The Road to Revolution

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments

I mentioned that I’d read Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road last week, for part of my Masters course, and Lucy added in the comments that a film is coming out – which probably means the novel (complete with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the cover, no doubt) will be rocketing up bestseller lists again. Well, whatever small amount my influence can do will, I hope, give the book a start on its way.

Published in the early 1960s, Revolutionary Road was successful in some respects, but widespread popularity doesn’t seem to have been one of them, at least not for very long – Yates’ is now described as a ‘writer’s writer’, whatever that means. Has to be a good thing, one assumes. Revolutionary Road tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, idealists who live in non-ideal suburbia. The novel opens with a play in which April plays the lead – and it is an unmitigated failure. So (watch out for the simple transferral of allegory) is April’s performance as a housewife; so is her performance as a latent revolutionary. The Wheelers dream of better things, and think they are hiding their gold amongst dross – but the credentials of that gold come under question when April decides to put their long-held plans into action.

Revolutionary Road is unmistakably American, and I don’t know why. It’s not just the “Geez, baby”s that crop up from time to time, but… well, I just don’t know. The American Dream in the background, perhaps. The striving for an achievement, even when that achievement is impossible – striving where the English would have cynically given up and put on a pot of tea.

Similarly, I don’t know why this novel is so good. All the usual – writing that grabs you, situations which need resolution, a subtle wit throughout – though undeniably sad, too. As I was reading (and before I knew that the Titanic co-stars would be reuniting) I kept thinking the book would make an excellent film – the plot is so event-led. Lots of emotions on the surface, or lots of surface emotions anyway. Kate Winslet rarely does a bad film, and never turns in a bad performance, so I’m quite excited at the prospect of seeing this one on the silver screen. Hopefully Yates will become a readers’ writer.

Miss Read et al

StuckinaBook All 3 Comments


Thanks for thoughts on Miss Read – they seem to be overwhelmingly positive, so I shall have to un-neglect this author! I always had her down as quite bad romance, but that was based on the covers seen in my local library – I was rather taken with the covers on the ones I bought. So I might read on and make my judgement on something more literary… the two which I have to sample are Miss Clare Remembers and Gossip from Thrush Green, which seem to be from vaguely the beginning and end of Miss Read’s writing career respectively.

These were called comfort reads by a few of you – we were chatting about comfort reads at Book Group last week, and two people there didn’t really understand the concept, and thought they’d probably never re-read a book… gosh! I don’t re-read much (though have done more this year than usual) but some comfort reads are essential for me.

What else did I buy? Against my better judgement, a book by Jeremy Paxman, who irritates me a great deal – but The English was mentioned so often with fondness in Kate Fox’s excellent Watching the English (my thoughts on it here), and seems to attempt a similar thing. Hopefully his writing isn’t anything like his presenting/reporting… But it’s non-fiction, so that will please Our Vicar (Dad, I’ve read 28 non-fiction books this year! Proud of me?) Also related to one of my 50 Books… is David Garnett’s Aspects of Love: I was in the book shop and toying with spending £3 on a secondhand copy, then saw that there was another copy a few books away for £1.50. I love it when that happens. And I bought it, and read quite a lot of it on the train home – not up to Lady Into Fox, and rather hurried… I daresay I’ll write about it soon.

And to finish with, Richard Yates’ excellent novel Revolutionary Road – we had a class on this on Friday, and I read a library copy, so am delighted to have a copy of it myself. Will doubtless blog about Revolutionary Road soon too – I’ve been finishing so many books recently that I’ll be able to fill days and days with them! Then again, sometimes there are so many that I forget… I never did blog about Passage to India, and now I can’t remember much about it. So I’d better get onto these soon…

But for now, bed. With Miss Buncle’s Book, the latest Persephone title.

