bad parenting | this nerding life

Video Accompaniment: Linda Ronstadt, “What’ll I Do?”

The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, continuing with the same caveat as before: I’ve exempted myself from reading books I’ve already read, leaving eighty-six or so left to go. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.

“I’m not saying we necessarily went around the whole time at that age worrying about the woods. I for one could go weeks hardly thinking about them, and there were even days when a defiant surge of courage would make me think ‘How could we believe rubbish like that?’ But then all it took would be one little thing — someone retelling one of those stories, a scary passage in a book, even just a chance remark reminding you of the woods — and that would mean another period of being under that shadow.” (p.51)

The Elevator Pitch: In the late 1990s, a woman named Kathy is a “carer”, a person whose job it is to drive all over England and help people out in convalescent homes. When she was young, Kath lived at a special school in the countryside called Hailsham, which I don’t want to tell you too much about right here. Suffice it to say, Kath and her young friends, who we meet over the course of her reminiscings, are very special children who were educated at Hailsham for a very interesting purpose… (Hint: bring a tissue while reading this one)

What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: While I was being coy about the big secret that surrounds this book up in the Pitch, I knew about it going in due to the fact that this book had a pretty well-regarded film adaptation two years ago. I think I’m going to try and check it out soon, potentially once I cheer up some. I’d heard of Kazuo Ishigiro before, with regards to The Remains of the Day, but I hadn’t read anything by him before this one.

Thoughts: Hi there. It’s been a while, now hasn’t it? As you will no doubt remember, being rabid fans of The Spoiler Show as you no doubt are, I’ve mentioned once or twice the fact that I’ve changed jobs. I’m not using this to excuse myself from my sacred duty of reading these books (so you don’t have to in many cases), but as a matter of fact I’ve been busier now than in the past. Doing a weekly podcast is potentially one of the factors in this. Sure, I’ve read a bunch of books since finishing The Kindly Ones back in summertime, but I haven’t really thought about the less entertaining ones on the Time 100 list. I’m trying to get back in the swing of things though.

Anyway, Never Let Me Go. This is a pretty excellent read, and one that I wish I hadn’t been spoiled on early on. Yes, I do realize the irony in that statement considering the blurb above this review, as well as the name of my podcast, etc. I do wish, though, that I could have been in on the ground floor seven years ago when this book came out. The real emotional power Ishigiro wields throughout this narrative comes from the amazing, frail, gormless, beautiful innocence of his protagonists. When I first started reading, the fact that Kath’s job allows her to traverse the countryside almost at will, without, say, gene-police or something out of Cloud Atlas hunting her clone ass down was kind of confusing. Why wouldn’t you try to escape the spectacularly shitty hand that “life” has dealt you? This is of course the plot of both The Island and the far superior Parts: The Clonus Horror, which are all basically the same story as this one.

It dawned on me pretty quick though that the Hailsham School is basically one giant pot of classical and operant conditioning, with a dash of isolation. The quote above, about the woods, is a marvelous example of form and theme and plot all rolled into one deliciously depressing burrito. As much as you’d want to empathize with the kids in the book, on a certain level their upbringing is so alien to most that you just have to accept the fatalism and fear that they operate under at all times. I guess the basic premise of the book is sci-fi, but it’s pretty lo-fi and awful to have to care for and raise all of these poor children rather than using bacta tanks or something. It’s heartbreaking. Add to the fact that the Hailsham School has as its sole emphasis development of artistic creativity in its charges, and you basically had a one-way ticket to Sadnesstown for this reviewer.

I’d be interested to know just how Ishigiro researched this novel. The interactions he describes between the children at various stages in their upbringing felt incredibly real to me. The children were not little Cuckoos or anything like that, they got into the same little spats and crushes that I remember from that time. It’s absolutely marvelous, and makes me want to seek out The Remains of the Day.

“None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you.” (p. 81)

Similar books on the Time 100 list: The cynical jerk half of me wants to recommend Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for fans of Never Let Me Go because it’s kind of a funny comparison, but I do honestly feel that the voices of Margaret and Kath have the same ring of authenticity about them. Aspiring grad students could potentially base a thesis on the suffocating feel of the nightmare England present in both Never and The Golden Notebook?

Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16530 pp. (2071 this year)

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 58/113, or 51% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: Money (1984) by Martin Amis. Maybe.

Tagged 1990s, bad parenting, England, movies, movies that suck, review, Time 100

May 23 2012

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The Resolution Project Season Two: Lolita (1955)

“My choice, however, was prompted by considerations essence was, as I realized too late, a piteous compromise. All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex.” (p. 25)

The Elevator Pitch: “Humbert Humbert” is a recent emigré to New England following a failed marriage in Europe. Humbert’s obsession is with the species he calls “nymphets”, girls aged between nine and fourteen who have yet to be ravaged at all by age. Dolores Haze, the eventual target of his fatal attraction, is a girl obsessed with movie magazines, comic books and ice cream bars. What follows next is probably one of the loveliest depictions of something we the readers know deep down is absolutely abhorrent.

What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: Lolita‘s probably one of the most famous books on the entire Time 100 list. It’s been made into two movies, the good one of which was done by auteur director supreme Stanley Kubrick. I’m going to watch it some time this week, hopefully.

As for the author, Vladimir Nabokov, I waxed philosophical about how much I liked his other entry on the list, Pale Fire, here. Suffice it to say, I was pretty excited for this one, given its impressive pedigree.

Thoughts: This has been a bit of a tough one for me to review, as I really did enjoy it, but I don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s like The Great Gatsby or The Grapes of Wrath, just a classic awesome novel that has been accordingly analysed to death over the years. It’s really good, and if the subject matter doesn’t creep you out too much to touch it, you should definitely read it.

One of the things I guess I should have guessed about Lolita from having read Pale Fire first was that it was at times going to be pretty hilarious. Once you are able to distance yourself somewhat from the, yes, disgusting goings-on between Humbert and his captive nymphet over the course of their “romance”, you have to think about the what the reality of a relationship between a middle-aged man and a precocious young girl would be like. Obviously they have nothing in common: Humbert would have us believe that in addition to his matinee idol looks, he’s also incredibly intelligent, where Lolita’s not much more than a typical movie magazine-reading little girl.

