Kipps by H. G. Wells

I'm a fan of H. G. Wells' realistic comic novels about lower-middle-class heroes. The History of Mr. Polly is his most famous; Kipps is my favorite.  Don't get me started on The Time Machine.  I'm just not interested in his science fiction, though I'm usually interested in EVERYBODY'S science fiction.  But listen to him on socialism. 

"Let us be clear about one thing:  that socialism means revolution, and it means a change in the everyday texture of life.  It may be a very gradual change but it will be a very complete one.  You cannot change the world, and at the same time not change the world.  You will find socialists about, or at any rate men calling themselves socialists, who will pretend that this is not so, and who will assure you that some little jobbing about municipal gas and water is Socialism, and backstreet intervention between Conservative and Liberal is the way to the millennium.  You might as well call a gas jet in the lobby of a meeting-house the glory of God in heaven."

Perhaps I should get back to my socialist roots. 

His 1905 novel Kipps is a masterpiece.  Henry James also loved it:  in 1909 he called it "the best novel in the last forty years."  Think David Copperfield crossed with fairy tales and socialism.  But Wells's writing, unlike that of the expansive Dickens, is spare and almost contemporary.


Artie Kipps, the hero of Kipps, lives a nearly idyllic life in a small town, New Romney.  His toy-shop owner uncle and aunt are sometimes cranky, but he and his best friend Sid play enjoy rich imaginative games of Red Indians and shipwrecks. 


At 14 he is yanked out of school and sent to the city to be an apprentice to a draper.  And for awhile the novel is not comical at all. Wells, who also worked in a draper's shop, portrays the world in painful detail.  Kipps's boredom and bewilderment as he faces the long hours at this unfulfilling job are heartbreaking.  His seven-year apprenticeship rewards him with dreary meals of bread and margarine and a bed in a dorm.

"His round began at half-past six in the morning, when he would descend, unwashed and shirtless, in old clothes and a scarf, and dust boxes and yawn, and take down wrappers and clean the windows until eight.  Then in half an hour he would complete his toilet, and take an austere breakfast of bread and margarine and what only an Imperial Englishman would admit to be coffee, after which refreshment, he ascended to the shop for the labors of the day.  Commonly those began with a mighty running to and fro with planks and boxes and good for Carshot the window-draper, who whether he worked well or ill, nagged persistently, by the reason of chronic indigestion, until the window was dressed."

And so it goes on.  After his apprenticeship, he stays on.  What else is he to do?

A playwright runs his bicycle into Kipps and the two become friends.  The playwright gets him fired--they get drunk and Kipps misses his curfew--but then finds an ad in the paper searching for Kipps, who has inherited a fortune from his "natural" grandfather.  

What will happen to Kipps?  Society, parasites, and a lowering of self-esteem.  But I will tell you right now:  you can trust the members of the lower middle class.  It is the upper- and genteel middle you have to watch out for.


This is one of those "un-put-downable" books.

Kipps is in print, and there are also many used out-of-print copies for sale. You can read it free at Project Gutenberg.  

Does anyone know a good biography of Wells?  What a fascinating character.  By the way, he had affairs with three of my favorite writers, Elizabeth von Arnim, Rebecca West, and Dorothy Richardson.  Apparently he was irresistible.

The Great Outdoors and What I'm Reading Now: Mary Gordon's The Love of My Youth

I've been outdoors the last few days, gardening, soaking up the sun, and taking long bicycle rides.  Well, it's really summer today:  it's 88 degrees as I write this.  I went to the woods today and was mesermized by the blooming redbuds.  Then I got lost in a book.  Mary Gordon's well-written new novel, The Love of My Youth, should have been a perfect companion. 

Except there's one thing:  I often am bemused by Catholic fiction.  Gordon is famous for her Catholic novels, but I find something slightly saccharine about her Catholic characters. Although she explores the gritty side of sexual relationships and the challenges of contemporary Catholic life, her blunt realism doesn't resonate with me.  I admire her lovely writing, but her books never click with me.  There are some interesting parallels between Gordon's Catholic women and Philip Roth's Jewish men. 

The plot of The Love of My Youth is simple.  Two former lovers meet for the first time in 40 years.  Miranda, an epidemiologist, is in Rome for a conference, and Adam, a musician, is living with his daughter, a music student.   At a dinner party, the hostess's sadistic mother-in-law attacks Miranda's liberal politics, and Miranda accidentally crushes a wine glass with her hands.  (The wine symbolic of...something religious?)  Adam helps her clean her cuts, and the two leave together before dinner.  They decide to sight-see together for a few hours a day during the remainder of their stay. They are not interested in renewing their love affair--or at least not in the four-fifths of the novel I've finished--but the encounters do help them remember both good and painful events from the past. 

The structure of this novel is ambitious and daring:  part travelogue, part philosophical dialogues, and part flashbacks to their young love.  The chapters are headed by date, place, and topic of conversation.  For instance, one chapter is titled:

Wednesday, October 10

The Villa Borghese

"What Have We Given up for an Ideal of Health?"

Miranda, a convert to Judaism, is impatient, practical, and sometimes unkind to Adam.  She has spent her life working in public health, married to a man from Israel who fought in the Six-Day War, and raising two sons in a healthy, unhysterical atmosphere.  She has never quite quelled her anger at Adam for the end of their affair. 

"How ridiculous, she thinks, keeping alive the grievances of nearly half a century, even the irritations of the day before.  With a new acuteness, she feels in the bones of her back the two words 'time' and 'past.' She thinks of a hymn her mother sang sometimes...did her mother miss churchgoing, was it another of her capitations to her husband..."

