldn’t figure out a way to teach a language without grammar, so I went ahead and secretly taught it anyway.   

Vocabulary and grammar are the stuff of life to language teachers.  A certain amount of discipline and analysis is necessary to gain proficiency in a language, and, alas, that particular kind of discipline disappears as cuts to the liberal arts eliminate German, Latin, Russian, and other departments.  Without the study of languages our society loses so much.  The ability to see patterns in words and sentences, to analyze structure and style, to understand other cultures, to discover that some languages very sensibly have words for different kinds of snow, and to enrich one's vocabulary with English derivatives.  Grammar can even influence the way people think.  What happens as we become a society without grammar?  A society that thinks "between you and I" is correct (the correct phrase is "between you and me," because the preposition  "between" takes the direct object),  nominates a book called Who Do You Love for the National Book Award ("Whom" is correct, as it is the direct object of the verb "love"), and says "everybody loves their cars" (the singular form of the possessive adjective", his" or "her," is correct because the possessive adjective refers back to "everybody," a singular form)? 

One of my classes is excellent:  students study, translate, write, and tell me up-front that they want to complete chapters, not do parts.  They understand that a certain amount of boredom and memorization is necessary. Of course, many aren't really bored, are fascinated by grammar, enjoy the readings.  And they do their homework.  It’s not that much, honestly.  But as long as they’re taking a class, they might as well learn something, no?  

 This year the other class, alas, is there to socialize.  I am told that I must put up with it.  They are there to have fun. Don't give homework.  It doesn't matter if they do it.  (But I'm still teaching grammar and...oh no, I'd better not go that route.)

For the first time, I really understand the problem with the public schools.  Standards are kept very low.  Students have a right to be there, regardless of behavior. Instead of raising the level by assuming intelligence, one must assume idiocy. One class can go down the drain because of the incivility of a few.  It's all very well to try to teach an academic subject, but teachers can be kept from teaching by the need to make it  "fun" and to please everybody.  One size fits all--or rather, one size fits none.  

One wonders:  do teachers have the right to teach?  

Zombie Novels

There is some beautiful writing at the beginning of Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth:

"My mother used to tell me about the ocean.  She said there was a place where there was nothing but water as far as you could see and that it was always moving, rushing toward you and then away."

As I paged through the first chapter at a bookstore, I was hoping for an all-ages classics, like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.   I decided to buy it.

It is, as a matter of fact, a zombie novel.  No one let me in on this.  Laura Miller in "Fresh Hell," an article in The New Yorker, promoted Ryan's novel as a Y.A. dystopian novel.  She expressed much interest in this new dark trend and speculated that youth today were more alienated than others. (Go figure:  we had Catcher in the Rye, they have zombies.)  Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games made the list, along with Catherine Fisher's Incarceron and James Dasher's The Maze Runner. 

I enjoyed The Hunger Games and Incarceron, fast, fun novels with likable heroes and heroines and a few real questions about ethics and power,  but Carrie Ryan's formulaic novel is not of that class.  It seemed immediately to escape the author's control, turning into a formulaic zombie movie in book form. Think 28 Days Later crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend--and I am already under the covers.  Except that Mary, the narrator of The Forest of Hands and Teeth, is a rather anemic heroine, trained to use weapons against zombies but essentially too romantic not to lean on boys and breaking down at crucial moments. Ryan doesn't bother much with the style.

The plot is fast.  Mary, the imaginative narrator, grows up in a village surrounded by a fence.  The zombies, known as the Unconsecrated, infect human beings by their bites.  Mary's  mother becomes a zombie on page 7 while Mary is flirting with Harry by the river. Mary becomes an outcast.  The Sisters, a group of secret-loving nuns who know the true history of the world, shelter her for a while after her mother "turns"--her mother chooses to become a zombie rather than to die.  Although Mary is badly treated by the Sisters, she learns that the nuns have contact with the outside and that a young woman named Gabrielle has come in from the outside with news.  Unfortunately, Gabrielle turns into a super-zombie.

if only Ryan had developed the link between Mary and Gabrielle.  Mary very much identifies with this girl-turned-unconsecrated, but, like so much of this book, it leads nowhere.  The book itself goes nowhere.  On the last page, in the middle of an adventure, the book ends.  We have no choice but to buy Book 2 if we want to know what happened to Mary.