He essentially (and legally) becomes Lolita’s parent over the course of the story, and while that gives him a bit of a delightful frisson for breaking the incest tattoo, it also forces him to come to terms with the reality of his situation. Some of my favorite bits of the story are when even Humbert takes a break from lusting after Lolita to call her a brat or something, like you would a normal child. While Nabokov occasionally alludes to Lolita’s childish love of movie magazines, current music, etc., it’s an interesting experiment to think about what the story would look like nowadays. There would definitely be a lot of Justin Bieber listened to on the road, I’ll tell you that much.

Nabokov, in his afterword, speaks of wanting to write a quintessentially American novel, one that takes the landscape of the country as seriously and allusively as European writers do their own climes. So in addition to being amazingly transgressive, even to a modern-day reader as myself, the book is also a great road novel, in addition to a sort of female bildungsroman. I was also sort of shocked to find that the book is also an excellent critique of the schooling of young women; when Humbert takes Lolita to a private school, he’s appalled by the curriculum, which teaches “useful” skills like:

“[t]he four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We are confronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will presently enter an age group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean as much to her as, say, business, business connections, business success, mean to you, or as much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me. Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life which consists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands, corner drugstores, malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, and even hair-fixing parties!” (p. 177)

It is at once a little quaint and nice to see hot-dog stands and square dancing brought up as a system of culture for teens as it is condescending to see that a young girl’s education should not extend beyond these things. And really, is this school much different from the applied math courses and life-skills management classes kids who do not plan on going to college take in school these days? At least when she was stuck with Humbert Lolita became somewhat worldly, not that it makes up for essentially being a hostage in sex slavery though.

It’s also interesting to think of the book as a collision between Worlds Old and New. Humbert’s tastes extend towards chess, French literature and gin, while Lolita loves movies, soda pop and jukeboxes. I’ve heard the book described as both “Europe lusting after American youth and joie de vivre” and “America subverting and changing European tastes in pursuit of cultural hegemony”. I’d probably have to agree with the former statement more, but you could look at the way Humbert himself changes during the course of the novel as a gradual lifting of the European out of him to be replaced with a hollow American shell. You know, if you felt like it.

I found the cover picture up there at an awesome website called “Covering Lolita“, which is a repository of all the known covers the book has had over the years, in as many countries as they can find. While looking through the covers and enjoying the typography on display, I was struck as to how difficult it must have been, and continue to be, to market such a strange and beautiful book as Lolita.

I like this one the most; the one I grabbed for this post up top is just what my copy looks like. There’s a lot of plain, text-based covers, impressionist paintings, and when we get to the first movie era, tie-in stills featuring the iconic heart-shaped glasses.

Weirdly, some of the covers try to sex up the book, this Finnish one (from 1998!) being particularly egregious. I think that the variety of approaches used to demonstrate the book’s importance speaks to just how interesting and unique Lolita is, and how the issues it raises still resonate, maybe even more nowadays.

Honestly, the fact that a TV show like Toddlers and Tiaras exists in a post-Lolita world is awe-inspiringly strange to me. On the one hand, young girls are to be protected and kept safe, this is obvious to people who are not evil. But sometimes, marketers and fashion types still toe the line with regards to how young girls’ youth and beauty can be used for more nefarious purposes.

“But every once in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book.” (p. 104)

Similar books on the Time 100 list: Humbert’s narration, which is prone to hyperbole and bouts with madness, begrudgingly reminded me of An American Tragedy, which I won’t recommend that hard though because I hated it so much. If for some reason you’re into books where children are raised very very poorly, you might also like reading Housekeeping. Finally, I’ll recommend Pale Fire again, because it’s really good, and deserves to be as well-known as Lolita.

Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16242 pp. (1783 this year)

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 57/113, or 50% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: A Dance to the Music of Time Book Four: At Lady Molly’s (1957), by Anthony Powell.

Tagged 1940s, bad parenting, books within books, Humbert Humbert, Lolita, movies, obsession, post-modernism, Vladimir Nabokov

May 12 2012

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The Resolution Project Season Two: The Man Who Loved Children (Part Two)

“Henny, never speaking to him, heard him with fright; but she had given herself up entirely to despair; she said nothing, and it seemed to her that (now that the clouds had rolled away) she saw her husband for the first time: she had married a child whose only talent was an air of engaging helplessness by which he got the protection of certain goodhearted people – Saul Pilgrim, who was penniless, various old Socialists, of small property, and in the dim past, by the same means, her own father.” (p. 325)

Thoughts: So I finally finished this beast. As I mentioned before, I really did not care for this book at all. I will say though, that it got a little bit better, but that is really not saying much. Maybe it’s the Stockholm Syndrome talking, but once the Pollit clan moved out of Washington to “Spa House” in Annapolis, halfway through the book, it started to get marginally better. This is a book that was desperately in need of editing. Look at the quote I pulled above. That is one long sentence there, folks, Frankensteined together with count ‘em, seven commas, two semi-colons, a regular colon, a dash and a pair of brackets. And the whole book is written like this! It’s a nightmare.

I kind of started to compare this book to a movie like Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father in my head, as that too deals with a similarly rising dread throughout. The problem is though, the film takes 95 minutes to tell its terrible story, whereas The Man Who Loved Children is an agonizing 527 pages of overwritten handwringing, philosophizing, babytalking and insulting, delivered to us through a cast of characters who are all completely and totally unbelievable. Had the book been cut down substantially, we wouldn’t have to spend hundreds of pages detailing just how and why mother Henny and father Sam are so goddamn terrible. One or two instances would have been more than enough, as opposed to the relentless cavalcade of misery that is heaped upon the children, and by extension, whatever poor bastard decided he should read this book in a feat of literary masochism.

Jonathan Franzen, who I believe alongside Time 100 list creator Richard Lacayo is the only reason this book has any critical sway right now, tells us in 2010 that the character of Louisa is based on author Christina Stead. This must be the only reason that the character is an accomplished poet/martyr figure, because nothing in Louisa’s background and upbringing would suggest that. She’s a total Mary Sue-type character, an author stand-in and wish fulfillment fantasy. You literally have no choice but to side with her, and by proxy, the author. Note though that she is given substantial physical defects though, so it’s not a classic Mary Sue move. It’s absolutely ludicrous, though, that a twelve year old would be as well-read as Louisa is in the novel. In addition to that, the school scenes, featuring Louisa’s only friend Clare, are absolutely nonsensical and a complete waste of space, and also prove that she’s not getting some sort of amazing schooling to make her this way. It’s pretty unbelievable to me that Louisa and her friends compose an epic poem cycle about their teacher, alongside numerous plays and other pieces. I realize that before TV and video games people were more inventive, but come on now .