Adam, a Catholic, is patient and brooding, regards himself as a failure, but is very generous with his time and knowledge.  Their conversations revolve around the art galleries, restaurants, churches, fountains, and other sites they visit.   And then they take a philosophical bent.


The travelogue is interspersed with flashbacks to their past, so we see the whole span of their love affair.


There is a Latin error.  When will copy-editors learn to dial 1-800-LAT-INEM (LATIN EMergency)?  No, honestly, they should contact me. 

Miranda sees the Latin words Vitae laudae on a sculpture.  She modestly insists she's forgotten all her Latin, and, yes, that's true, because there is no such word as "laudae."  Miranda thinks the phrase means "Praise life."  Is Gordon thinking vitam laudate (which means "Praise life")?   Or is she thinking vitae laus (praise of life), or perhaps vitae laudes (praises of life?.    Did the copy editor make the error?  

They should really proofread these phrases.

The High Trestle Trail in Iowa

The High Trestle Bridge in Iowa

We missed the grand opening of the High Trestle Trail last week. Well, we missed it on purpose.  We don't like cycling in crowds, even if it means festively drinking beer and eating pie along the way.  The celebration in five towns along the 25-mile Iowa trail--Ankeny, Sheldahl, Slater, Madrid, and Woodward--coincided with the completion of a bike-pedestrian bridge across the Des Moines River.  The bridge is 13 stories high and half a mile long, decorated with artwork based on the area's coal mining history.  Two towers at each end sport gray ceramic stripes meant to evoke coal seams.  And overhead are rusty steel frames, which I hear symbolize the support cribs found in coal mines.

Today the trail was fairly crowded:  people who missed the grand opening want to cross the bridge.  We rode from Slater to Woodward and back--25 miles--and stopped in Madrid (pronounced Mad-rid, with the accent on "Mad"), a nice little town which now sells ice cream at The Filling Station as well as at the Git 'n' Go.  Someone is also refurbishing a quonset hut, soon to open as the  Flat Tire Lounge.  We know this will give the trail an edge:  Iowa bicyclists love drinking along the trails. 

My husband gave directions to a couple in a pickup truck trying to find the bridge.  I heard much muttering about 210, the highway, and there was much gesticulating, though my husband was guessing (we were on bicycles).   They never seemed to arrive, so we can only suppose they got lost.   

On the bridge bicyclists and pedestrians hung out together and chirped over the bridge rails.  There were placards about coal mining history, birding, and prairie fires, which I didn't read, but will read next time when the novelty has worn off.   


You might want to know what book I read on our break on the trail, because it's that time of year.  This is it, guys:  Margaret Drabble's The Needle's Eye. 

My copy is falling apart and I might have to invest in a new one. 

Ree Drummond's Pioneer Woman Blog

Ree Drummond of the Pioneer Woman blog

Ree Drummond is to housewives and homeschooling moms what columnist Erma Bombeck was to our mothers. She might be your role model.  She might be your nemesis.   Some love her $1 million blog, Pioneer Woman.  Others satirize it.

Here are a few of her tips for blogging:

 Be yourself.
Write in your own voice.
Write as if you’re talking to your sister.
Unless you don’t get along with your sister.
Or don’t have a sister.

It's very cute, you have to admit.

I read about her successful blog last winter, probably in The New York Times.  It began as a regular blog in 2006.


Then it got popular.  It became a big business.


She writes about housework, her family, ranching, cooking, and homeschooling. It is now organized into six blogs, and the site is honestly a bit confusing for neophytes.  It is divided into Home, Confessions, Cooking, Photography, Home & Garden, and Tasty Kitchen, and I'm not sure WHAT I want to read.  It is an online diary, with ads, giveaways, and many photographs.  It gets 23.3 million page views per month, according to The New Yorker, and she made approximately $1 million one year.

She reminds me of an American Dovegreyreader, without book chat.  Dovegreyreader has Bookhound (her husband), the Tinker (I don't know why he's called that, either), the Kayaker, Offspringette, and a (now dead) cat named Rocky.  Pioneer Woman has Marlboro Man (her husband), Charlie (a basset hound), multiple animals, Juice Box (her toddler), the Kids, and Mike (her brother). 

Marlboro Man

What struck me about Pioneer Woman when I first visited was the butt shots.  Perhaps I went on a slow day.   Here is Marlboro Man's butt in jeans.  She writes:


"I don’t own a pair (of Wranglers jeans) myself, but I know someone who does. He’s six feet tall, has bulging biceps, and I’ve had four of his children. I’ve considered slipping on a pair of his Wranglers before—whether it be because I was short on durable work jeans or I was going to some costume party dressed as a man—but I’ve always stopped short because I was afraid to see how well they fit me."

She's quirky and funny, fascinating to some, but a little goes a long way with a feminist non-mom like me.  She is an editor's dream, because her cookbook and memoir have been best-sellers.  She now also has a children's book about her dog Charlie!  The blog is a modern woman's Western about a hip mom.  But, much as I like the pictures of cows with new calves, I don't frequent the blog.  She is of a different generation:  chick lit-ish humor.

There is a fascinating, not completely flattering article in The New Yorker about Ree Drummond this week.   The article also alerted me to an extremely cruel and unfunny blog called The Pioneer Woman Sux.  Why anyone would stalk and hate Ree Drummond so viciously is beyond me. At our house, we don't read EITHER Pioneer Woman.

Margaret Drabble's A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

Margaret Drabble is one of my favorite writers.  I was delighted to learn a collection of her short stories would be published this month.  I tracked down an uncorrected proof of A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman:  Complete Short Stories some months ago. Then I promptly put it aside--typical--and didn't read it until it was released this month. 