This is like a serialized novel of the 19th century, only I paid $9.99 for it and was expecting an ending.  Not even an attempt to wrap it up.

Sorry, can't support this.

A New Doctor Zhivago

Today I got out and rode my bike for three hours, was caught in the rain, but returned relaxed after riding in the country. Enjoy the autumn while you can:  the tree in the back yard is bare, the trees in our front yard are still orange, but it's only a matter of time before the cold sets in.  It snowed a year ago Friday.  Soon there will be no more bicycling:  just weekend after weekend of reading Russian novels. 

I didn't get dressed yesterday because I was reading the new translation of Doctor Zhivago. Consider my enthusiasm equal to that generated by Obama's recent visit to a house in my neighborhood.  I couldn't get dressed for that event, either, meaning that I didn't go. But I got psyched at B&N last week over a new translation of Boris Pasternak's masterpiece by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, award-winning translators.  OhmyGod--and I couldn't buy the book, either, because I was already carrying too many packages for my bike pannier.  But a copy managed to appear in the house.  No protests from my husband, either.

The previous English translation of Doctor Zhivago by Manya Harari and Max Hayward came out in 1958.  It was done in haste after the international excitement fueled by Pasternak's winning the Nobel Prize for his Soviet-banned novel, which was first published in Italy in 1957 and banned in Russia until 30 years later.  Pasternak accepted the Nobel by telegram and then had to decline, pressured by the Soviet Union.  His son finally picked up the prize for him in 1989. 

Doctor Zhivago is both a page-turner--I can read this the way others read John Grisham--and a poetic masterpiece.  I am rapt over many passages in this new translation. Here's Yuri's observation of a foul day in autumn.

“The rain poured down most disconsolately, not intensifying and not letting up, despite the fury of the wind, which seemed aggravated by the imperturbability of the water being dashed on the earth. Gusts of wind tore at the shoots of the wild grape vine that twined around one of the terraces.  The wind seemed to want to tear up the whole plant, raised it into the air, shook it about, and threw it down disdainfully like a tattered rug.”

Here is the same passage in the Harari-Hayward translation:

“The rain poured with a dreary steadiness, neither hurrying nor slowing down for all the fury of the wind, which seemed enraged by the indifference of the water and shook the creeper on one of the houses as if meaning to tear it up by the room, swinging it up into the air, and dropping it in disgust like a torn rag.”

Actually I like both translations. The new one is  more elegant, the old one more concise.  Those who feel Pasternak just won the Nobel for political reasons--my husband tells me that’s the general view--may be very interested in this new, fuller version of Doctor Zhivago.

More later. 

Siberia, Lucky to Be Here, and P.S.

Don't get up.  I'm writing this in lounge position.  See all those pillows?  I'm pretending I'm Oblomov.   Every time my husband sees me, he says, "You're still in your pajamas."  Yup.  There are days like this.  You read and sip tea and finally jump into your shoes just to go downstairs and do the laundry. Then you recline again. I was supposed to make squash soup, but in the end I didn't feel up to it. 

I have four books going, three of which are classics, and I'll report on them later.  One is a real classic (NOT Madame Bovary; I've already given up on that, and, alas, find Lydia Davis's translation even clumsier than Alan Russell's); a 1980s novel by a Big Name; and one extremely good contemporary novel by a little-known English writer.  The fourth, alas, I can't recommend:  a Y.A. paranormal romance I was suckered into buying after it somehow got the lead review on the L.A. Times Books Webpage.  

Because of my susceptibility to well-reviewed bad books, I've begun a moratorium on book-buying.  I'm lighting a candle and flashing the peace sign to publishers in hopes that they'll "release" better books next year.