So, I get it. Sam Pollit is an absolutely horrifying man. He’s a symbol of the evils of American-style paternalism and science gone unchecked. One of my “favorite” running themes concerns his attitude towards eugenics and social planning; at one point the phrase “if I were a Stalin or Hitler” is dropped, as Stead decides to go so far as to invoke Godwin’s Law on her main character about 50 years early. There must have been a more elegant way of relaying this information to me.

Franzen’s right about how this book should be included in the feminist discourse, though. If only for the fact that it makes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series seem like a nice place for a little girl to grow up. It’s about as strident an attack on patriarchal society as you’re going to get, although I’d argue that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook does this in a much more interesting form, with much, much better writing. I am so glad to be done this book, you have no idea.

Similar books on the Time 100 list: If I was to be a real bastard and recommend books like this one to someone, The Golden Notebook for sure. I’m also assuming that people who “enjoy” this one would get something out of Revolutionary Road, although this is me saying this without having read the book yet, just based on the movie. Also, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret would probably share some thematic similarities, but I kind of feel like a dick for grouping those two together.

Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16452 pp. (1993 this year)

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 56/113, or 50% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: I am going to have to think about this one, it depends on what treasures the library makes available to me.

Tagged 1930s, bad parenting, Christina Stead, Great Depression, modernism, socialism, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Man Who Loved Children, Time 100

Apr 19 2012

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The Resolution Project Season Two: The Man Who Loved Children (Part One)

“Henny daily revealed the hypocrisy of Sam, and Sam found it his painful duty to say that Henny was a born liar. Each of them struggled to keep the children, not to deliver them into the hands of the enemy: but the children were not taking it in at all. Their real feelings were made up of the sensations received in the respective singsongs and treasure hunts.” (p. 33)

The Elevator Pitch: For me, living at the Pollit house would be akin to hell on earth. Sam and Henrietta “Henny” Pollit must rank among the worst couples of all time. They live in Washington D.C. where Sam works in some sort of governmental capacity while Henny attempts to look after his ever-increasing brood of children. She acts like a shrewish harridan, while Sam is a baby-talking buffoon. I hate this book.

What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: Nothing at all. I am kind of jealous of those days now.

Thoughts: As I mentioned in my last post, this book is a real motherfucker. It is long, overwritten, and filled with characters I can’t even begin to identify with. The eponymous “Man”, Sam Pollit, is among the most annoying characters it has ever been my misfortune to read about. He shifts wildly between Roosevelt-era Socialist dreamer, to baby-talking manchild, to condescending educated douchebag, almost every other sentence. I get that we’re not supposed to like him as readers, but this is a bit much.

He also brings back another one of my pet peeves, the overuse of accents in fiction. Whereas in something like Call It Sleep, The Berlin Stories or some of the Boston parts of Infinite Jest, accents are used to demonstrate the differences between people, be they immigrants, tourists or members of the underworld, Sam Pollit busts out accents all the time, just because he’s a dick. He pretends that he’s a stereotypical old Jewish guy, or a “cornpone” Southern guy, or someone from Singapore, just to get cheap laughs out of his kids, who essentially worship the ground he walks on. That’s literally the only reason. I’m sure Stead knew that this would happen, that I would hate her main character, so bravo, Stead! You made me hate a guy by making him unbearable to read about. You deserve some sort of award. And so does Sam Pollit, who is able to impress children with “funny” voices. What a champ, you guys.

His wife Henny is probably the closest thing to someone we can empathise with, as her husband has essentially driven her crazy with his wacky antics. The children in the book are so far pretty unbelievable characters. Louie, Sam’s daughter from his previous wife, is prone to reciting bits of poetry and theology, which would be okay if she wasn’t something like 12 years old. How is she able to remember all this stuff? Could it be that she’s only a mouthpiece for the author to attempt to class up her story with? Much like Scarlett’s son in Gone With the Wind, the younger children are written as if Stead had never seen a real human child talk. It reminds me of nothing more than the “Superbaby” stories that would crop up in Action Comics in the ’50s and ’60s. Here he is packing up a super-bindle:

So yeah, so far I don’t really like this book very much. I’m hoping it ends in Grand Guignol-style with a huge bloodbath. To close up today, here’s Henny discussing which is the best way to kill yourself, which is not a great thing to put in a book that seriously makes you consider it:

“There are so many ways to kill yourself, they’re just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I’d take permanganate? I wouldn’t want to burn my insides out and live to tell the tale as well; idiots! It’s simple. I’d drown myself. Why not put your head in a gas oven? They say it doesn’t smell so bad.” (p. 164, this goes on for a long time).

Tagged 1930s, bad parenting, Christina Stead, Great Depression, modernism, socialism, The Man Who Loved Children, Time 100

Feb 23 2012

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The Resolution Project Season Two: I, Claudius (1934)

Musical Accompaniment: Kanye West – “POWER”

“I was a very sickly child – ‘a very battleground of diseases,’ the doctors said – and perhaps only lived because the diseases could not agree as to which should have the honour of carrying me off.”

(1018-20, Kindle version)

The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, continuing with a caveat: I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so left to read. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.

The Elevator Pitch: Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (whose name is shortened to Claudius as all of those other names belong to other important characters in the story as well), is a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the First Family of the Roman Empire. Unlike most of his family members, Claudius never really wanted to seize power, perhaps owing to his malformed body and pronounced stutter marking him as a social pariah of sorts. He prefers instead the company of books and especially history. In this, his autobiography, he reveals to us almost first-hand what it was like to live in this extremely tumultuous moment in time, as the rules of rulership were being rewritten almost daily; as alliances and marriages are formed and dissolved as quickly as they are announced; and as the most powerful position in the world was up for grabs, that of the Emperor of the Romans, aka. Emperor of the known world.

What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: Not too much. Most of the Classics classes I took in university focused on the Greeks, I think we got to the Romans just briefly at the end a couple of times. Sadly, I’d say that most of my knowledge of the Roman Empire came from reading Asterix comics? They’re pretty great, but not exactly historically accurate. I watched about half of the HBO series Rome, the events of which take place just before the novel’s opening. I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen the movie Caligula, which I probably seeked out more for its salacious content more than any other merit. I’ve read some of David Lapham’s recent comic book of the same name as well. I’d heard the name Robert Graves before, but had never read anything by him. If I, Claudius is any indication of his capabilities as a writer, I’d definitely be interested in reading more, especially the direct sequel Claudius the God.