Some people get Drabble; some people don't. I'm a Drabble addict and regularly reread her novels, or reread parts of the ones I know too well.

In her early light novels, charming comedies, she writes about young women of the 1960s.  A university student gets pregnant after having sex once, confident bachelor girls learn that they can run with an arty crowd even when stuck in humdrum jobs, and young married women have doomed affairs.   Although these are not Drabble's best, I am fond of them.  I was surprised when a good friend, and a great reader, said she thought Drabble was sexist, and that her heroines underplayed their intelligence for the sake of the men. I don't read them that way at all.

Drabble's work became more serious in the '70s and '80s.  Six of her best books, The Realms of Gold, The Ice Age, and The Radiant Way trilogy, are elaborate novels of social realism, interweaving the stories of successful women  with flashbacks about their class origins, the relationship of place (London) to success and revisitings of hometowns, their messy marriages, faithful love affairs, and jobs.  There is no ideology that defines them; the characters are mostly liberals, but Drabble is not writing to proselytize. She records the the times, analyzing the economic , political, and sociological trends that define them.


In the '90s her novels became shorter, but equally intense.  My favorite of the shorter novels is The Seven Sisters, about a divorced woman who moves to London (London is always freer), takes a Virgil class, and frees herself through Virgil's Aeneid and a trip retracing his steps (which I wrote about here).

Drabble's new book, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman:  Complete Short Stories, is surprisingly effective.  I think of her as a slow, fastidious developer of long narratives, but she pares these down and they are powerful.  The themes are love, travel, loneliness, voyeurism, marriage, adultery, and work.  In "A Voyage to Cythera," a young woman who loves to travel cannot connect closely with anyone. She lives for the next hill, or the next town.  Then a man on a train asks her to address an envelope and mail a letter to a woman. She realizes that much is at stake, that he is in love, and that he does not want the woman to recognize his handwriting.  She wonders about his strange passion.   Later, she walks to the house, where she sees through the window two happy women talking and preparing a meal for their children.  The everyday scene is the most enchanting she has ever seen, and has an epiphany.  

 In "A Success Story," a famous playwright has a chance to meet her favorite writer, a playwright she has idolized since she was 16. She is nervous beforehand.  At the party he is drunk and flirts with her; they leave together, though she makes it clear that nothing will happen.  This is the kind of Drabble situation we know and like so well.  What happens is not what we expect.

In my favorite story, "Faithful Love," the beautiful, unhappy, but practical heroine runs into her old lover at a cafe. There is romance, and there is suspense.  What will they say to each other?   But what I enjoy most are the heroine's everyday.  musings.

"She had done enough walking, she thought--from the Old Street tube station to the place where they had made her new tooth.  She ran her tongue over the new front tooth, reassuringly, and was slightly ashamed by the immense relief that she felt at being once more presentable, no longer disfigured by that mutilating gap.  She had always made much of caring little for her beauty, and was always disturbed by the accidents that brought her face to face with her own vanity--by the inconvenient pimple, by the unperceived smudge on the cheek, by the heavy cold."

Mrs. Miniver

Frazzled after a long day of work, we drove 40 miles to return our books to the university library.  We didn't stay long, because it was finals week:  groups of students chatting in the lobby, swilling diet drinks and eating cereal, rummaging through backpacks, staring at computers and iPads, an occasional book open, and a general air of panic. 


I almost checked out Jan Struther's Try Anything Twice:  Essays and Stories, but then I realized I hadn't read Mrs. Miniver.  Some people swear by Mrs. Miniver. And it wasn't there.   Serendipitously, when I got home, I surfed the net for a Jan Struther web page:  I found that you can read The Collected Works of Jan Struther online here. 

So I'm reading Mrs. Miniver.  Jan Struther, who wrote for Punch magazine in the 1930s, was recruited by Peter Fleming, an editor for The Times, to write a series of columns about "an ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life - rather like yourself". The  columns were collected into book form in 1939.  And Mrs. Miniver was made into a movie with Greer Garson in 1942.


I'm charmed by these slight sketches.  In a parallel life, I would love to be Mrs. Miniver, who is the contented wife of an architect, with three comical children (one at Eton), servants, a house in town and the country, friends, charming Christmases, funny dinner parties, and leftist leanings.  She has a sense of humor, but also is sensitive to nature.  The sketches are almost like diary entries, proceeding chronologically through the seasons, a mix of family events and nature description.   My favorite essay so far is "The New Engagement Book."  It is very fitting that Mrs. Miniver, Struther's alter-ego, should be fascinated by the diaries in a stationery shop.

"As usual, she had meant to buy one before leaving London for Starlings; but as usual, there hadn't been time.  It is a thing, she knew, which must never be done in a hurry.  An engagement book is the mos important of all those small adjuncts to life, that tribe of humble familiars which job along beside one from year's end to year's end, apparently trivial, but momentous by reason of their terrible intimacy."

She browses through several planners.

"One was bound in crimson leatherette, one in brown calf, and one in green lizardskin.  She rejected the leatherette at once.  In a spasm of post-Christmas economy, she had once bought a very cheap engagement book, and it had annoyed her for twelve months; everything she put down in it looked squalid."

The beautiful green lizardskin is too expensive, so she compromises with the brown calf.  But then on the bus...  


Mrs. Miniver is an excellent mother.  The Minivers's Guy Fawkes Day is idyllic.  Christmas is also good, as Struther recounts the delight of older generation in the children's pleasure in their gifts.  