But here are some books, recommended by various reivewers, that I do want to read.  Perhaps they're good.  

1. Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier. We love Sandy Frazier's books. He's intelligent, funny, and does good research.  Of course, he doesn't know us, but we call him "Sandy" because I interviewed him once and that seemed to be his name.  I obtained his autograph on a copy of Family, a memoir of growing up in Hudson, Ohio, combined elegantly with his family history, which I highly recommend.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle,  "Frazier was in his early 40s when he became 'infected' with a love for Russia. (He is now 59.) After meeting the Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, Frazier became friends with Melamid and his wife, Katya. They invited him to accompany them on a 1993 trip to Moscow - their first trip home after a 15-year exile - and Frazier found Moscow to be merely a gateway drug to Siberia, where he would return time and again over subsequent years, like a hopeless years, like a hopeless addict. "At what point can you say you have traveled in Siberia enough?" he writes.

2.  Keith Richards's Life.  I didn't know who Keith Richards was till I heard that a friend of a friend had had an affair with him. I love the Rolling Stones, never followed any rock stars' lives, and didn't know any of their names (except Mick). I am, however, interested in the survival thing after the deaths of so many:  Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain, and surely one of the Rolling Stones. In the Martin Scorsese film about the Rolling Stones, Richards said he felt lucky to be here.  (And don't I know what he means, in a different way?)

The New York Times  says: "He’s been through quite a lot of phases. And they’re all on the page in “Life”: the Boy Scout (really); the tyro rocker; the lovestruck kid (mad for Ronnie Spector, unbeknownst to Phil Spector); the astonished new star; the heroin-addicted older one; the jaded veteran of countless world tours; and the longtime sparring partner of Mick Jagger....All of this is recounted with straight-up candor, and some of it is easily sensationalized. But the book’s single biggest stunner is a hand-written note on its jacket flap: 'Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten any of it.'”  I'm quite a bit kinder to memoirs than I am to paranormal romances, so I might like it.  

3.  P.S.  Iowa City, UNESCO City of Literature, celebrates Tolstoy, Chekhov, and the UI Russian program this month.  You can attend a public reading of Anna Karenina by the fountain downtown Oct. 27-30, Wed. and Th. 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Friday and Saturday 9 a.m.-6 p.m.  There are also many, many other events, like a staged reading of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and an exhibit of Mauricio Lasansky's "Tolstoy."  I'm cyber-inviting A Work in Progress (who inspired me to reread AK last spring) and Dovegreyreader might as well come, too, since she's reading War and Peace.  I don't live in Iowa city, but it's a lovely town.

Book Giveaway

"Any books to give away?"  That's my husband speaking. He needs stamps, and if there's one sure-fire way to get them, it's to do our cyber-trading of books for stamps.

I have two books to give away.

1.  Saki's The Unbearable Bassington.  I enjoyed this novel, reviewed here, but it it's included in my Complete Saki.  So my lovely Capuchin copy is available. 

2.  Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.  This very popular science fiction book is about time travel to the Middle Ages and a faulty time machine.  Most loved it; honestly, I only read half.  

If you'd like one of these, leave your first name and the title of the book in a comment.  I'll do the drawing on Monday, but if you're the only one then the book is yours.  The book is free, but you'll reimburse me for the postage.  

Bonam fortunam!

Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?

Reading Trollope is like finding a secret treasure.  One wants to share it, but Trollope's very smoothness and modern ease of style masks his subtle brilliance and sometimes renders him mundane in the eyes of the uninitiated.  He is neither Dickens nor Hardy, lacking the former's baroque style and the latter's gloomy poeticism, but his novels are beautifully-written page-turners.   People are vaguely aware that Trollope wrote "classics," but Barchester Towers is the only one universally stocked at bookstores.   So who reads Anthony Trollope?  

Numbers of people online participate in discussions of Trollope.  There are approximately 550 members of two separate Trollope groups at Yahoo, Trollope19thCStudies,  run by Ellen Moody, and Trollope, founded by Elizabeth Thomsen. For those who believe he is not worth reading, these  groups of enthusiasts will strive to change your mind.