“He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.”

(1134-35 Kindle version)

While Kanye West’s “POWER” music video/tableau project shares some superficial similarities with I, Claudius, specifically the Greco-Roman-Egyptian imagery, I feel like the main refrain of the song rings true in the book as well. The allure of absolute power is simply too much for mortal minds to wrap their heads around. If there’s any lesson I can take from reading Graves’ book, it’s that. Of course, Kanye spends most of the song talking about how great he is, but that’s pretty much par for the course. The idea of being the Emperor is so big, so powerful, that it completely blocks out any other appeals to human interest. It becomes and obsession, and once held, is defended at all costs. Kanye tells us that “no one MAN should have all that power,” but what’s interesting is that for most of the duration of the book, it’s actually a woman, Augustus Caesar’s wife Livia, who runs the show.

Livia’s an amazing character, completely manipulative, spiteful, bitchy, and mean on the one hand, but on the other hand, she was definitely the brains behind one of the most important governmental systems the world has ever known. I, Claudius, being from the point of view of a member of the Claudian clan, concerns itself primarily with the fortunes of the rich and famous, a social class Claudius belongs to, even if he never feels welcomed. For the most part, up until Caligula really started screwing things up, the poor and middle class folks in the Roman Empire seem to have had it pretty good, comparatively, it was just the rich and powerful who had to deal with coup attempts, poisonings, informers and the like. So a proletarian reading of the text would in my mind say “well, all those rich people only got what they deserved” The proles seem fairly well looked after, at least in comparison to say, the Germans, who Graves spends a lot of time detailing the Roman wars against. It’s pretty telling once the mad Emperor Caligula’s begun employing a German group as bodyguards:

” [t]his inexplicable sort of behaviour only made him the more worthy of their worship as a divine being. They used to nod wisely to each other and say. ‘Yes, the Gods are like that. You can’t tell what they are going to do next.” (7586-92, Kindle edition)

The fact that the Roman people as a whole are able to notice that Caligula’s ridiculous treatment of everyone around him is a bad thing, and not the capricious will of gods or nature indicates that they’re somewhat spoiled, comparatively anyway.

Claudius, though, as an ostensible member of the upper class does not deserve all of the abuse he’s put through, though. By misfortune of fate (or, rather, by fortune, any child that had his disabilities and was not a member of the ruling class would have been thrown off a cliff at birth), he’s at the epicenter of three different Emperors’ reigns, who all treat him fairly poorly, but in different ways: Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. He’s a great companion through this history he’s crafted for us, at turns catty, sarcastic, funny, and sort of maudlin at times. I was quite charmed by him, and his continued insistence to his family that he’s nothing but a common-variety dullard. This is what keeps him alive; while most of his family were perfectly fine with ignoring him and having him take his meals with the servants for fear of embarrassment, Caligula’s reign forces Claudius to openly act a fool, as keeping the Emperor entertained becomes the highest priority of the State in this period, for fear of death. Claudius at times reminded me of Polonius, from Hamlet, except for the fact that he was just playing dumb with the help of his disabilities where Polonius was just plain dumb.

In fact, I would be absolutely shocked to find out that George R.R. Martin, writer of the popular Song of Ice and Fire series of books, had not used I, Claudius as a reference point when constructing his immensely popular saga. Yes, I realize that those books are somewhat based on the English Wars of the Roses, but the signs are all there. Horribly deformed, but incredibly engaging and clever protagonist? That would be Claudius/Tyrion Lannister. Crazy boy-king? Caligula/Joffrey Baratheon. Manipulative queen bitch? Livia/Cersei Lannister. Guy who’s too damn honourable for his own good? Germanicus/Ned Stark. The list goes on and on.

I, Claudius is a great book. I found it dragged a little bit during the early years of Tiberius’ rule, as various strong men rise up (usually by warring against the Germans) and then are cut down for fear of them taking the throne, but on the whole it is very engaging. It’s a fascinating way to learn about the period, curated by a man you can’t help but love. I also found it interesting how it frames Roman history in Great Man Theory terms of one-on-one confilcts: Caesar vs. Antony, Marcellus vs. Agrippa, Gaius vs. Tiberius, Sejanus vs. Drusus and so on. While perhaps not the most truthful attempt at recounting events from the era, it is an easy way to get readers to understand quickly what’s going on, and what’s at stake. If I have one complaint it’s that pretty much everyone has a few of the same names and this gets confusing, but that’s not exactly the fault of the author, really.

“Sejanus was a liar but so fine a general of lies that he knew how to marshal them into an alert and disciplined formation – this was a clever remark of Gallus’, it is not mine – which would come off best in any skirmish with suspicions or any general engagement with truth.”

(3853-55 Kindle version)

Similar books on the Time 100 list: All The King’s Men is another good look at the world of politics, and how it can corrupt otherwise good people. The Berlin Stories present a Weimar Germany on the edge of collapse, the decadence of which compares nicely to that of Rome under Caligula. The same thing kind of goes with The Day of the Locust as well, a sort of Paradise falling apart-type situation.

Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 15345 pp. (886 this year)

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 53/113, or 47% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison.

Tagged bad parenting, books within books, I Claudius, review, Robert Graves, Roman Empire, Rome, Time 100

Feb 09 2012

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The Resolution Project Season Two: The Death of the Heart (1938)

First off, I feel like this is in order, because this book was a chore to get through, and as such delayed my reading project even worse than Skyrim did:

“She had watched life, since she came to London, with a sort of despair – motivated and busy always, always progressing: even people pausing on bridges seemed to pause with a purpose; no bird seemed to pursue a quite aimless flight. The spring of the works seemed unfound only by her: she could not doubt people knew what they were doing – everywhere she met alert cognisant eyes. She could not believe there was not a plan of the whole set-up in every head but her own” (p.72)

The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, with a caveat: I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so left to read. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.

The Elevator Pitch: Portia Quayne is an orphan. After flitting about in hotels and shabby flats on the Continent with her mother before her death, Portia has come to London to live with her brother Thomas and his wife Anne. No one really knows what to make of the quiet young girl, whose gormlessness and eager-to-please nature seem to lay bare the veneer of civilization in the 1930s. Portia falls in love with an old friend of Anna’s, Eddie, who works at Thomas’ advertising concern. This adolescent crush sets in motion a series of events that makes everyone feel really bad.

