⭐⭐⭐⭐
This Guardian article on Dickens and Christmas nudged me into re-reading A Christmas Carol. The introduction to this Penguin edition even starts with the same anecdote, about the costermonger's daughter who asked “Mr Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”
I rarely re-read books, not least because there are too many classics I wish I'd read, and which I haven't yet read once, to launch myself into a project of re-reading. But also because I know that re-reading is more time-consuming both to do and to write about, because it's not just about the book and the current reading experience, but a reconsideration of what I'd previously got out of the story. (This post is, for the moment, just about A Christmas Carol and not the other Christmas Writings. People's appetite for Christmas material is probably already waning on 4th January, and I don't expect to finish this whole collection by Twelfth Night.)
The early pages of A Christmas Carol remained so familiar that I thought it might be basically impossible to review the book. It was simply itself and that's how it was. Goodness knows how many times I'd read them when I was growing up - I'd been given two different editions as presents before the age of ten, and would have opened and browsed them frequently. The only surprises were that some of Scrooge's anti-Christmas rants were genuinely funny, and that he was suffering from a cold throughout proceedings. However, I found it less familiar once I hit Stave Two, and more possible to think about it as I would another book, although every now and again, there were occasional sentences that had resounding familiarity from childhood, because they'd just got into my head, like "who and what are you?" or because they were probably captions to illustrations in other editions.
It was hard to tell whether this is an effect of my own early habituation to the text, or if I was spotting genuine influence at work, but there is a tone here which seems like the essence of British children's writing, especially, though not only, children's fantasy writing, and fantasy stories which aim to have cross-age appeal. Did Dickens essentially invent it? Or did he simply popularise it so that almost everyone since has been influenced via his work? Probably its greatest contemporary exponent is Neil Gaiman - including with that storyteller voice and occasional authorial breaking of the fourth wall that has become connected with the trust many readers have in his public persona (a clause which I feel could be saying equally about Dickens or Gaiman). I don't read much in the way of contemporary children's or YA, but it's also the tone A.L. Kennedy was going for in her Little Prince spin-off, The Little Snake, which I read a few months ago.
Often the sentences seemed astonishingly modern - noticeably more of them would work in contemporary writing than would sentences from, for example, Henry Fielding, written a century earlier. Perhaps this is due to the overwhelming popularity of the Carol which has led a huge readership and reuse, often unwitting, of many of the phrasings. I did not find myself struck by modernity of wording in the same way when I read the less popular Hard Times a couple of years earlier. But just when I was marvelling at all this, of course there would come along some paragraph really quite antiquated and tangled to 21st century ears, showing that this is indeed still a work of 1843.
What never would have occurred to me as a kid is that Scrooge is essentially forced through a rapid course of psychotherapy in order to effect personality change - only he didn't seek it out himself. (Did Freud read much Dickens?) Its transformative outcome in either three days or one, depending how you measure time in the book, is one that promoters of accelerated programmes like the Hoffmann Process can probably only dream of. He is made to examine how the past made him who he is, including a number of painful moments which reawaken a dormant capacity for a variety of emotions; he is shown the adverse effects he has on others, and his separation from what are considered healthy social norms; and then to reinforce it all, just in case his repentance - to use a term from religion that would have been recognisable to early Victorians - is not yet deep and sincere, he is forced to look in the eye the probable future consequences of his current way of life. His response to the final Spirit is basically the idea of psychological integration: "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."
The main, intended, message of A Christmas Carol is one of charity, and, ultimately, in tandem with Dickens' other works, the need to improve economic equality. However, I think that alongside this it also ends up showing lavish material consumption (via spending rather than hoarding of money) as a sign of being good-hearted. (Picking out unhelpful influences I absorbed from books and films when I was younger is, for me, an inevitable part of revisiting them. In some cases these influences occurred because I didn't properly understand the wider context or social norms beyond the work, but in the case of A Christmas Carol I think it's something the text in its many forms has actually put into the wider Anglo-American culture. 'Moderation in all things', or lagom to use the Swedish term increasingly fashionable in English, is not what it's about.) Whilst Scrooge is possibly malnourished himself, living on gruel to save money, Scrooge's nephew's house evidently has more than anyone could ever need. Bob Cratchit definitely needed a substantial pay rise and decent heating at work. (Which I think of all the more keenly knowing some of my own ancestors were unhealthy Victorian clerks, and another a milliner like one of the daughters.) But his Christmas dinner sounds very nice as it was - and would he have even been able to cook that giant turkey? Would the local ovens have had space for a thing like that, which would have normally been bought by a wealthy household? Would it have cost them more to cook and delayed neighbours' dinners by taking up communal oven space? I guess in an age of extreme wealth inequality there is lavishness and there is poverty, and Dickens' own life story had a hand in how he showed this. Issues of the later 20th and 21st century - of prevalent commercial and media pressures to overconsume leading to stress and overspending, and of ecological depletion - were certainly not on the radar of the Hungry Forties, when mouthwatering accounts of mountains of food could provide thrills and comfort to poorer readers who were scraping by, much as the Cratchits were. Slater's introduction refers to real letters readers sent to Dickens also saying how much they loved the scene of the family's dinner. Which, it’s interesting to see, includes a Christmas pudding cooked in the laundry copper - would that affect the taste? (I assume the name 'Cratchit' is supposed to have a scraping-by sort of sound and perhaps to echo Tiny Tim's crutch, but its echoes of 'crotchety' and 'crabbit' mean it also sounds ill-natured in a way that emphatically does not suit Bob and his family.)