At the excellent website, anthonytrollope.com, there is more evidence of reading.  4,756 people have participated in a poll about their favorite Trollope book.  The results?

31.6% Barchester Towers
12.5% Doctor Thorne
13.4% Can You Forgive Her?
16.7% Phineas Finn
10.5% The Way We Live Now
15.3% Dr Wortle's School 

It is a bit of an odd list, but I voted for Can You Forgive Her? And it is about Can Your Forgive Her? I want to write today.  

This will almost surely be my desert island novel.  It's very rare for me to want to start rereading a book the minute I reach the end.  Yet I feel I can't spend too much time in the company of heroines who can't forgive themselves: Alice Vavasour loves her Independence so much that she jilts John Grey, primarily because she can't face living in the country and hopes to support liberal politics; Kate Vavasour, Alice's cousin, who undermines Grey and tries to push Alice into a marriage to her brother, George, who is running for Parliament and needs Alice's money; and  Glencora Palliser, perhaps the wittiest and most original,  coerced by her family to marry a man she doesn't love, Plantaganet Palliser, but standing up for herself afterwards.

Known as one of six political novels, the first book of the Pallisers series, Can You Forgive Her?, is mostly about love.  But it also deals quite candidly with politicians who cannot handle their personal lives and who treat women badly.  The charming George Vavasour wants Alice's money. He is running for Parliament and can't raise all he needs for the campaign.  Some years earlier, he and Alice had been engaged.  She broke it off after he had an affair with another woman.  But now that she has broken her engagement to John Grey, he decides to take another shot.  His sister, Kate, who loves them both dearly, is a full-time campaigner for this marriage.

George's relationship with Alice is frightening.  She agrees to marry him, liking the idea of staying in London and being a political force.  But it soon becomes clear that he cares only about the money and when he becomes angry he physically abuses her.  Later, in another fight about money, he breaks his sister Kate's arm.  The two women are shocked, terrified, and  break off their relationships with him.  Alice cannot forgive herself for having broken with John Grey, and Kate cannot forgive herself for having brought George back together with Alice.

Plantaganet Palliser, the husband of Lady Glencora, a distant cousin of Alice,  is also a politician.  Unlike George, he is not abusive.  He is simply cold.  The relationship with Glencora means nothing to him except in terms of politics and insofar as she may be the mother of the heir.  Parliament is his whole life.  He is an up-and-coming young politician.  But Glencora longs for Burgo, the young scapegrace whom her family had prevented her marrying, and it is not until Plantaganet is forced to confront this fact that her love for Burgo is real that he finally changes his manner and courts his wife.  

Trollope's women in Can You Forgive Her? are strong and fascinating.  Oddly, the men are gray.  Even John Grey, Alice's lover, though handsome and decent, seems a bit lacklustre, and it is easy to see how she mistook George's vivacity and humor for kindness and love.  

This novel is beautifully written and compelling.  A perfect book for Trollope "newbies" to start with.

The Writing on the Wall

Lynne Sharon Schwartz's novel, The Writing on the Wall, escaped my radar in 2005. There was a flurry of 9/11 literature:  Ian McEwan's  Saturday and Jay McInerney's The Good Life, both of which were stunning and sad, and many, many more I didn't read.  

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I was tired of the incessant chronicles of the event.  A zillion and one journalists wrote books.  All that TV jingoism.  The televised concert for the firemen.  Yes, Paul McCartney, Bon Jovi, and the Who.  Writers expressing their reactions in The New Yorker.  

But novelists often tell the truth in a more effective way than journalists, and I was finally ready to read Schwartz.

In Schwartz's superb novel, the main character, Renata, has an emotional breakdown after witnessing the destruction of the World Trade Center. Renata is a librarian-translator who has kept emotions under wraps for years.  Her twin sister, Claudia, died when they were teenagers after the uncle with whom she had had an illegitimate baby left her to drown in the river.  A few years later Renata's father committed suicide.  Then her mother went into a mental hospital.