What I knew about this book and its author going in: Absolutely fuck-all. It is apparently a defect in my character and education that not once in working towards my degree in English Literature that the name Elizabeth Bowen and this, her supposed masterpiece ever came up. Now that I’ve rectified the situation, I cannot say that I feel like I was missing out in the slightest.

As I noted above, this book was an absolute beast to work through, and this is solely due to the style it was written in. The back cover calls this a “psychological novel”, which I take to mean it purports to explore the psychological makeup of characters as they move through the world of the book. Which it does. To a fault, I’d say.

Bowen proves herself capable of really beautiful turns of phrase, and really good at examining how people tick, especially when it comes to the female characters in the book, Portia, Anna and Matchett the housekeeper. What I found, in my opinion anyway, fault in, was that the book was narratively not as strong. It shares this distinction with the last book I read on the Time 100 list, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which I also had a hell of a time pushing through.

Where Bowen shines is in depicting thumbnail sketches of characters right at the exact moment she turns her eyes towards them. One in particular I found well done was the character of Major Brutt, a military man who vaguely knew Anna before mustering into the service. He’s sort of a boring guy to encounter, as he’s been out of circulation for so long that he has forgotten how to get along in London society, assuming of course he ever really fit in to begin with. One sequence I enjoyed was when Brutt, who has sort of accidentally ingratiated himself into life at 2 Windsor Terrace, mistakenly drops in at the wrong time and has a drink with Thomas instead of Anna. Thomas, who’s not exactly a social butterfly himself, feels like Brutt wants something from him, something like a job or a connection, rather than the basic human company he actually craves. It leads to this excellent summation of men of Brutt’s type:

“All he seemed to have put on the market was (query) experience, that stolid alertness, that pebble-grey direct look that Thomas was finding morally hypnotic. There was, of course, his courage – something now with no context, no function, no outlet, fumbled over, rejected, likely to fetch nothing. Makes of men date, like makes of cars; Major Brutt was a 1914-1918 model: there was now no market for that make. In fact, only his steadfast persistence in living made it a pity he could not be scrapped.” (p.113)

This makes concrete a really unfortunate facet of the world of the 1930s, as well as the world of today. It is especially poignant considering the death of the last known participant in the Great War, Briton Claude Choules, died last year, while the last serviceperson, Florence Green, died only a few days ago (source). Some people unfortunately find their purpose in a specific time and place, and cannot cope with the world after that time and place are no more.

Portia’s kind of in the same boat. While living with her mother, she was itinerant, moving around Europe in a sort of fairy tale of funny people met in hotels and different vistas seen out of the window, a counterpoint to, again, the homeless girls in Housekeeping. When this state of affairs is no longer applicable, she cannot fit in with the upper-middle class London society that Thomas and Anna aspire to. She gets along better with the staff of the house, taking tea with Matchett everyday. So, like Brutt, Portia has a tendency to put people on edge; where he makes younger folks feel a little ashamed at their lack of service, or forces them to imagine the hell he’s been put through in their defence, Portia reminds them of their own innocence long forgotten, and makes them feel ashamed of what they’ve become.

When she meets Eddie, it seems good on paper (joke). Eddie’s a misfit too, he didn’t set the world on fire with his writing (unlike fellow houseguest St. Quentin, who appears to do all right for himself, and is also the catalyst for the climax of the book), nor does he do a great job in advertising. It doesn’t work out between them though. Eddie’s a bit of a man-whore, catting about with Anna at the same time as his so-called romance with her half-sister in law Portia, and holding hands with women he meets in Seale, which I gather is the 1930s equivalent to a dirty bathroom hookup? Anyway, he’s a mess, and he takes Portia’s 16-year old heart and fucks it up, seemingly irrevocably.

So while I can appreciate the amount of detail Bowen is able to put into character study, in my mind anyway, a little of that goes a long way. When that’s the main “driving” force of your novel, though, it starts to wear on me. Narrative-wise, there’s maybe 5 or 6 actual events that happen throughout the year or so the novel takes place in. I can only imagine how long this book would have been in the hands of another writer. Raymond Chandler probably could have told this story in a page or two, and would have had enough room for shots to ring out and a couple of one liners. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that The Death of the Heart, while probably a great novel based on sheer technical brilliance alone, was not for me, in the exact opposite way the something like Blood Meridian wasn’t for me. Give it a try, though, if the subject matter and time period sound interesting to you. Personally, it reaffirmed my enjoyment of historical novels written long after the period has come and gone. I like the insight into London at this time that Bowen brings to the table, but I’d rather it was filtered through the little bit of artifice that “historical” writing brings.

“We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t. One doesn’t have to be in love to be silly, because then one makes a thing about everything.” (p. 315)

Similar books on the Time 100 list: American Pastoral and Are You There God?It’s Me Margaret also examine the state of mind of a preteen/teenage girl, but in radically different ways. If you’re interested in the time period, the Dance to the Music of Time cycle is a look at London right around then. Appointment in Samarra, while it takes place in America, examines the same sort of set I believe that Anna and Thomas would feel a part of, at around the same period in time as well. Finally, I feel like The French Lieutenant’s Woman also explores the psyche of Victorians in the same way this looks at that of the Interwar Period, but in a way I found much more enjoyable to read. It’s something about the distance between author and subject that I enjoy.

Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 14877 pp. (418 this year)

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 52/113, or 46% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: I, Claudius, by Robert Graves (1934)

Tagged 1930s, bad parenting, Elizabeth Bowen, England, modernism, review, The Death of the Heart, Time 100, World War I

Dec 14 2011

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The Resolution Project Book Forty-Four: Housekeeping (1981)

“Since my grandmother had a little income and owned her house outright. she always took some satisfaction in thinking ahead to the time when her simple private destiny would intersect with the great public processes of law and finance – that is, to the time of her death.” (p. 27)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.

The Elevator Pitch: Ruth and Lucille are two children sent to live with their surviving relatives in Fingerbone, Idaho after the suicide of their mother. They end up first with their grandmother and then eventually their aunt Sylvie in their grandmother’s home, which rests on the side of the lake that claimed their grandfather and mother’s lives. The house eventually starts to be reclaimed by nature somewhat, which justifiably angers Lucille who wants to live more conventionally. Ruth, the book’s narrator, tends to side with her aunt Sylvie in this debate.