The abundance of works like this one, showing great positive change in difficult people, can also lead to frustration over the years, as one gradually discovers that, in the reality of adult life, people do not necessarily change and 'grow' as much as would be helpful - but that is hardly peculiar to A Christmas Carol.
However, in terms of evaluating A Christmas Carol by modern mores, I suppose one can't much fault Dickens on healthy eating! Often in the 19th century, meat and carbohydrates were valued over vegetables, which could be seen as a food for the poor. (No sprouts to spoil the Cratchits' dinner!) Yet a paragraph this ecstatic about veg and fruit (Dickens even sexualises it somewhat) could only fit these days into food or travel writing; anywhere else it would sound like a parodic escape from a public health campaign - normally it is cakes and chocolate that are extolled this way:
There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.
The notes in this edition seem very good. There is very little in the way of material so obvious it's patronising, and only a couple of things missed out which could have done with notes: " a twice-turned gown" and " like a bad lobster in a dark cellar" (in 2018 the combination of lobsters and basements made one think of Jordan Peterson fans; goodness knows what greater significance it had in 1843).
Something I keep mulling over more generally about Dickens is how he was, in his day, so effective in his social reform agenda, and so well-loved by readers, whereas fiction doing the same now - not least because he's done it before - easily comes across as either mawkish, or written by and for a particular small audience (which has in the past couple of years come to be called 'liberal elites'). As far as I can work out, reasons for this on a larger scale would have included the reform-mindedness of some 19th century parliaments, the prevalence of some strands of Christianity, and the abundance of cheap energy fuelled industrialisation which required better education and thereby societal participation of workers. Whereas nowadays many people are aggrieved about declining standards of living, making them feel, en masse, less inclined to share, and the economic underpinnings have a different trajectory. (Not that Dickens didn't have opponents, of course. The introduction mentions that the Westminster Review condemned him, in June 1844, for his ignorance of political economy and the ‘laws’ of supply and demand: ‘Who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them – for, unless there were turkeys and punch in surplus, some one must go without – is a disagreeable reflection kept wholly out of sight [by Dickens].’ But this was a predictable reaction from Utilitarian extremists. ('Utilitarian extremists' seems somehow an absurd phrase now, if utilitarianism is an abstract idea from introductory philosophy courses, but evidently they were a thing!) Yet although the sight of the poor was surely more familiar to the wealthy of the 18th and 19th century than to their 21st century contemporaries in many western cities, people were shocked by reports on working and living conditions - Earlier in the year [1843] he, like Elizabeth Barrett and many others, had been appalled by the brutal revelations of the Second Report (Trades and Manufactures) of the Children’s Employment Commission set up by Parliament.. Were many shocked this way, or were plenty of others inured? There was evidently some shift of ideas and sentiment which I've not really read about, and of which Dickens was no doubt part - it was not just underlying economic factors, even if they are the growth medium - which made those with power gradually start caring more and doing more. The biggest change was the post-WWII welfare state, but there was a broad trajectory of improvement over the century or so before that. Something I'd like to read more about.
----
What Christmas is as We Grow Older is a short piece Dickens wrote in 1851 at the age of 39. The introduction explains the background: for some years Dickens had been struggling with memories of family members and friends who had died, and he had started to find Christmas increasingly sad because of this. This article is a kind of resolution in which he concludes that it is fine and right to think of them as well as of those present, and to remember youthful ambitions unfulfilled as well as enjoying what is happening now. (Although probably the latter had been easier for him, as a successful man.) It mirrors the integration he'd written about Scrooge experiencing, but after he'd had more struggles of his own that marred his wish to find Christmas special. It shows how much death it was normal for someone of that age to have experienced at that age in the Victorian era (very different from now, though I thought of one good friend who, quite recently, at the same age, lost a much-loved parent), and that regardless of its being a universal experience then, and despite Dickens' religious belief, it was still a struggle. I'm sure this is the sort of writing that makes some people scoff at Dickens' sentimentality (the bit about child angels especially); and I couldn't help but speculate that it might have annoyed people who knew the less pleasant sides of Dickens' character - yet overall I found the piece incredibly moving; it instilled a sense of reverence, and before the end I cried in a way few books have ever provoked (not just welling up a bit, the actually-need-a-handkerchief sort) and couldn't read anything else straight afterwards.
(Read Dec 2018 - Jan 2019; reviewed January 2019. The review on Goodreads.)
Showing posts with label publisher: penguin classics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publisher: penguin classics. Show all posts
4 January 2019
3 September 2018
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, tr. Natasha Randall
[4.5] Each time I've started reading A Hero of Our Time - and there have been three or four - it's been tremendous fun. This is partly due to the playful self-awareness and utterly modern attitude of the second and third sentences, which shine through in every translation I've tried, and in this version mention:
one valise of average size, half-filled with my travel notes about Georgia. The majority of these luckily for you, were lost; but the valise with the rest of my things, luckily for me, remained intact.
I know these days that 'postmodernity' is about as old as the novel itself (a look at reviews of [author:Steven Moore|16001]'s histories of the novel will help), but meeting phrases like these, sparkling out from the dust of 200 years, still brings nearly the same surprise and delight as I got twenty years ago from discovering [book:The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner|87580].