Renata, the sole (sane) survivor of the family, was left literally holding the baby, her sister's illegitimate daughter, who had been given away informally to a mobster couple.  When the couple had to run from the police, they left the baby with Renata, who was working as a barmaid in New York.

Something so terrible happened after that that I'll spare you. The trauma explains much about Renata.  But the point of the 9/11 disaster is that Renata's quiet life finally explodes, and her carefully edited presentation of herself to Jack, her boyfriend, falls apart.  The lacunae in her confidences become apparent when her exaggerated attachment to a few needy children in the aftermath of the event--an orphaned baby and a lost girl who cannot speak--underscores her mourning.  The terrifying disaster deranges her.

Of course the plot is not all.  It is Schwartz's skillful, lyrical writing that makes this novel compelling.  She manages to describe the terrorism in an understated style that conveys the shock and the horror.  And she shows us Renata's metamorphosis--the turning of her mind inside-out during the horror--from a controlled woman obsessed with language to a sad person who briefly loses her sanity.

"After the pillar of smoke came a hurricane of paper.  The sky rained paper, and later some of the papers would be picked up as relics and sorted out--office memos, bills, jottings, computer printouts, resumes, stock reports, the daily menu of corporate life mingling with private scrawled hieroglyphics--while other papers would be left lying in the ash to devolve back to pulp under trampling feet and the wheels of sanitation trucks.  Any other day the papers would have been a treasure trove for Renata, with her collections of linguistic artifacts, of demotic speech, examples of brain and tongue company.  But not today.  Not hurricane day."

Schwartz is one of our best contemporary novelists.  Perhaps her work is overlooked because it doesn't employ the pyrotechnics of Jonathan Lethem (actually my favorite American writer) or the poeticism of Marilynne Robinson.

But I do urge you to look her up.  My favorite of her novels is Disturbances in the Field.

New Translations and a Note

I cannot translate Catullus, nor can anybody.  Peter Green's bilingual edition, published by University of California in 2006, is the best I've seen, but Green was smart to include the Latin.  Although one can find readable translations of Virgil and Ovid, Catullus's lyric poetry must be read in Latin.  The flexible Latin word order defines the tone and meaning. Latin words can be placed anywhere in the sentence; only the endings change to show the sense.  These effects can't be duplicated in English, which depends on a rigid word order. The two languages are like oil and water. 

Catullus was one of the Novi Poetae--"new poets" of the first century B.C.--who brought the Greek meters of lyric poets such as Callimachus and Sappho into Latin literature.  His poems were short and personal, as opposed to the  historical epics favored by earlier Romans.  And his friend Cornelius Nepos, a biographer who apparently did something similarly radical in prose (his lost book Chronica was three volumes), encouraged him.

Here is my literal translation of Catullus 1, the dedication.  I tried whenever possible to duplicate the word order.  

"To whom do I present the elegant new littlebook* [*one word in Latin]

polished just now by a dry pumice?

Cornelius, to you, for you were accustomed 

to think my trifles were something,

when you alone of the Italians dared

to explain all time in only three volumes.

These volumes were learned--by Jupiter!--and laborious.

So take for yourself whatever or what kind of a little book this is. And, O protectress Muse, may it last longer than a single age."

How on earth does one convey the sound, playfulness, and double meanings of words? Libellum (meaning little book), placed at the end of the first line, describes the size but certainly not the quality.  It is a charming false modesty, which the reader appreciates.  His poems are dazzling.  Expolitum (meaning "polished" or 'smoothed") falls at the end of the next line, and refers both to the smoothing of the ends of the scroll and to polishing the style.  The phrase arido modo pumice precedes expolitum, and means literally "by a dry just now pumice."  The "just now" between the adjective and noun indicates just how fresh the process is.  Catullus wants us to think this poetry is tossed off but he also admits it is polished.  He also refers to it as nugas--trifles.