I really disliked this book, so I’m going to change up my review style a bit here, as I don’t have too much to say about it other than what it is not. I will say that if you for any reason decide to pick this one up and give it a try, this review will probably be even spoilerier than normal, so do us both a favour and read a different book. I recommend Brideshead Revisited.

Housekeeping is not a bildungsroman, even though it kind of looks like one: the bildungsroman is a literary genre that follows the upbringing and moral development of a young person over the years. The classic example is David Copperfield, which follows that character’s life as he goes out to seek his fortune and eventually reaches maturity. A lot of the books I’ve read so far on the Time 100 list could be thought of as having elements of the genre, like The Adventures of Augie March, A Clockwork Orange and The Confessions of Nat Turner. Where I feel that Housekeeping only sort of fits this criteria is that in the archetypal bildungsroman, the young person blunders through their early years and eventually becomes wise in the ways of the world, carving out a niche for themselves in the process; in Housekeeping, the main character Ruth learns that society is sort of bullshit, being a hobo of all things is awesome, and much more fulfilling than a “normal life”. She is entirely possessed by the spirit of her aunt Sylvie, who was herself a an itinerant until right before coming to the girls’ aid. The house in which they live, and the lake that surrounds it, both of these places weigh down so much on the characters that they give in and run away forever. I just couldn’t believe the book’s arguments as to why this would be a satisfactory idea.

Tangent time! I’ve always wanted to write an article on how Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is the best bildungsroman of recent years. CJ’s character arc is a perfect example of how the genre works, and the game is one of the best of all time. Maybe once I finish reading all of these (supposedly) great works of literature I can give that a whirl. I just need to find enough time to play through it again…

Housekeeping is a terrible textbook on how to raise children: so Ruthie and Lucille are in kind of a spot at the beginning of the book, it’s true. Their mother has killed herself, taking a page from the Laura Chase playbook and crashing her car into the lake, the site of the train crash that also killed their grandfather. They get shuttled about from family member to family member, and eventually Sylvie is found from who the fuck knows where and drafted into service. She essentially lets the girls live as feral children for the most part, as she is far too busy wrestling with her own internal demons and her itchy hobo feet to take care of them properly. Housekeeping is that rare novel where the title eventually becomes antithetical to the action found within, as it eventually starts to resemble an episode of Hoarders (bonus fun joke for those of you who don’t follow me on twitter yet: Housekeeping is marginally less boring than the mundane task it’s named after, as well. *rimshot*).

Housekeeping is not a great novel: what it is, though, is an excellent tone poem. Robinson is an excellent stylist, if perhaps maybe a little too drawn to descriptions of local flora (a quality shared by another book on the list I really hated, Blood Meridian). She’s great at crystallizing little moments of the human experience for all to see. Here’s a few of them, they’re pretty self-explanatory.

“We walked the blocks from the lake to our grandmother’s house, jealous to the point of rage of those who were already accustomed to the light and the somnolent warmth of the houses we passed.” (p. 35)

(That’s as good of an articulation of the experience of walking home through a Canadian winter as I’ve ever heard.)

“Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.” (p. 62)

“I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings.” (p.116)

“I do not think Sylvie was merely reticient. It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.” (p.53)

It’s this last quote that I feel sums up the novel as a whole. It’s difficult for Ruthie to impart to the reader why she decides to go down the path she does, and I never really felt the book itself gave her much of a chance. When I look at it now as a tone poem, though, I kind of get the point. You can’t really ever describe someone enough to make these things make sense, that would imply that you’re omniscient somehow. It reminds me now of The Heart of the Matter, where no one could understand why anyone else did anything, but with the added difficulty level of first-person narration sunk in the mix. I guess I’m a reader that usually enjoys a strong narrative than just beautiful writing and a few good jests.

Who would I recommend this book to?: People that really love old houses, and perversely to people who really hate old houses. People who worship the whole Walden thing. Wanna-be hoboes.

Total pages read since January 1st: 14459 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 51/113, or 45% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: Herzog, by Saul Bellow (1964)

Tagged 1950s, bad parenting, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson, non-protagonists, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American West, Time 100

Nov 22 2011

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The Resolution Project Book Forty: A Handful of Dust (1934)

“But with the exception of her sister’s, opinion was greatly in favour of Brenda’s adventure … It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone.” (p. 54)

Tony and Brenda Last are members of the increasingly irrelevant landed aristocracy in 1930s England. Tony is somewhat obsessed with the upkeep of his estate, Hetton House, which he insists must keep its Gothic architecture even in the face of fashion and his own wife’s desires. When John Beaver (a worthless layabout who lives with his mother) is mistakenly invited over for a weekend, events are set into motion that will destroy the marriage of the Lasts and pretty much wreck Tony’s entire existence as he knows it.

First off, sorry about the late post here. In addition to the birthdays of four or five people, -30 degree temperatures making it a pain in the ass to go to the library, Christmas ramping-up at the store and getting ready for Graphic Content’s third outing (also the subject of my next post wouldn’t you know?), I also thought it would be a good idea to buy Skyrim. After all, I made it through Arkham City without missing too much reading time, so what could be the problem?

Frost Trolls. Frost Trolls are very much a problem.

Anyway, I powered through all of these temptations/complications and finished. My technique for Skyrim, by the way, was to not go into the room my Xbox is in, just to entirely disregard its existence for a couple of days. Success! It’s not even like A Handful of Dust is a long book, or tiresome to get through, it’s actually a fantastic read, which made this situation even more unpleasant for me. In fact, I’d be willing to say that I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoyed the previous entry by Waugh in the list, Brideshead Revisited.

Dust presents us an interpretation of the sanctity of marriage that is only matched on the list so far by Doris Lessing’s apocalyptic The Golden Notebook. When Brenda Last begins her affair with the non-entity known as John Beaver, as the above quote indicates, the situation becomes one of great fun and enjoyment for everyone in civilized society, and no one care a whit about the feelings of her husband, or the well being of their child. Brenda even attempts to set Tony up with a mistress to give him something to do, resulting in hilarious scenes where “Princess” Abdul Akbar attempts to seduce a man who has no idea why she’s even there, much less any interest in her.