Despite my enthusiasm, each previous time I began to read A Hero of Our Time, I was waylaid by things I can no longer remember, and got nowhere near finishing the book. But now I have finished it, and straight away went back to re-read various bits and pieces. (There are few books I like enough to bother doing this. It's also a testament to it that I started again from the beginning so many times. I usually avoid doing this when picking up a book after a gap, so I don't have to read the same chapters again and can get to the end more quickly.)
Hero isn't like the typical Anglophone idea of a Russian classic: a giant, complex opera or symphony (i.e. a Tolstoy doorstopper). It's short, immediate, and full of escapades and scrapes: an old-fashioned boys' own adventure. (Neil LaBute's foreword to this Penguin Classics edition rightly compares Pechorin to Flashman, and dreams up a meeting for the two characters during the Crimean War, which I, for one, would really like to read.) Bring the expectations you'd bring to Verne or Conan Doyle, rather than those for high literature, and you'll get more out of it.
The British boys' own adventure isn't just an adventure story, though, it's a document of Empire, colonialism and imperialist attitudes, and the same goes for A Hero of Our Time in the Russian context. For some reason, it's very unusual in mass media to hear Russia (or the Soviets) described as a colonial and imperial power in the same way that Western European countries are - this understanding of the country seems mostly confined to academic works. Perhaps, because Russia was appropriating territories contiguous to its own borders - many of which it still rules - while Britain was spreading pink over the global map to the Americas, Asia and Africa, it just isn't as obvious to the general public. A few months ago, I was browsing [book:Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy|1181367]; I thought reading fiction would be an enjoyable and inexpensive way to learn a bit more about Imperial Russian colonialism - and there among the most significant works was Lermontov and A Hero of Our Time, so I picked up the book again, and found myself noticing sentences I would once not have looked at so intently: all these characterisations of 'Asiatics', Cossacks, warlords and their families. I might otherwise have read them with the same well-it's-not-great-but-it's-old resignation as I'd have brought to a 19th-century Londoner's stereotyping of locals during his journey to the north of England, and not filed alongside British Empire-builders' depictions of India with the Said-Orientalism toolkit etc. (Not that one couldn't also apply that to regional and class snobbery, actually.) My desire to hear more about the place and time, and the relative unfamiliarity (only, for comparison, having the memory of a few documentaries and newspaper articles from and about the 1990s-present) meant it was fascinating to an extent that similar stuff about the British Raj - a backdrop to dozens of novels, films and TV series since childhood - wouldn't be now.
(An interesting-looking book of stories about Russian colonialism from the Georgian side: [book:The Prose of the Mountains|28089291] )
As in British Imperialist literature, there are colonising protagonists who partly identify themselves with the colonised region and go native when it suits them (of course Pechorin can be mistaken for a Circassian), and there is a great aesthetic love of the landscape they've been sent to tame. Lermontov was also a painter, and it shows in the gorgeous extended descriptions of scenery. Natasha Randall's introduction says these can occasionally be repetitive, but I was enjoying wandering around in them way too much to notice.
In the last few years, I've read too many articles by women who identify with female supporting characters in fiction that has sexist male protagonists, and it's too current a subject to ignore in 2018 - so I should mention that the reader who identifies primarily with them here is unlikely to enjoy A Hero of Our Time so much. I'm not sure it would even be possible to identify with them in the first half - they are not so much characters as dolls or pets exemplifying desirable qualities of the era (there's also a Bond Girl), and the average contemporary Western reader has such a different background and emotional history that they are unlikely to truly fathom Bela, the kidnapped daughter of a Circassian warlord, and who has lived all her life in a culture in which such snatchings are commonplace, any more than Lermontov/Pechorin did. In the second half of the book (about social intrigue rather than derring-do), aristocratic Russian ladies from Moscow and St. Petersburg get more page time, and are evidently trying to negotiate their own emotions, and the double standards and conflicting expectations of their milieu and the Romantic period, where medieval courtly love style tendencies and expectations of respectable marriage coexist with a fashion for Byronic bad boys, and behaviours like pickup-artist style negging. I would guess that much ink has been spilled already on the similarities between Vera, Pechorin's former lover, and Anna Karenina.
LaBute - famous in the late 90s for his films about what's now called toxic masculinity - considers Pechorin to be a sociopath. And I have to say that certain of Pechorin's social manipulations, his nerve, and his occasional moments of introspection and doubt, closely resemble someone I used to know who described himself as a sociopath. I'm not talking serial killer bad (nor gloating at length over destroying people in the manner of Valmont in [book:Les Liaisons Dangereuses|49540], another character LaBute mentions) - more like Tony in Skins: an arrogant, clever, socially connected, player of games, sometimes very hurtful, and sometimes also useful and supportive when it suits. Given Pechorin's level of reflectiveness, you wonder how much of this arsery he might grow out of: possibly some, but not 100%. The energy and likeability with which Pechorin is presented shows realistically how such a person seems to acquaintances (of which they have a great many) until they do something too awful - and how they get on in life, in a way that the later tendency to present such personalities as sinister unreliable narrators really doesn't. (LaBute also does that thing, pretty much universal in New Lad-era media and later 20th century litfic, of presenting highly egotistical and difficult characters as universally, typically male, as if men's personalities did not, in fact, vary as much as women's.)