Back

StuckinaBook All 9 Comments

Hello! I’m back from a lovely time in London, where I attended a fantastic talk (as detailed below) and saw Elaine (Random Jottings) – also, unexpectedly, Lynne (dovegreyreader). After that, and during today, I saw many friends from uni who have made the move to London… Emily, Karina, Will, Hannah, Matt and Joy. Gosh! What a busy couple of days. Started and finished two books, too. And it won’t surprise you to learn that I bought a few books… five, in fact, but four were in a charity shop. Shall reveal all later, when I’m not too tired to get my camera… but for a little preamble I shall ask… Miss Read: yes or no?

The Home-Maker and The Home-Wrecker

StuckinaBook All 3 Comments

Just to make people jealous… I’m going tomorrow to London, to the fourth Persephone Lecture. I haven’t managed to get to the others – where previous speakers have been Penelope Lively, Hermione Lee (my supervisor for my thesis!) and Salley Vickers – but shall be attending ‘The Home-Maker and The Home-Wrecker: Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Susan Glaspell, and 20th Century American Women Writers’ by Elaine Showalter. Quite a combination there – one made perfectly for Elaine from Random Jottings, who very, very kindly bought me a ticket and will be going with me. For those not in the know, The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Fidelity and Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell, are novels published by Persephone Books. They’re rather good, especially The Home-Maker, which is about a ruthlessly efficient mother and wife who is forced to let her husband become a househusband when he is injured and becomes a wheelchair user. From 1924, it is very ahead of its time in gender/job ideas – even ahead of today, I’d say. While a lot has been done to level the field in gender equality at work (still some way to go, of course) there is still enormous stigma attached to a househusband, and men don’t really have the career/housework and parenting choice which is becoming open to more and more women, and so often debated.

But I don’t think it’s the plight of men which Elaine Showalter will address, and that’s fine. She’s probably best known (to me, anyway) as the author of A Literature of Their Own, about British women novelists, though I’ve been using it recently in regards the South African writer Olive Schreiner.

(As an aside, I know men have dominated literary history, but I was thinking the other day… my knowledge of it is swayed completely towards female writers. Those were the choices I made both academically and recreationally… which is really good on one hand, but means I’m quite ignorant of the path for male writers through the ages! And if I had to label three genii in writing… it would be Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf. Women are winning…)

Anyway – I fully expect to have a fascinating evening, and will report back in due course – might not be until Thursday, as I’m spending Wednesday catching up with friends who’ve moved to London. And don’t they all eventually!

(Results) – Letters from Menabilly

StuckinaBook All , 5 Comments

What a nail-biter the Dickens vs. Hardy match was – and the final result was… a tie! 9 votes each, and 3 going for neither. And, what was even more interesting, most voters seemed not to have to hesitate for a moment. I wasn’t sure which way it would swing, but didn’t expect it to be so close as to be identical. Which, I suppose, means that my vote will be the decider… and I choose Dickens. Something unique in his writing, so witty but grotesque, a world which is unmistakably his. I admire Hardy a lot, but… Charles wins it.

Onto a wholly different topic, I finished Letters From Menabilly today. These are letters from Daphne du Maurier to Oriel Malet (Persephone author; I read the introduction ages ago, so can’t remember the reasoning behind excluding Oriel’s letters. Perhaps they weren’t saved?) Bought it in the midst of my *intended* du Maurier spree, which ended up being just The Flight of the Falcon and My Cousin Rachel, and now this. Somehow it hasn’t worked out exactly as I’d hoped… instead of building on my deep love of Rebecca, and hopeful adoration of Daphne du Maurier, she has rather faded in my estimation, both as a writer and a person. I shouldn’t have expected her to be able to match Rebecca, but I found The Flight of the Falcon fairly tedious at times, though My Cousin Rachel was rather good. It was more on the personal front…

Others have read Letters from Menabilly and loved Daphne as a result. Lynne aka dovegreyreader rather liked it, I think Becca Oxford Reader was also a fan. I enjoyed reading it, but found Daphne to be rather cold-hearted, a little selfish, and not altogether charming. I think opinion shifted irredeemably when she wrote this to Oriel Malet: “If I had never married, and hadn’t had financial success with my books, I think I’d have lived the same life you do”. I paraphrase a little, because I can’t find the quotation, but that’s more or less it. How insensitive! Yes, perhaps I can’t judge the friendship from outside, but so many of these letters seem to gloss over Oriel’s concerns and talk about Daphne’s own.