But, typically, I'm less interested in her life as a mother than I am in her as an individual.

Her musings and meditations are sometimes slightly offbeat.  She manages to describe a visit to the dentist entertainingly.  She satirizes her attempts to answer him when he asks if she's all right.

"Eye aw eye," said Mrs. Miniver.  Oh, quite all right.  Grand.  I love it.  This is just my idea of the way to spend a fine afternoon in early spring.

Halfway through the book, World War II is beginning.  Mrs. Miniver is horrified by the news of Hitler. Her lovely domestic life begins to be affected by the outside world.

Mrs. Miniver is a little like The Diary of a Provincial Lady--not as well-written, but charming, the slightly idealized life of an Englishwoman in the home in the 1930s.

Galen Beckett's The Magicians and Mrs. Quent

Galen Beckett's The Magicians and Mrs. Quent is the most entertaining fantasy novel I've read this year.  If you admire Jane Austen, delve often into the Brontes' Gothic novels, are charmed by Georgette Heyer's romances, and secretly wish the Harry Potter books were more grown-up, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent is for you. 

I'm gobsmacked by the knowledge that the author, Galen Beckett, is a man. His novel is a hybrid-regency-romance fantasy, both comical and suspenseful.

It begins:

"It was generally held knowledge among the people who lived on Whitward Street that the eldest of the three Miss Lockwells had a peculiar habit of reading while walking."

We are immediately intrigued by the reader, Ivy Lockwell.  The neighbors step out of her way, accustomed to her dangerous absorption in books.  Ivy isn't a dreamer, though.  She is beautiful, blond, brilliant, well-read, practical, the mainstay of her family, and interested in magic.  


But the Lockwells are poor.  Her father, a former magician, has been sick and silent for years; her mother is too class-conscious not to overspend, much to Ivy's chagrin (she is the one who goes over the accounts); her sister, Rose, is painfully shy; and the youngest, Lily, too romantic to be helpful, plays gloomy mood music on the pianoforte.

The Lockwells' Regency-period England-style world is actually an island called Altania; their London-ish city is called Invarel. There have been periodic Risings of the Wyrdwood, a magical primeval forest that originally covered Altania, inhabited by witches.  Ivy becomes involved with magic after she takes a job as a governess at Heathcrest (think Jane Eyre combined with Wuthering Heights combined with The Turn of the Screw) and the children are almost kidnapped by the Wyrdwood.  And, yes, there is romance for Ivy as well as danger.


But the Lockwells aren't the only characters,  In Invarel a witty young man named Rafferdy, an Oscar Wildeian fop with a heart, has fallen in love with Ivy, but is talked out of it by his father.  (Hard to feel sympathetic with THAT.) As magic comes back into fashion in Invarel, Rafferdy, who barely believes in magic, discovers that he has inherited the art.


And then there's Eldyn, who has to drop out of the university after his father's death (and debts).  While looking out for his sister, he is blackmailed by Weston, a rich highwayman, into working intelligence for the revolutionaries, witches. and Wyrdwood.  Will he get out of it?


This charming, well-written novel, the first of three, is a kind of classic which should appeal to people of a variety of interests.  It's not Jane Austen, it's not Jane Eyre, but the gentle satire should make you laugh.  Certainly it's fun to find all the allusions.The second novel, The House on Durrow Street, has also been published.

Bibliobits: Book Festivals, Autographs, & Not Finishing Books

Baltimore Book Festival

Book festivals sell a lot of books. 

NPR's Marketplace ran a story last week about the business potential of book festivals.  Steve Wasserman, a literary agent, former L. A. Times Book Editor, and previous organizer of the L. A. Times Festival of Books, said that book festivals provide an extensive, increasingly important venue for selling books, with Borders and B&N closing so many stores. 

I never thought about that.  Of course it is true. 

The story was mainly about the L. A. Times Festival of Books, but all book festivals should be so lucky as to be covered by the press.  There are hundreds of book festivals in the U.S.  I've attended them in Chicago and Nashville. 

Southern Festival of Books

At the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, which I learned about from an online book group, you have a chance to hear 200 authors (well, not all of them, since they read simultaneously) and buy books from many publishers and booksellers.  The festival is held in War Memorial Plaza downtown by the Capitol the second weekend of October, and the readings are held in (blessedly) air-conditioned government buildings, because the South is hot even in the fall.  I loved strolling around looking at books and chatting to friendly readers, and then heading off to a restaurant near Vanderbilt.  The atmosphere is more redolent of bibliophilic charm than of the country music friendliness I expected. The fans seemed to be EXCEPTIONALLY WELL-EDUCATED and came from all over the South to the festival. I heard readings and lectures by Elizabeth Spencer, Kaye Gibbons, Alan Gurganus, Bobbie Ann Mason, Susan Choi, Madison Smart Bell, and Tim Page.  

That same weekend in October, there are The Twin Cities Book Festival and the Wisconsin Books Festival in Madison. 

And there are many more, at different times of year.

I used to love going to readings. I have an autographed copy of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer.  I thought she was my soul mate because she carried a bag with a design of cats.  The very entertaining Kaye Gibbons looked exhausted after her lecture.  I love her novels and am still waiting for the memoir she said she was writing.  There was a HUGE line waiting for her autograph.  I stayed in that line, but then made a decision.

I'm not really one for autographs.  I don't care about the enhanced value of signed books.  "To Frisbee from ___"  means very little to me.  I'm much more excited when I buy used books with inscriptions than when I've stood in line and a tired author has signed my book. 