Randall, drawing attention to the psychological realism rather than to labels, compares A Hero of Our Time with [book:The Confession of a Child of the Century|16282313], another personal favourite of mine - although very different in its emotional intensity and not such an easy read - which is again remarkable in presenting the inner world of a difficult character without judgement, to an extent that modern works rarely do. The period when both books were written, the cusp between Romanticism and the fashion for realist fiction (a time also, importantly, before the codification of psychology and the rise of psychology-as-morality) seems to have been especially productive for this.
The lightness with which Pechorin's games are presented makes it clearer how he experiences them - they are not related with that heavy-handed insinuation that characterises later fiction about questionable individuals - and the narrative sometimes bestowed strange flashes of insight beyond the words on the page. I suddenly understood how hunting would be exciting because it would be different every time, moving through the landscape on different routes decided by another creature, different weather and sounds, not knowing where the quarry would go, different from the relatively fixed possibilities in, for example, gaming. Passages which could have been commonplace are elevated: something that in the hands of many later writers would have been a dyspeptic, predictable rant against astrology is here a poetic consideration of how 'we' see ourselves compared with how our ancestors saw themselves and their lives.
The structure is odd - the book ends abruptly, inside a framed narrative, and it's understandable that some readers would knock a star off for this, but the aytypicality of this in a 19th century novel felt interesting in itself. It helped to understand that this is actually a collection of short stories about one character and his world, previously published separately - it was even suggested that Lermontov might have written more about Pechorin had he lived longer - and the introduction's listing of the sequence in which the episodes happen prompted me to look over them again in that order for an altered perspective.
Even the title has more to give than I expected. A hero as in a (potential) war hero; a hero as in a Byronic hero (not necessarily approved of by those in the 19th century establishment who esteemed of the former), the implied question mark at the end - these could be obvious from reading the blurb. A facet added by contemporary Western life (especially outside the US) where warfare has not been part of most people's lives for a couple of generations, is the suspicion in some quarters of those who have killed or are prepared to kill repeatedly in the armed services: might it actually require a dark-triad sort of antisocial personality? Is that what a lot of 'heroes', especially old-fashioned heroes, really are?
A Hero of Our Time is a classic partly because of its place in the history of the Russian novel, as a bridge from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Golden Age - and I admit that a bit of my enjoyment was from seeing it in this light (it was probably good to read it after W&P, AK, C&P and EO) and in relation to English literature (having seen it argued that Constance Garnett's translations of later Russian greats effectively prompted the incorporation of the country's major writers into the English canon). But mostly I found it to be something which, having read most of the 'easy' English classics a long time ago, I don't really expect any more from books of this age: an enjoyable, light adventure story with intriguing character portrait.
(finished & reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
one valise of average size, half-filled with my travel notes about Georgia. The majority of these luckily for you, were lost; but the valise with the rest of my things, luckily for me, remained intact.
I know these days that 'postmodernity' is about as old as the novel itself (a look at reviews of [author:Steven Moore|16001]'s histories of the novel will help), but meeting phrases like these, sparkling out from the dust of 200 years, still brings nearly the same surprise and delight as I got twenty years ago from discovering [book:The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner|87580].
Despite my enthusiasm, each previous time I began to read A Hero of Our Time, I was waylaid by things I can no longer remember, and got nowhere near finishing the book. But now I have finished it, and straight away went back to re-read various bits and pieces. (There are few books I like enough to bother doing this. It's also a testament to it that I started again from the beginning so many times. I usually avoid doing this when picking up a book after a gap, so I don't have to read the same chapters again and can get to the end more quickly.)
Hero isn't like the typical Anglophone idea of a Russian classic: a giant, complex opera or symphony (i.e. a Tolstoy doorstopper). It's short, immediate, and full of escapades and scrapes: an old-fashioned boys' own adventure. (Neil LaBute's foreword to this Penguin Classics edition rightly compares Pechorin to Flashman, and dreams up a meeting for the two characters during the Crimean War, which I, for one, would really like to read.) Bring the expectations you'd bring to Verne or Conan Doyle, rather than those for high literature, and you'll get more out of it.
The British boys' own adventure isn't just an adventure story, though, it's a document of Empire, colonialism and imperialist attitudes, and the same goes for A Hero of Our Time in the Russian context. For some reason, it's very unusual in mass media to hear Russia (or the Soviets) described as a colonial and imperial power in the same way that Western European countries are - this understanding of the country seems mostly confined to academic works. Perhaps, because Russia was appropriating territories contiguous to its own borders - many of which it still rules - while Britain was spreading pink over the global map to the Americas, Asia and Africa, it just isn't as obvious to the general public. A few months ago, I was browsing [book:Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy|1181367]; I thought reading fiction would be an enjoyable and inexpensive way to learn a bit more about Imperial Russian colonialism - and there among the most significant works was Lermontov and A Hero of Our Time, so I picked up the book again, and found myself noticing sentences I would once not have looked at so intently: all these characterisations of 'Asiatics', Cossacks, warlords and their families. I might otherwise have read them with the same well-it's-not-great-but-it's-old resignation as I'd have brought to a 19th-century Londoner's stereotyping of locals during his journey to the north of England, and not filed alongside British Empire-builders' depictions of India with the Said-Orientalism toolkit etc. (Not that one couldn't also apply that to regional and class snobbery, actually.) My desire to hear more about the place and time, and the relative unfamiliarity (only, for comparison, having the memory of a few documentaries and newspaper articles from and about the 1990s-present) meant it was fascinating to an extent that similar stuff about the British Raj - a backdrop to dozens of novels, films and TV series since childhood - wouldn't be now.