And then the in-jokes and funny neologisms. We know, from reading the Mitford letters, that these can be adorable or witty – I just found them “tarsome”, as Georgie would say, in Daphne’s letters. Tell-him and crumb and a shilling and beeding and waine and pegging and Doom… incomprehensible without a glossary and so often used, and without any noticeable charm. Am I being contrary? Perhaps. But ‘Tell-Him’ (used to describe more or less anything Daphne found dull or lecturey, to the slightest degree) was a label for almost everything she encountered, and seemed a bit cruel.

There was one exciting bit, which I’d already read about in Lynne’s review – when she writes about Frank Baker, the author of my beloved book Miss Hargreaves. He sent Daphne du Maurier a copy of his novel The Birds, which predates her short story which Alfred Hitchcock adapted so memorably – Daphne writes, ‘So I began his, rather smiling derisively, thinking it would be nonsense, and it’s frightfully good! Much more psychological politics than mine, and going into great Deep Thoughts, I was quite absorbed!’ I have The Birds but have yet to read it…

One final thing I must say – Oriel Malet comes across as a lovely, lovely person. Not only the recipient of the letters, so intersperses letters every now and then with prose for context. Usually explaining where they both were at the stage of their lives when writing, but also with such interest and charm and I looked forward to these sections the most. Her experiences living on a houseboat are especially delightful. So, though Daphne comes across as no fairy godmother, the book is worth seeking out – and I shall be turning my Daphne-fest into an Oriel hunt.

Black Dogs

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments


Somehow, over the years, I’ve read five novels by Ian McEwan. Not such an astonishing fact, except that he is far from being my favourite novelist – I admire quite a few of them, really like some, dislike others. And, thinking about it, four of those five have been read for book groups or similar – including Black Dogs which I finished (and, indeed, started) today.

It certainly battles out with Atonement for being my favourite McEwan – people have recommended ‘early McEwan’ to me, and I can see why. The writing here is compact, tense – so often I’d finish reading paragraphs or phrases and think “wow” – quite the opposite of Saturday.

Black Dogs centres around an incident which happened on a couple’s honeymoon, involving the dogs in question. We spend most of the novel knowing that something took place, but not knowing what, so I shan’t spoil it for you – the novel is filled with the impact and effects of the event. June and Bernard are the central couple – both old by the ‘present day’, both recounting their lives to the narrator, Jeremy, who is writing a sort of biography. We flit back to their youth, forward to their separate old age, to Jeremy’s life and marriage (to their daughter). Bernard is an ex-Communist whose narrow ideology cannot be made compatible with June’s spiritual ‘conversion’. I give that word inverted commas as, though June is supposed to represent ‘religion’ in the novel, she never does much other than embrace a hazy spirituality.

Nevertheless, she is the novel’s most interesting character, one with more depth than the rest. It is particularly to see her in an old people’s home; how disorientated she is: ‘In the few seconds that it took to approach slowly and set down my bag, she had to reconstruct her whole existence, who and where she was, how and why she came to be in this small white-walled room. Only when she had all that could she begin to remember me.’ Makes me want to watch Away From Her again…

Perhaps the most intriguing bit of the book is something Jeremy thinks, when researching the lives of June and Bernard: ‘Turning points are the inventions of story-tellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by, a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth.’ If McEwan is anything, he is the novelist of turning points. And usually very good with this technique, I must say – why is he arguing against it here, I wonder?

All in all, I thought it was very good – not much of a linear plot, more vignettes pulled together by the centring force of the Black Dogs incident. Some incredibly taut language and effective writing. I should add, however, that the majority of the group’s response at book group was middling or negative – but we all agreed it was better than Saturday!