I'm not the person with the lovely story about how their novels kept me going while I commuted 40 miles a day. A married couple said they traded off reading aloud while they commuted.  I heard this story when I stood in line and am sure the writer was interested.

Most of just said, "I read your book and loved it!"  

ON NOT FINISHING BOOKS. I invested a lot of time today in reading Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills.  I picked up a copy without reading any reviews--sometimes this works out, and sometimes not--and soon became absorbed by this Indian family saga.  Then, in the second hundred pages, the novel changed tack.  From a family comedy and romance, it turned into a cruel, brutal tragedy.  One of the main characters, a medical student, is beaten repeatedly and raped by a group of students.  The victim then turns around and rapes someone.

I cried, then felt a ghastly weight of depression.  It was supposed to be my contemporary novel of the week, but I've given up.

So if you don't hear about any new books from me this week, you'll understand.

Bicycling in the Sunshine & Mary Webb's Precious Bane

Bike Art on the Trail from Last Fall

When we saw the sun, we ran out in t-shirts and capris and soaked up the light.  Finally!  We felt like the girl in Ray Bradbury's story, "All Summer in a Day," one of the few characters on rainy Venus who knows sunshine.


We rode our bikes.  You all know how good it feels to ride a trail when it's not raining. It has been mucky, muddy, and rainy for weeks.  There was so much flooding last year that many trails are closed.  Very few were out on the woodsy trail we rode today, due to the grand opening of another bike trail.  Actually we've been on that trail, too, but this was a special celebration.  

The wind just about gusted us off the path in a few places. We saw some who gave up.   Fortunately it was at our back on the way home. 

We took a break for half an hour and as usual we read. The husband:  nature essays.  I lay down on a bench and finished Mary Webb's Precious Bane.


The short biography of Mary Webb at the beginning of my 1938 Modern Library edition of her masterpiece, Precious Bane, says:

"...Precious Bane might have languished unnoticed by the world at large and its author...might have been forgotten, had not a busy Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, paused to introduce and champion Mary Webb in 1928."

This edition of Webb's novel also includes Baldwin's 1928 introduction, which says her power lies in "the fusion of the elements of nature and man."  And, indeed, her elegant nature writing is one of the pluses of this lovely novel.

Precious Bane, which won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse  as the best English novel of 1925, is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's novels.  Webb's pastoral novel delineates a tragedy just as deep and affecting as that of Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure.  Her poeticism and allusive consciousness of Hardy's Wessex world are deliberate; her Shropshire is as gorgeous and often as forbidding as his terrain.  

Yet she is a very different kind of writer. Her lyrical language is not as arresting as Hardy's, yet her sense of story is strong, and the intelligent voice of her first-person narrator, Prue, is more direct than Hardy's less personal omniscient third-person narration.   She isn't quite in Hardy's class, but she is certainly worth reading.  Sadly, many remember her novels only as the object of satire in Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm.  

The heroine of Precious Bane, Prue, age 21, was born with a harelip.  She lives and works on her parents'  farm, and, though she is quick, caring, practical, and brilliant, she believes her deformity will prevent her marrying.  Her rhapsodic observations of nature are her comfort.  For most of the book, she lives with her ambitious brother, Gideon, and peaceful mother.  


But she falls in love with a traveling weaver, who doesn't know she's alive.

"It was at a love-spinning that I saw Kester first.  And if, in these new-fangled days, when strange inventions crowd upon us, when I hear tell there is even a machine coming into use in some parts of the coutnry for reaping and mowing, if those that mayhappen will read this don't know what a love-spinning was, they shall hear in good time."

 The novel is intertwined with love stories:  her brother Gideon's engagement to their light-hearted, giggling neighbor, Jancis, the daughter of Wizard Beguildy; and then Prue's more complicated love for Kester, the weaver, whom she gets to know indirectly through letter-writing: Gideon and Jancis are illiterate, so Prue writes her brother's letters and Kester writes Jancis's.

Prue is no prude.  In one scene, she agrees to participate in a trick Wizard Beguildy plays on the squire.  He says he can raise Venus, and orders Jancis to appear naked.  Prue takes Jancis's place:  no one can see her face.  And it turns out that Kester is present: both he and the squire are smitten by her figure.

Because of Gideon's insane ambition--he works day and night on the farm to get rich--he refuses to marry Jancis even when her father says he will sell her to the squire or as a farm maid.  This leads to tragedy:  it makes Far, Tess and Jude look bland.


Except we know what's coming.  We never know what will happen in Hardy.

I loved this novel when I read it in the '70s and rereading it has been a pleasure. And I love it that a politician would have bothered to write an introduction to the novel.

Shakespeare Festivals

It's Shakespeare festival time.  The brochures are arriving.

Park in Stratford

There's the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, of course.  We used to live nearer to Stratford, so we traveled there every year.  We planned to see two plays a day, but usually burned out after one, so we'd see the second play the second day, the third play the third day, and so on.  There was plenty to do:  hang out in the park and watch the swans in Lake Victoria, take a boat ride on the River Avon, go out for tea or coffee, walk around the town and admire the nineteenth-century houses, browse at a bookstore or antique shop, hike in a park near Goderich (we think), and swim in Lake Huron.


If you can't go to Stratford, and I certainly wish I COULD go back, there are Shakespeare festivals in almost every state.