(An interesting-looking book of stories about Russian colonialism from the Georgian side: [book:The Prose of the Mountains|28089291] )
As in British Imperialist literature, there are colonising protagonists who partly identify themselves with the colonised region and go native when it suits them (of course Pechorin can be mistaken for a Circassian), and there is a great aesthetic love of the landscape they've been sent to tame. Lermontov was also a painter, and it shows in the gorgeous extended descriptions of scenery. Natasha Randall's introduction says these can occasionally be repetitive, but I was enjoying wandering around in them way too much to notice.
In the last few years, I've read too many articles by women who identify with female supporting characters in fiction that has sexist male protagonists, and it's too current a subject to ignore in 2018 - so I should mention that the reader who identifies primarily with them here is unlikely to enjoy A Hero of Our Time so much. I'm not sure it would even be possible to identify with them in the first half - they are not so much characters as dolls or pets exemplifying desirable qualities of the era (there's also a Bond Girl), and the average contemporary Western reader has such a different background and emotional history that they are unlikely to truly fathom Bela, the kidnapped daughter of a Circassian warlord, and who has lived all her life in a culture in which such snatchings are commonplace, any more than Lermontov/Pechorin did. In the second half of the book (about social intrigue rather than derring-do), aristocratic Russian ladies from Moscow and St. Petersburg get more page time, and are evidently trying to negotiate their own emotions, and the double standards and conflicting expectations of their milieu and the Romantic period, where medieval courtly love style tendencies and expectations of respectable marriage coexist with a fashion for Byronic bad boys, and behaviours like pickup-artist style negging. I would guess that much ink has been spilled already on the similarities between Vera, Pechorin's former lover, and Anna Karenina.
LaBute - famous in the late 90s for his films about what's now called toxic masculinity - considers Pechorin to be a sociopath. And I have to say that certain of Pechorin's social manipulations, his nerve, and his occasional moments of introspection and doubt, closely resemble someone I used to know who described himself as a sociopath. I'm not talking serial killer bad (nor gloating at length over destroying people in the manner of Valmont in [book:Les Liaisons Dangereuses|49540], another character LaBute mentions) - more like Tony in Skins: an arrogant, clever, socially connected, player of games, sometimes very hurtful, and sometimes also useful and supportive when it suits. Given Pechorin's level of reflectiveness, you wonder how much of this arsery he might grow out of: possibly some, but not 100%. The energy and likeability with which Pechorin is presented shows realistically how such a person seems to acquaintances (of which they have a great many) until they do something too awful - and how they get on in life, in a way that the later tendency to present such personalities as sinister unreliable narrators really doesn't. (LaBute also does that thing, pretty much universal in New Lad-era media and later 20th century litfic, of presenting highly egotistical and difficult characters as universally, typically male, as if men's personalities did not, in fact, vary as much as women's.)
Randall, drawing attention to the psychological realism rather than to labels, compares A Hero of Our Time with [book:The Confession of a Child of the Century|16282313], another personal favourite of mine - although very different in its emotional intensity and not such an easy read - which is again remarkable in presenting the inner world of a difficult character without judgement, to an extent that modern works rarely do. The period when both books were written, the cusp between Romanticism and the fashion for realist fiction (a time also, importantly, before the codification of psychology and the rise of psychology-as-morality) seems to have been especially productive for this.
The lightness with which Pechorin's games are presented makes it clearer how he experiences them - they are not related with that heavy-handed insinuation that characterises later fiction about questionable individuals - and the narrative sometimes bestowed strange flashes of insight beyond the words on the page. I suddenly understood how hunting would be exciting because it would be different every time, moving through the landscape on different routes decided by another creature, different weather and sounds, not knowing where the quarry would go, different from the relatively fixed possibilities in, for example, gaming. Passages which could have been commonplace are elevated: something that in the hands of many later writers would have been a dyspeptic, predictable rant against astrology is here a poetic consideration of how 'we' see ourselves compared with how our ancestors saw themselves and their lives.
The structure is odd - the book ends abruptly, inside a framed narrative, and it's understandable that some readers would knock a star off for this, but the aytypicality of this in a 19th century novel felt interesting in itself. It helped to understand that this is actually a collection of short stories about one character and his world, previously published separately - it was even suggested that Lermontov might have written more about Pechorin had he lived longer - and the introduction's listing of the sequence in which the episodes happen prompted me to look over them again in that order for an altered perspective.
Even the title has more to give than I expected. A hero as in a (potential) war hero; a hero as in a Byronic hero (not necessarily approved of by those in the 19th century establishment who esteemed of the former), the implied question mark at the end - these could be obvious from reading the blurb. A facet added by contemporary Western life (especially outside the US) where warfare has not been part of most people's lives for a couple of generations, is the suspicion in some quarters of those who have killed or are prepared to kill repeatedly in the armed services: might it actually require a dark-triad sort of antisocial personality? Is that what a lot of 'heroes', especially old-fashioned heroes, really are?