For the benefit of those who have found their way here from the book group, here are the links to other Book Group Books which I’ve written about here…. not as many as I’d thought. And, for anyone interested, this is the book group’s website. Very nice it is too.

Speaking of Love – Angela Young
Alva & Irva – Edward Carey
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Deborah Harried

StuckinaBook All 5 Comments

The collected letters of the Mitford sisters, which I raved about here, is still my favourite book read this year – and so it was with delight that I discovered Deborah Mitford (or Deborah Devonshire – or perhaps m’lady) would be having more letters published this year. In Tearing Haste is the letters between Debo and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who share the unusual trait of being alive whilst having their letters published. I imagine they are writing some amusing letters to each other about it already.

What makes this new book even more exciting is that Charlotte Mosley is editing it – how she found the time after The Mitfords is beyond me, but I’m very glad she did. With so much material, especially for that previous volume, the task of the editor is (I should imagine) incredibly difficult and incredibly skilled. I even wrote to Charlotte Mosley to say how much I enjoyed (nay, loved) her work on The Mitfords, and got a nice note back.

I have only just bought it – rather quailed at the price (£25, down to £20 at Blackwells and probably discounted in a lot of places) but an online friend, Sherry, and I made a cunning plan. We both have November birthdays, so we’re buying In Tearing Haste for each other – but since I live in England and she lives in the US, we’ll collect our presents from the local bookshop. Plus, I have Blackwells vouchers from Magdalen… down to my last £10 there, actually – expect a full run-through of how I spent Magdalen’s money soon. And this book will be very useful for my writing on the middlebrow, I daresay, and thus qualifies as an ‘academic text’ (on which the vouchers had to be spent). One of the great things about studying 20th Century Lit is that fun books are also work books!

I’ve not read anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor before, but apparently his style is the opposite of Debo’s avowedly philistine writing. Will just share the opening to the first letter from the book, and you’ll understand why I love her:

Dear Paddy Leigh Fermor,
I’m beginning like that chiefly because Nancy [Mitford] says one mustn’t, but as she says I’m mental age of 9 it doesn’t signify how one begins. I’m ever so excited about you coming to Ireland. Do really come & don’t just say you are.

The Mitfords, in some circles, had become bywords for the affluent and senseless – hopefully the recent succession of published letters, and Debo’s unavoidable charm, will lead the next generation of the Mitford-curious to a different conclusion.

Challenging

StuckinaBook All 5 Comments

I don’t usually go in for reading challenges, because I have enough demand on my reading time as it is and deadlines make me panic, but I loved one I saw on Books Please so much that I had to join in. I rather anticipate that I won’t *actually* read the books in 2009, but the fun will be choosing books to fit the categories…

The challenge is What’s In A Name (2) – (2) because a successful challenge was run last year with different categories. I’m going to go through my unread-but-owned books and see where I can fit them in…

A book with a “profession” in its title.

The Professor – Charlotte BronteThe Calligrapher’s Night – Yasmine Ghata
The Sailor’s Return – David Garnett

A book with a “time of day” in its title. Endless Night – Agatha ChristieAs I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – Laurie LeeA Clear Dawn – Winifred Peck

A book with a “relative” in its title. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting – Penelope Mortimer
Good Wives? – Margaret ForsterMiss Linsey and Pa – Stella Gibbons

A book with a “body part” in its title. The Eaten Heart – Giovanni BoccaccioBy The Pricking of My Thumbs – Agatha ChristieThe Heel of Achilles – EM Delafield

A book with a “building” in its title. The Orchid House – Phyllis Shand AllfreyHotel du Lac – Anita BrooknerThe House of Dolls – Barbara Comyns

A book with a “medical condition” in its title. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
I don’t think I have any others for this category… I don’t own Love in a Time of Cholera… does ‘Death’ count as a “medical condition”…?Even if you don’t intend to carry out the challenge, have a think of books on your shelves which might slot in… we’ll see next year how many of these I’ve read.