My friend the actress once played a shepherdess in As You Like It at a Shakespeare festival in Boise.  She finished a master's in theater arts, moved to a big city, played some small roles in a local theater, then moved again to follow her husband.  She lost touch with the theater when she was home with the kids, but during those halcyon hours when the kids were in nursery school, she made friends, implored stay-at-home neighbors to walk around the lake with her for comapany, and organized an evening play-reading group.  Finally she got her break when a slightly crazed community theater director cast her as Hermione in The Winter's Tale (she got to wear a Coco Chanel suit!).  She never made it to Stratford, but she often worked in small theaters in neighboring towns and absolutely believed in what she was doing.


Well, the brochures may have made me think of her.  She loved her Shakespeare festivals!  You can see Romeo and Juliet at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival in Bloomington, The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Riverside Theatre in Iowa City, A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona,  The Taming of the Shrew at the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, Othello at Flatwater Shakespeare in Lincoln, Nebraska, and As You Like It at the Arkansas Shakespeare Festival.  And of course each festival shows at least one other play (often two).

Cousin Bette

In the end we always go back to Balzac.

Even a reader with only a smattering of French can appreciate La Comedie Humaine (The Human Comedy), Balzac's cycle of approximately 90 novels, novellas, and short stories portraying French society during the 19th century period of Restoration and July Monarchy.  All the antithetical pairs of qualities mentioned above can be found in Balzac. 

Balzac is easier to read in French than Flaubert or Proust, and his novels translate well into English.

Cousin Bette is one of my favorites. I'll briefly synopsize the plot, because I haven't the inclination nor years of study necessary to analyze this very funny French novel.  Balzac's vivid characters' flaws and foibles, and the elaborate machinations of the plot, make the action unroll so rapidly that one breathlessly feels as though one inhabits the novel.  The characters are weak or villainous people you might not wish to know, but they are your friends in this tragicomedy.  Bette, a provincial old maid who has worked for years as a seamstress and lived in poverty in Paris, conspires with her neighbor, a clerk's beautiful wife, Madame Marnieff, to destroy her cousin Adeline's family fortunes.  Bette has always envied Adeline Hulot, who years ago married a baron and has, in Bette's view, had an easy life.  How to bring them down?  By the neighbor Madame Marnieff's seduction and fleecing of Baron Hulot.  


With the exception of Adeline, all the characters have frailties and imperfections, and Adeline's daughter Hortense, who deliberately sets out to seduce Bette's "lover," Wenceslas, a Polish count and artist who depended on Bette's advice and affection, brings Bette's vengeance down on their heads, and almost deserves her fall.  Eventually, Baron Hulot installs Madame Marnieff in a rich, luxurious apartment, with Bette  upstairs, while Adeline, her son, and daughter, Hortense, fall into terrible poverty.  One man after another in the family falls for Madame Marnieff; the women are soon on their own. The susceptibility of Baron Hulot to women is humorous, even though one desperately empathizes with Adeline.  


Can anything stop Madame Marnieff?  Even Baron Hulot's actress-singer courtesan mistresses were more compassionate than this greedy bourgeois woman. 


Balzac's detailed accounts of money make this a very realistic novel.  Money and debt are intertwined with love when it comes to old men with young women.  Things haven't changed much--money is still an obsession--only we're maxed out on credit cards instead of unscrupulous moneylenders.

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier's graceful novel, The Illumination, is gorgeously written but disturbing.  It is a bit like Saramago's  Blindness. The beauty of the language, the strangeness of vision, and the starkness are almost mystical. Unlike Blindness, however, The Illumination is not a political allegory.  A twist of science fiction keeps this novel spinning in the world of story.


The science fiction aspect is apparent from the beginning. Perhaps some would call this magic realism.  In Brockmeier's alternate world, human pain suddenly begins to glimmer and glow. Every bruise, wound, cut, lesion, toothache, cancer, or heart ailment lights up.  As people walk down the street, you can see their illnesses glinting and shining.  Pain sometimes defines people, but does not make people kinder.

Kevin Brockmeier

Divided into six stories, the novel is an elegy for the ill and dead, underpinned by rage about why people must suffer. 

In the first chapter, Carol Ann Page, a data analyst, severs the tip of her thumb while attempting to open a package from her ex-husband.  At the hospital, her wound begins to glow.  

"...when she saw the light shining out of her incision, she thought she was hallucinating.  It was steady and uniform, a silvery-white disk that showed through her thumbnail, as bright and finely edged as the light in a Hopper painting."


In the operating room, someone says, "This is really freaking me out.  Isn't this freaking anyone out?"


But the world soon gets used to it.  The light is everywhere, on the streets, in photos, on TV.  People flash with pain.


In the hospital, a dying woman, thinking her husband is dead, gives her journal to Carol Ann.  Her husband had left a love note daily, which she copied into the journal.  Each beautiful note begins with, "I love..."  Her relationship with her husband is in every way the opposite of Carol Ann's with her ex-husband. It describes a perfect love.


As this journal gets passed from person to person, it inspires, raises questions, and causes problems.  Love is contrasted with pain.  The characters who "share" the journal include:  Jason, a photojournalist, the widower of the woman who gave away the journal, and the author of the notes; Chuck, an autistic child; Ryan, a former stockbroker turned Christian missionary for the sake of his dead sister; Nina Poggione, a writer who suffers terribly from ulcers on her mouth, but must give readings; and Morse, a homeless man who sells books on the street.  


The characters are fascinating, but the illumination doesn't quite clarify for me.  The chapter about Nina is perfect: the descriptions of her loneliness on the book tour, her attempts to speak as little at her readings because of the pain caused by language (she has ulcers on her mouth and it hurts her to speak), her anxiety about her teenage son, and her attraction to the young man who hits on her at readings.  The chapter about Jason is also pitch-perfect.  He is in such pain after his wife's death that he gets involved with a group of teenage cutters.  On the other hand, the chapter about Ryan, an urban missionary who rages about the meaninglessness of suffering, is startling after Brockmeier's spare elegance in the other chapters.  I absolutely understand his rage, though, and he addresses the Christian question.