A Hero of Our Time is a classic partly because of its place in the history of the Russian novel, as a bridge from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Golden Age - and I admit that a bit of my enjoyment was from seeing it in this light (it was probably good to read it after W&P, AK, C&P and EO) and in relation to English literature (having seen it argued that Constance Garnett's translations of later Russian greats effectively prompted the incorporation of the country's major writers into the English canon). But mostly I found it to be something which, having read most of the 'easy' English classics a long time ago, I don't really expect any more from books of this age: an enjoyable, light adventure story with intriguing character portrait.
(finished & reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
23 March 2017
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
In 2013 or 14, I voted on the Goodreads list 'Books you are tired of hearing about' to express my exasperation at seeing To the Lighthouse every bloody where that summer. If, even six months ago, you'd told me not only that I'd read To the Lighthouse this spring, but that I'd give it 5 stars and mark it "favourites", I'd have told you, if you were the kind of friend I could say this to in a friendly way, to fuck off. Especially because I didn't much like Mrs Dalloway and the imprint it left of grey-grubby dejected aftermathness, a book which on at least half a dozen occasions I've called "the wrong sort of depressing", and my default position was that I didn't like Virginia Woolf apart from Orlando and didn't want to read any more. I am still not very happy to have joined the club of Goodreads bores who love To the Lighthouse, but for what it's worth, the book was rather amazing - and I don't think this way about dozens of other classics and favourites I read before GR or was already determined to read before joining the site, and which people with large followings also go on about, so it'll just have to get re-framed to fit with those. When something's this popular, it goes without saying that you won't be on the same wavelength as all the other fans.
It wasn't instant. I read Hermione Lee's excellent introduction (better than a lot of the recent introductions to classics; the notes, however may be a bit too detailed unless you're doing a dissertation about textual alterations) and then small dribs and drabs of the novel. It was full of odd metaphors that were clearly well-written but which didn't describe my own experience of anything. I was sad not to be connecting when I'd wanted to connect with its superlative descriptions. Though there was a curious sense of its being the platonic idyll of hundreds of early-to-mid twentieth century English stories about elegant families and children and lawns and parties and summer escapades - even though it was written after plenty of examples I thought of, E. Nesbit for instance, and even though a lot of the characters just weren't very nice. (Later, the family structure, with the moody writer father and caretaking mother and lots of kids and guests, would prompt me to wonder if it had partly inspired childhood favourites of mine, the Bagthorpe Saga by Helen Cresswell.)
It was a world I still couldn't imagine as great high art: it's a world that's popularly cosy Sunday evening entertainment, as described much later, in Chapter 16: when the great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading, writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on their washing-tables and dressing-tables, and the novels on the bed-tables, and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the dining-room for dinner.
Back near the beginning, I couldn't grip it. (These quotation marks are all things I wrote straight after reading.) "The prose is so silky, it slips past my eyes the same way poetry does. Probably because it's very well made. But feels essentially insubstantial. Yet quite often there's a really novel image. I get this with Ali Smith too - I often find it hard to see why she's quite so revered because she doesn't do the Pynchon thing of throwing around huge words and references and gags and it seems enjoyable in a simpler way, but there's a sort of... there isn't a word for it, because I have a sense of its being plainer and more grounded than 'beautiful' would suggest, it's not ornate, but it's incredibly well crafted."
No, to work its magic it needs to be read at length: immerse oneself and swim around in it, stretch out.
"I am getting to like it a lot now. There was a bit from chapters 4-12 that was really enchanting and ethereal, and it worked despite most of the characters being prickly, interesting how it does that. And it gained momentum once I read a lot of it at a time."
"Am starting to feel how some of the curious metaphors in TtL are like paintings. It doesn't matter that I might not have experienced that thing that way, the joy is in the images themselves." [I would later start to feel the nature of the actions in a new way, through their imagery. I can't recall a book that has ever done this before, and so very many times; other great descriptions have merely captured a feeling that already existed, on the edge of consciousness and previously beyond words. This is one of the central and unique achievements of this novel as far as I am concerned.] "It is refreshing to find such a very good book that feels like it's all about other people, the characters (not something for me to identify with or see people I know in it). Totally unconvincing as being about Scotland though. Always feels like the South Coast. Walter Scott was still fashionable in Scotland decades later. Never mind the complete absence of the sense of Scottish weather." It is an airy halcyon world, like the perfectly chosen cover of this Penguin Classics edition; it is Metronomy's English Riviera a century earlier. No one is stung and importuned and tangled, raw-eyed, by perpetual smirring sea breezes that any non-native would rather call gales.
"It's incredible how tiny the moments are that are described in TtL. So much longer to read (and esp to write) than to feel. I've read some reviews that seem to miss this completely. How very fleeting these states of mind are; the sort of thing people don't feel in the long term, nor set out to be judged by, not like writing down a considered opinion." Each moment is not what one character definitively thinks of another; among these are the moments we usually forget, microscopic aberrations and contradictions.
It is remarkable to have created such a beautiful and shimmering book from actively cathartic writing about a dysfunctional, sometimes abusive family , and a delineation of the frustrations of being an intelligent, artistically ambitious woman in the early twentieth century. It still barely seems possible. Just as it is strange to think of Woolf as a Victorian or Edwardian, yet those were decades of her life, drawn here, as she, like Lily, created new strange modernist forms that were anything but characteristic of the century of her birth. (Though perhaps the most modern - the most twenty-first century moments are of the irascible Mr. Ramsay with his nose forever in a book whilst in company, like a smartphone addict neglecting his guests.) It is a book very much about art, about painting, concerned with the creative process - perhaps the central human moment of the story being Lily's resolution to move the tree - as well as these memoirish themes which are often considered the opposite of art, a way to make art unartistic; rather it makes them into a resolutely aesthetic object.