This all ends up in Tony having to do the gentlemanly thing and give Brenda a divorce. The only way this can be accomplished, however, is for Tony to be the adulterer, which results in him taking a dance-hall girl (and her eight-year old daughter) to Brighton for scandalous photos to be taken (with the dance-hall girl, I mean, not the kid). I will admit to being a little confused as to why Tony had to be seen as the bad guy for the divorce proceedings, it must have something to do with keeping Brenda’s reputation intact so that she can marry Beaver? The scenes where Tony mingles with the detectives he’s hired to follow himself are pretty funny though.

There were a lot of great pieces to this novel. I really liked the parish priest in Hetton who recites sermons he wrote while stationed off in India and Afghanistan, hoping that no one calls him on this fact. I also liked how everyone knew about this, but didn’t have the heart to tell him, and how the mention of exotic flora and fauna in the priest’s sermons presage Tony’s ultimate retreat from the civilized world. Dust also reaffirms my belief that horses in works of great literature are evil, and will kill children at almost a moment’s notice (see: Gone With the Wind, and I’m sure there’s more coming). I loved the last names everyone had, and I liked John Beaver’s mother a lot. She had the hustle and ambition of a Scarlett O’Hara, and was one of the few characters in the novel who weren’t completely ridiculous. I liked Jock Grant-Menzies, and the brief look at English politics he gives us (it’s completely ineffectual, dull and boring, not to mention incomprehensible).

While I don’t think Dust is quite as good as Brideshead Revisited, it does have a better title, for one, and it feels real with regards to the betrayal of a loved one. I’m continuing my tradition here of not really researching the novels much more than a quick wiki search while reading (apparently there’s a movie of this book?), but you can definitely tell from reading this book that someone hurt Evelyn Waugh very deeply, and he decided to immortalize them in the characters of Brenda Last and John Beaver, possibly as a revenge that would far outlast any of the participants.

Who would I recommend this book to?: People who like seeing the foibles and frailties of the upper crust laid bare. People who liked other entertainments featuring large manor houses, like Gosford Park, and Downton Abbey. People who won’t be crushed by the unflinchingly harsh portrayals of love, marriage and women found in the book.

Total pages read since January 1st: 13829 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 49/113, or 43% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene.

Tagged 1930s, A Handful of Dust, bad parenting, England, Evelyn Waugh, non-protagonists, review, Skyrim, Time 100

Oct 13 2011

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The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Six: Gone With The Wind (1936) – Part Two

This is the second part of my review of Gone With the Wind. For the first part, go here.

“Everything in their old world had changed but the old forms. The old usages went on, must go on, for the forms were all that were left to them. They were holding tightly to the things they knew best and loved best in the old days, the leisured manners, the courtesy, the pleasant casualness in human contacts and, most of all, the protecting attitude of the men toward their women. True to the tradition in which they had been reared, the men were courteous and tender and they almost succeeded in creating an atmosphere of sheltering their women from all that was harsh and unfit for feminine eyes.” (p. 569)

Wow, what a book! Gone With the Wind is an epic read in the truest sense, in that it is big and contains multitudes of different stories within. You get Antebellum South romantic fiction, harrowing Civil War adventure, sociological examination of the dying courtly classes of the Georgia region, kitchen sink melodrama, political intrigue, and more. It had no real low points, except for one glaring omission that I started to talk about last time but couldn’t really get a handle on. More on that later.

Scarlett O’Hara is a fascinating character, one who changes a lot throughout the course of the novel’s twelve calendar years. She’s ultimately a very pitiful person, with a mind incapable of the sort of “great love” she continually moons over, and definitely not someone who should have become a mother, much less to the the three children she eventually has. For a while there, it was pretty irritating how she kept mooning over Ashley Wilkes and ignoring Rhett Butler, but once you realize that Scarlett’s love is an incredibly toxic one, I quit feeling like she should just read He’s Just Not That Into You and felt even more sorry for her (and everyone around her) than I did before.

My favorite incarnation of Scarlett’s character was once she’d moved back to Atlanta to try and raise money in hopes of keeping her ancestral home, Tara. I came to refer to this era as her “Scarface” period in my head, as from this point onwards she becomes incredibly cruel and calculating with regards to accumulating wealth. It’s fun, though a little harrowing, to see the techniques and drive she once used in trying to steal away the beaux of other girls back in the County used instead to buy lumber mills, saloons and the debts of her fellow Atlantans (Atlanteans?). She eventually resorts to another kind of slave labor to make up for that lost the Emancipation of black people: convict labor. This, in addition to numerous social transgressions against the old guard of Atlanta society, results in her becoming effectively ostracized from the gentlemanly community she was bred to rule as a Southern Belle. I think this meme I made describes it best.

The other reason I thought of this as the book’s Scarface period was that she eventually builds an elaborate mansion after marrying a rich business partner, and then proceeds to decorate it in what I could only assume was an incredibly gaudy style for the time (my knowledge of home furnishings from the era is somewhat less than it could be):

“Within the house was furnished as Scarlett had desired, with thick red carpeting which ran from wall to wall, red velvet portieres and the newest of highly varnished black-walnut furniture, carved wherever there was an inch for carving and upholstered in such slick horsehair that ladies had to deposit themselves thereon with great care for fear of sliding off … on the walls were gilt-framed mirrors and long pier glasses … steel engravings in heavy frames, some of them eight feet long … [t]he walls were covered with rich dark paper, the ceilings were high and the house was always dim, for the windows were overdraped with plum-colored plush hangings that shut out most of the sunlight.” (p. 806)

See, add a few hot tubs and televisions and you’ve got Tony Montana’s ostentatious pad from the 1980s remake, don’t you think?

I’m getting a little off topic here. Gone With the Wind does an excellent job of evolving its main character from an empty-headed nobody at sixteen to a hard-headed pragmatist at twenty-eight. As she increases her power in business dealings, she’s blithely unaware of the fact that she’s pounding nails into the coffin of the South she grew up in; Atlanta society matrons scorn her though, knowing all too well what she’s doing.