Something tells me I need to read this novel again to understand exactly what Brockmeier is saying.  His lyrical writing is stunning.  A spare Borges mixed with David Lindsay?  Maybe.  But I might find it difficult to reread, because of the emphasis on pain.  


One of the best new books of the year so far. 

New Books, The "Opposite" of Critics, & Susan Fletcher's Corrag

Dallas News Book Editor's Room

It takes time to read new books. 

On my table are Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, Aminatta Forma's The Memory of Love, and Elle Newmark's The Sandalwood Tree.  I'd like to read them, but I am in the middle of SIX other books.  My husband doesn't know how I can possibly read all these books at once. 

The older I get, the less time I feel I have for new books. While I work, bicycle, shop, cook, and read forgotten classics, I rely on reviewers to read the new books.  I'm just praying the newspapers and magazines continue to publish reviews.  Although I often disagree with reviewers, I can read between the lines of bad reviews by GOOD reviewers to figure out if I might actually LIKE a book. 


I have an "opposite" view of certain reviewers.  The famous Michiko Kakutani, Pulitzer-winning reviewer for The New York Times (does she set the bar for reviewers?), and Ron Charles, book editor of The Washington Post, are excellent writers but perhaps a bit jaded after years of reviewing.  Often I consider the books they reject page-turners.  Yes, honestly. 

On that note, I can't wait to read Francine Prose's new novel, My New American Life, dismissed by Kakutani as mediocre, and Mary Gordon's new novel, The Love of My Youth, considered pompous and boring by Charles.   Now it may very well be they're right, but on the other hand they have inspired me to read TWO new books.  And these are NEW books in a dying book industry. 

And that's why I read Susan Fletcher's Corrag.  Ron Charles didn't like it, but I love novels about witches. 

I very much like the atmosphere of this beautifully-written historical novel.  Fletcher's lyrical narrative is divided into two parts: short letters from Charles Leslie, an Irish Jacobite sent to Scotland to investigate the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe; and his long interviews with Corrag, a young woman accused of witchcraft, through a fascinating first-person chronicle of her short life.

Corrag's grandmother and mother were condemned as witches. Now Corrag is locked up in a hut.  Her mother, Cora, who had a "gallows neck," knew through second sight that  men were coming to hang her.  She ordered Corrag to ride northwest, on a neighbor's horse.  Cora ends up in the highlands of Scotland, and wins the respect of the MacDonald clan for her healing herbal knowledge.  

Corrag says:

"Witch is a dying word, I know.  I've known it as along as I've known my own name--witch will make you hunted, witch will shorten your days.  And they hunted me, and hated me, and my life will be done by the month's end, I am certain of that.  They will rope me to barrels, and make me flame."

Eventually, her story convinces Charles that she is innocent.  He changes from a prejudiced man into a respecter of her knowledge and smart conversation. 

It's very enjoyable, probably a women's book, because somehow women relate to witches.  Even though it's the 21st century, we still earn only 77 cents for every man's dollar, and there's still a feeling women may be punished for doing too well in school or in the workplace.  Corrag does everything too well, and people are envious and cruel:  Corrag talks too much (is a great storyteller), does good deeds (saves a boy's life but then is condemned as a witch by the mother), tolerates difference (provides henbane to a drug-addicted witch), and is an excellent doctor/herbalist (a witch).


Good characters, much good writing.

Borders Closing and A Silly Website

How Borders Used to Look

Yesterday I went to Borders.  The store is closing, so I hoped to find bargains--perhaps H. G. Adler's The Journey, Jean Plaidy's pop historical novels, and a nice copy of David Copperfield. Nothing.  I was so appalled by the stripped-down store that I bought nothing.

How Borders Looks Now.

It is NOT my Borders.  It looks like a warehouse now.  Glittery lights, no more Borders Original Voices, big 40% off signs everywhere, and the coffeehouse closed.  Borders is FINALLY selling books.  There was a line.

There are no more cozy chairs.  No more book groups.  The mystery book group met here for 20 years. No more backlist treasures in the literature and history sections.  No more annoying clerks for whom I now feel incredibly nostalgic.  

Borders was the store with personable personnel.  I'd sneak around the science fiction section, PRAYING I wouldn't have to have a conversation about Octavia Butler or Jo Walton, and somebody would materialize from the back. A very nice person, I might add, who knew a lot about SF, while I vaguely murmured about Teri Gross's interview with Butler on Fresh Air and asked about Jo Walton.  Or I'd pick up Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment (a book I later read and blogged about here), and a clerk who hadn't read it, either, was pushed out of the wings by his or her boss, and we discussed the publisher, Europa.

Once I bought most of Shakespeare in paperback because I could no longer stand reading my huge Pelican Complete Works of.  I stuffed them in a backpack, a messenger bag, and bike panniers, and took off on my bike.  I looked like one of those people who bicycle around riffling through people's recycle bins to find pop bottles.

So, I wonder, glumly, what has happened to bookstores.  Borders was not my favorite store, just a heartless corporation, owned at one time (perhaps now?) by K-Mart, and the clerks' chatting didn't work for it.  My husband refused to shop there.  

The store has been below par for a few years now.




WRITERS & KITTIES.  This entire website is devoted to photos of writers and their cats!

Francoise Sagan

The Frisbee Book Blog Book Awards!

The Frisbee Book Blog Book Awards!