"And how wonderful is 'Time Passes'?! I was expecting something knotty and Joycean - based on a negative review (whose saying it was too similar to Mrs Dalloway continues to puzzle me because this book is so gorgeous and Mrs D made me feel 'urghhh') and someone else saying it was hard to make sense of - but I think it's one of my favourite bits of a book I've ever read. It's almost animist (makes me want to read" [Amitav Ghosh's recent, and I think vital work of criticism on the neglect of climate change and nature in fiction] The Great Derangement all the more" [for this, surely, is its project of writing about and from the viewpoint of the non-human and the absence of humans: here the characters are buildings and the force of nature and history itself, taking over the unlived-in building, ending the Edwardian pre-war eternal summer of the upper classes, combining in the effects of human deaths, and new life in other forms: animals, plants and the renewed interest in poetry after the war]"- but the writing is so superlative: I couldn't believe there was something like that, which mentions things I love hearing about in evocative low fantasy, in an author like Virginia Woolf. And it does actually say what happens, and mostly in full sentences. Makes me want my own paper copy just so I can re-read those pages over and over."
The servants become full characters here in this section whilst the family is gone: they are aligned with nature, which both feels right - because they are local, they are part of the place, whereas the Ramsays belong in London - and feels wrong because it seems part of Woolf's only-half-developed class consciousness to align them with the non-human, with invisible forces.
This is a book which works by accumulation; I am not sure if some favourite moments from 'Time Passes' will seem so special in isolation.
weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane (as well as the darlingly anthropomorphistic 'methodically', it's that collapse of time that suggests both night as a metaphor for the years of awayness, and the speed at which growth occurs in the absence of humans, that it does feel like overnight, yet also it is like fantasy where the plants do grow triffid-like in a few hours)
Toads had nosed their way in (... that adorable way animals affectionately push at you with their snouts: but here directed not at people but at the absence of humans that allows them to truly flourish).
Ideas that arrived earlier in reading seemed to be affirmed subsequently by the book:
And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all. (pt 1 Ch 19)
the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome Constantinople (pt 3, Chapter 10)
It was only towards the end of the third part that I realised the reader doesn't actually find out if the Ramsays went to the lighthouse at some off-screen moment during their visit in part one, and it doesn't matter. What matters is what's in the frame, as in a painting.
Yet also not: Lily's Cubist canvases - which she feels driven to work on despite suspecting they will end up as nothing more than attic bric-a-brac (something relateable all too well to writing a 685th Goodreads review) - are created as much by what is left out as by what is shown.
When the Ramsays finally make it to the lighthouse, their boat is out of sight from the mainland, out of the painter's view: the distance of the boat from land is the greater distance from the past Woolf gained by writing about this refraction of her family (as the letters quoted in the introduction more or less confirm). It really is a remarkable achievement to make such very artistic art from this stuff - compared with the thousands of lightly fictionalised memoirs now in vogue - though in its concern with posterity (The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.) and details of the creative process, overtly and in recursive, "symbolical" commentary on itself, it may be an artists' book most of all.
(read & reviewed March 2017; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
It wasn't instant. I read Hermione Lee's excellent introduction (better than a lot of the recent introductions to classics; the notes, however may be a bit too detailed unless you're doing a dissertation about textual alterations) and then small dribs and drabs of the novel. It was full of odd metaphors that were clearly well-written but which didn't describe my own experience of anything. I was sad not to be connecting when I'd wanted to connect with its superlative descriptions. Though there was a curious sense of its being the platonic idyll of hundreds of early-to-mid twentieth century English stories about elegant families and children and lawns and parties and summer escapades - even though it was written after plenty of examples I thought of, E. Nesbit for instance, and even though a lot of the characters just weren't very nice. (Later, the family structure, with the moody writer father and caretaking mother and lots of kids and guests, would prompt me to wonder if it had partly inspired childhood favourites of mine, the Bagthorpe Saga by Helen Cresswell.)
It was a world I still couldn't imagine as great high art: it's a world that's popularly cosy Sunday evening entertainment, as described much later, in Chapter 16: when the great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading, writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on their washing-tables and dressing-tables, and the novels on the bed-tables, and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the dining-room for dinner.
Back near the beginning, I couldn't grip it. (These quotation marks are all things I wrote straight after reading.) "The prose is so silky, it slips past my eyes the same way poetry does. Probably because it's very well made. But feels essentially insubstantial. Yet quite often there's a really novel image. I get this with Ali Smith too - I often find it hard to see why she's quite so revered because she doesn't do the Pynchon thing of throwing around huge words and references and gags and it seems enjoyable in a simpler way, but there's a sort of... there isn't a word for it, because I have a sense of its being plainer and more grounded than 'beautiful' would suggest, it's not ornate, but it's incredibly well crafted."
No, to work its magic it needs to be read at length: immerse oneself and swim around in it, stretch out.