So while Scarlett, Rhett Butler and to a lesser extent, continual crush object Ashley Wilkes, are quite rounded characters, the black servants they surround themselves with are definitely not. As I sort of got at last time, I feel that even by Gone With the Wind’s publication date in 1936 the way Mitchell characterized the slaves (soon to be the free people) in Scarlett’s world was a little much. It’s not like this was a true story with transcriptions of their speech habits and mannerisms to go by (like those William Styron had to go by when writing The Confessions of Nat Turner), Mitchell must have been playing up hateful stereotypes on purpose. Maybe sometimes it was done for comic relief, as the book needed it at some points, but reading dialogue from Mammy, Pork and Prissy was cringe-worthy a lot of the time. I don’t really have much more to say on that, other than it’s almost like Mitchell used all her writing prowess up on Scarlett and didn’t have any left for anyone else? Seems somewhat fishy though, I think.

I still would like to watch the film and compare it to the text, and I should hopefully have a brief review of that coming up this weekend.

“The Lost Cause was stronger, dearer now in their hearts than it had ever been at the height of its glory. It was a fetish now. Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who had died for it, the battle fields, the torn flags, the crossed sabers in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans.” (p. 814)

Who would I recommend this book to?: People who are interested in American history, especially people like me who had no reason to learn about the Civil War up until now, as it wasn’t really that important in the overall scheme of things. People who enjoy books with strong, flawed female leads. People who are interested in narratives about the collapse of civilizations, and what arises from the ashes.

Total pages read since January 1st: 12535 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 29

Next up on the Resolution Project: Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone (1974)

Tagged 1860s, bad parenting, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, movies, Pulitzer Prize, review, Scarface, The American South, Time 100

Oct 04 2011

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The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Six: Gone With the Wind (1936) – Part One

“It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.” (p. 163)

Scarlett O’Hara is a young member of Georgia’s landed gentry in the waning days of the Confederacy. As such, her life revolves around balls, barbecues, dancing and dresses. She loves a young gentleman named Ashley Wilkes, who, strangely enough, would rather read a book than drink and ride horses like the rest of the men his age. But trouble’s a brewing in the land of King Cotton. The War Between the States looms as Scarlett moves to Atlanta, encountering along the way Rhett Butler, a scandalous man whose spoken thoughts resonate in Scarlett’s mind somehow.

I’m enjoying Gone With the Wind a lot more than I thought I would. As such, I’m going to end up devoting two posts to it, also because it is pretty long. Anyway, I think I had some misconceptions about the book coming in. I thought it was a sort of trumped-up romance novel, notable mostly for its massively successful film adaptation in 1939.

I was wrong, though.

While the romance element in Gone is still a pretty big part of it, it’s closer to that found in something like Jane Eyre or an Austen novel. While the main narrative thrust of the novel is “who will Scarlett end up with?”, it uses that as a base to examine Confederate society, and specifically women’s role in it, far more than your average bodice ripper does. Consider the way being a widow is treated. I had no idea just how intense it was at this point in time.

“A widow had to wear hideous black dresses without even a touch of braid to enliven them, no flower or ribbon or lace or even jewelry, except onyx mourning brooches or necklaces made from the deceased’s hair. And the black crepe veil on her bonnet had to reach to her knees, and only after three years of widowhood could it be shortened to shoulder length. Widows could never chatter vivaciously or laugh aloud. Even when they smiled, it must be a sad, tragic smile. And, most dreadful of all, they could in no way indicate an interest in the company of gentlemen. And should a gentleman be so ill bred as to indicate an interest in her, she must freeze him with a dignified but well-chosen reference to her dead husband.” (p. 144)

That sort of stuff is fascinating to me, and while I haven’t really researched the veracity of this description, it feels real to me. That’s why when all three of Scarlett, Ashley and Rhett chafe under the yoke of a society this calcified, I really started to empathise with them.

Another thing I’m enjoying is the main characters’ attitudes towards the Civil War. Again, I don’t really know what I was expecting here, but one thing I wasn’t expecting was for all three of them to have different, well thought out problems with the ideological underpinnings behind the conflict. Ashley Wilkes is a self-made scholar, and as such would rather stay home at Twelve Oaks than go out and die for his newborn country, even though he eventually does do so as he is one of the best riders in the County. He objects to the war on the same moral basis that sensitive people usually do, he just hates to see human life wasted for any “Cause”. Still, his love for his country gets him mired in the battlefields North of Georgia, as he is not able to reconcile his somewhat pacifistic nature with the danger posed by Yankees who would do away with the lifestyle that fostered it.

Rhett Butler, on the other hand, is an opportunist who sees in the War a chance to make a killing (not literally). He thinks the idea behind the War is a stupid one, as the Confederacy has not got the resources to fight the industrialized North for any great length of time. That’s why he stays back home and runs the blockade to bring supplies to Southern towns, as he knows the conflict’s not worth risking his own skin over. While the South runs high on valour and excellent commanding officers, it lacks factories to make things like boots and guns, aka. the very materiel needed for any modern conflict.

Scarlett has perhaps the most honest reason to hate the war, if not the best thought out. She hates the inconvenience it brings to her, she hates how it plucks marriageable men away from the County she lives in and spits them back shell-shocked and minus some limbs. She hates how the simple amenities that any Southern belle of her stature takes for granted are made much more difficult to come by in wartime, as well as more expensive.

So yeah, I wasn’t expecting all of the main characters in the book to see through the hypocrisy of the War so soon, so that was a good surprise. One thing I figured would be difficult for me would be the treatment of Black people throughout the book. It is, suffice it to say, somewhat regressive, especially coming in the wake of my having read The Confessions of Nat Turner and Beloved earlier on in this project. I’m going to try and talk about this subject at more length in my next post on Gone With the Wind, though.

I’d also like to compare the film version of Gone With the Wind to the book next time. I’ve actually been surprised, almost shocked a few times while reading the book by some of the things that happen, so I’d like to see if a Hays code-era film was able to bring some of these things to the screen. From what little I know about the movie, it’s that Clark Gable gets some pretty sweet lines and that the burning of Atlanta sequence is pretty well done, so right there that’s two things the movie and the book did equally well. I hope that the film version of Wade Hamilton is better than he is in the book, because I’d like nothing better than to smack that kid every time he shows up in the text. He’s annoying, and makes me think that Margaret Mitchell never came in contact with a real human child before deciding to write about one.

“Then you aren’t a nice girl, Scarlett, and I’m sorry to hear it. All really nice girls wonder when men don’t try to kiss them. They know they shouldn’t want them to and they know they must act insulted if they do, but just the same, they wish the men would try … Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.” (p. 301)

- Rhett Butler

For the second part of my review of Gone With the Wind, go here.

Tagged 1860s, bad parenting, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, movies, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American South, Time 100

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