The American book awards are pretty much over.  

We had the National Book Awards in November, the National Book Critics Circle Award in March, the PEN/Faulkner Award in March, and the Pulitzer in April.  I pay attention to the National Book Award, because there's a lot of fuss, famous writers being honored for life achievement, and the awards themselves often go to books I haven't heard of (as is the case with Lord of Misrule this year).  I care less about the NBCC, because I care less about critics, though this award goes to very respectable writers.  The PEN/Faulkner Award, like the National Book Award, often highlights writers I don't know or who don't quite get their dues.   As for the Pulitzer, I am gobsmackeded by the idea of a bunch of journalists getting together to judge anything besides journalism.  (It provides a nice monetary prize, though, so I'm not knocking it.)

"Now is the time for REAL awards to be dished out," said my husband.   

The Frisbee Book Awards for Best Books Published in 2010, according to genre!!!!!!   Every winner gets a frisbee.  Of course I have no frisbees, but I'd be happy to send you one if you really want it. 

Best Novel Published in 2010:  

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.  From Frisbee:  "This is a brilliant satire of a dystopian future where everyone is tuned constantly into apparati (computer-phone-things which everyone has to carry or be arrested as a traitor).  The dystopia is a reality where attention is fragmented by cyber-lives.... Lenny, the 39-year-old youth-worshipping second-generation immigrant Jewish hero, works for an eternal life society. ...It doesn't help that he is the only person who reads books (a suspicious activity:  books "smell.)" 


Best Historical Novel:

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey.  Frisbee said:  "Based loosely on Alex de Tocqueville, Olivier is a French aristocrat whose politics are confused by the French Revolution and his pride in aristocracy.  When he and his best friend frequent political meetings which endanger their lives, his parents intercede and arrange for him to travel to America to investigate prisons. Reluctant to go, he is kidnapped and awakes from his drugged stupor on a ship bound for America.  He is accompanied by Parrot, an English artist, secretary, and spy, hired by Monsieur, the French marquis with whom as a child he escaped  a political raid on a printer forging currency (Parrot’s father was killed), to look after Olivier."

 Best Memoir:

I Want to be Left Behind:  Finding Rapture Here on Earth by Brenda Peterson.  Frisbee said:  "This beautifully written memoir is a mixture of autobiography, musings on Christian fundamentalism, and stunning sketches of her work as an environmentalist.  Peterson, a novelist and non-fiction writer who has founded a Seal Watch group in Washington, was raised by Christian fundamentalists.  She fascinatingly compares similarities between belief systems of conservative Christians and radical environmentalists when it comes to blame-finding. Her relationship with her warm family is loving despite her rejection of their beliefs."

Best Science Fiction:

Blackout by Connie Willis.  Frisbee said:  "Award-winning science fiction writer Willis's time-travel book reads like a compelling historical novel about World War II. 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..."

Best Novel in Translation: 

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  Frisbee said:  "I loved both the old and this new translation of Doctor Zhivago. This one is more lyrical.  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... 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.'

Best Criticism: 

Dickinson:  Selected Poems and Commentaries by Helen Vendler.  Each chapter of this book is headed by a poem of Emily Dickinson, followed by Vendler's critique.  

I should have Best Mystery, Best Poetry, etc., but I read mainly OLD books in these genres last year, so nothing applied...

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor won an Oscar for "Butterfield 8."

I love Elizabeth Taylor.  I love her in Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?   She won the Oscar for Best Actress for these two movies, but should also have won for Giant and A Place in the Sun.  Maybe for others, too.  A great movie star, but much more.  A great actress.

Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in "Giant"

It started with National Velvet.  My mother took us to a matinee re-release of  National Velvet.   We saw Lassie Come Home (on TV?), Little Women, and Life with Father.  We weren't allowed to see her Oscar-winning movies until much later.

Although her movies weren't shown at the university cinema--the "star" system was frowned upon and we saw exclusively Fellini, Jean Renoir, and Martin Scorsese--we watched the DVDs of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and her comparable great movies.  

Then there was her AIDS work.  

When she died, I was sad.  So my husband got me C. David Heymann's Liz:  An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor. 

It's a very fast read, very absorbing.

The first chapter is almost shockingly frank.  It begins with her rehab in 1983 at the Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol rehabilitation.   She was forced to share a room and share the cleaning of the unit.  In her journal she wrote, 

"Nobody here wants anything from anybody else except to share and help.  It's probably the first time since I was nine that nobody has wanted to exploit me.  Now the bad news.  I feel like hell.  I'm going through my body. I can almost see it, rushing like red water over the boulders in my pain-filled neck and shoulders, then through my ears and into my pounding head.  My eyelids flutter.  Oh God, I am so, so tired."

Peter Lawford, the actor, a friend of Liz, entered the Betty Ford Clinic at the same time.  He ran away into the desert, looking for a liquor store.  He contacted a drug dealer who leased a helicopter and landed near the center.  A comedy of rehab. 

Everybody who has been in rehab, or visited someone in rehab, will recognize these scenes. Somebody is cured, but somebody else is kicked out for smuggling in cocaine. These places are far from pristine, so I'm not surprised about Peter Lawford. Plenty of good people have a drug or alcohol problem.  (Not I:  I'm a "non-addictive personality," apparently meaning I don't drink or take drugs.)


The photographs in this book are gorgeous.  Liz is glamorous, but somehow human.  Doesn't she look charming on her Acapulco honeymoon with Mike Todd in 1953?  Yet she isn't perfect.  It's not an air-brushed picture.

She died on March 23 of heart failure.  Still lovely after all those years.