And what of the two lines, Quare habe tibi quidquid hod libelli/qualecumque, quod,... ("So take for yourself whatever and what kind...")  What can one do with all the q's?  

  Those of us who have taken comp lit classes have agonized over translation.

That's why I'm heartened by the translation of prose classics.  The new translation of Dr. Zhivago by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is available today in bookstores.    I was excited to see it, but I was simply so laden with packages that I couldn't fit it into my bike pannier. I have the old translation in a beautiful Everyman edition--hastily done, according to Pevear--and it has always been one of my favorite books. Pevear and Volokhnosky have a good track record.  I love their translation of Anna Karenina, though the Maude translation is even dearer to my heart.

I am looking forward to reading Lydia Davis's new translation of Madame Bovary. There has been a surge of online enthusiasm for Flaubert, and the new Bovary was even promoted in Book Page, the free paper.  The edition is beautiful, with a detailed historical and literary introduction and notes, and Davis'  note on translation is fascinating: she looked long and hard at eleven other translations. My husband has read Madame Bovary in French and was not impressed, but perhaps I'll finally understand the fine prose of Flaubert.  I'm hoping that Lydia Davis will come through for me in a way that other translators have not done.

NOTE:  Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, recently recommended The Aeneid as a favorite book.  I don't have a Facebook page and I've never really understood what it's for, but I was thrilled that he mentioned The Aeneid in an interview in The New Yorker.

My students, however, were more cynical.  They know Facebook, know his reputation, and seemed to think it was some kind of PR trick.

The New Yorker asked Zuckerberg about Ender's Game, a sci-fi novel he had recommended elsewhere as one of his favorites.  He said:

“...there are definitely books—like the Aeneid—that I enjoyed reading a lot more."

Five Books I'm Inspired to Read

Since I'm busy finishing an excellent novel at the moment (Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall), I decided I'd eschew a review tonight and post a quick blog instead about five books I want to read, inspired by two excellent bloggers and three newspaper reviewers.  Of course I don't have any of these books, so I can't start them tomorrow. And I should cut up my credit cards so I can't start them the next day, either.

1.  Nonsuch Book is hosting a discussion of Lydia Davis's new translation of Madame Bovary.  Since Nonsuch is neither a gusher nor a publicist, we can probably trust her take on MB.  I've already read two translations of Flaubert's novel, and though I don't share Nonsuch's enthusiasm--I'm definitely more an Anna Karenina person--I am game to try Davis' translation as soon as I've finished Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?  

2.  Guy Deutscher's Through the Looking Glass:  Why the World Looks Different in Different Languages, reviewed in The Washington Post.  "Guy Deutscher confidently asserts that a language influences how its users perceive the world. The book is a thrilling and challenging ride, and in the end you may find yourself agreeing with Frenchman Étienne de Condillac that 'each language expresses the character of the people who speak it.'"

3.  Will Self's Walking to Hollywood, reviewed in The Spectator.  This humorous memoir of his walks in Canada, Britain, and the West Coast of the U.S. annoys the reviewer.  He complains of an imaginary talk with Scooby-Doo, and perhaps that is going too far, since I don't exactly know who Scooby-doo is.  But I'm a fan of Self, I enjoyed The Butt and How the Dead Live, and we once drove 2 hours to a reading in Iowa City only to find it was canceled.  

4. Roald Dahl's Boy and Going Solo, reviewed by Reading Copy Book Blog, the blog of Abebooks.  "The two books document his own childhood at boarding school as well as his time working in East Africa for Royal Dutch Shell and flying with the RAF out of North Africa in WWII."  I'm very fond of Dahl's short stories and look forward to trying his autobiographies.

5.  Andrea Kremer's Nightshade, reviewed by The L.A. Times.  "Although "Nightshade" is likely to be devoured by Twi-hards, there's a lot more to enjoy about this new series debut from young adult author Andrea Cremer than weak-kneed romanticism and its similarities to the vampires-and-werewolves blockbuster."  I liked the Twilight books and would probably enjoy this.  I have, however, some other science fiction and fantasy novels to read first.