"I am getting to like it a lot now. There was a bit from chapters 4-12 that was really enchanting and ethereal, and it worked despite most of the characters being prickly, interesting how it does that. And it gained momentum once I read a lot of it at a time."
"Am starting to feel how some of the curious metaphors in TtL are like paintings. It doesn't matter that I might not have experienced that thing that way, the joy is in the images themselves." [I would later start to feel the nature of the actions in a new way, through their imagery. I can't recall a book that has ever done this before, and so very many times; other great descriptions have merely captured a feeling that already existed, on the edge of consciousness and previously beyond words. This is one of the central and unique achievements of this novel as far as I am concerned.] "It is refreshing to find such a very good book that feels like it's all about other people, the characters (not something for me to identify with or see people I know in it). Totally unconvincing as being about Scotland though. Always feels like the South Coast. Walter Scott was still fashionable in Scotland decades later. Never mind the complete absence of the sense of Scottish weather." It is an airy halcyon world, like the perfectly chosen cover of this Penguin Classics edition; it is Metronomy's English Riviera a century earlier. No one is stung and importuned and tangled, raw-eyed, by perpetual smirring sea breezes that any non-native would rather call gales.
"It's incredible how tiny the moments are that are described in TtL. So much longer to read (and esp to write) than to feel. I've read some reviews that seem to miss this completely. How very fleeting these states of mind are; the sort of thing people don't feel in the long term, nor set out to be judged by, not like writing down a considered opinion." Each moment is not what one character definitively thinks of another; among these are the moments we usually forget, microscopic aberrations and contradictions.
It is remarkable to have created such a beautiful and shimmering book from actively cathartic writing about a dysfunctional, sometimes abusive family , and a delineation of the frustrations of being an intelligent, artistically ambitious woman in the early twentieth century. It still barely seems possible. Just as it is strange to think of Woolf as a Victorian or Edwardian, yet those were decades of her life, drawn here, as she, like Lily, created new strange modernist forms that were anything but characteristic of the century of her birth. (Though perhaps the most modern - the most twenty-first century moments are of the irascible Mr. Ramsay with his nose forever in a book whilst in company, like a smartphone addict neglecting his guests.) It is a book very much about art, about painting, concerned with the creative process - perhaps the central human moment of the story being Lily's resolution to move the tree - as well as these memoirish themes which are often considered the opposite of art, a way to make art unartistic; rather it makes them into a resolutely aesthetic object.
"And how wonderful is 'Time Passes'?! I was expecting something knotty and Joycean - based on a negative review (whose saying it was too similar to Mrs Dalloway continues to puzzle me because this book is so gorgeous and Mrs D made me feel 'urghhh') and someone else saying it was hard to make sense of - but I think it's one of my favourite bits of a book I've ever read. It's almost animist (makes me want to read" [Amitav Ghosh's recent, and I think vital work of criticism on the neglect of climate change and nature in fiction] The Great Derangement all the more" [for this, surely, is its project of writing about and from the viewpoint of the non-human and the absence of humans: here the characters are buildings and the force of nature and history itself, taking over the unlived-in building, ending the Edwardian pre-war eternal summer of the upper classes, combining in the effects of human deaths, and new life in other forms: animals, plants and the renewed interest in poetry after the war]"- but the writing is so superlative: I couldn't believe there was something like that, which mentions things I love hearing about in evocative low fantasy, in an author like Virginia Woolf. And it does actually say what happens, and mostly in full sentences. Makes me want my own paper copy just so I can re-read those pages over and over."
The servants become full characters here in this section whilst the family is gone: they are aligned with nature, which both feels right - because they are local, they are part of the place, whereas the Ramsays belong in London - and feels wrong because it seems part of Woolf's only-half-developed class consciousness to align them with the non-human, with invisible forces.
This is a book which works by accumulation; I am not sure if some favourite moments from 'Time Passes' will seem so special in isolation.
weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane (as well as the darlingly anthropomorphistic 'methodically', it's that collapse of time that suggests both night as a metaphor for the years of awayness, and the speed at which growth occurs in the absence of humans, that it does feel like overnight, yet also it is like fantasy where the plants do grow triffid-like in a few hours)
Toads had nosed their way in (... that adorable way animals affectionately push at you with their snouts: but here directed not at people but at the absence of humans that allows them to truly flourish).
Ideas that arrived earlier in reading seemed to be affirmed subsequently by the book:
And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all. (pt 1 Ch 19)
the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome Constantinople (pt 3, Chapter 10)
It was only towards the end of the third part that I realised the reader doesn't actually find out if the Ramsays went to the lighthouse at some off-screen moment during their visit in part one, and it doesn't matter. What matters is what's in the frame, as in a painting.
Yet also not: Lily's Cubist canvases - which she feels driven to work on despite suspecting they will end up as nothing more than attic bric-a-brac (something relateable all too well to writing a 685th Goodreads review) - are created as much by what is left out as by what is shown.
When the Ramsays finally make it to the lighthouse, their boat is out of sight from the mainland, out of the painter's view: the distance of the boat from land is the greater distance from the past Woolf gained by writing about this refraction of her family (as the letters quoted in the introduction more or less confirm). It really is a remarkable achievement to make such very artistic art from this stuff - compared with the thousands of lightly fictionalised memoirs now in vogue - though in its concern with posterity (The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.) and details of the creative process, overtly and in recursive, "symbolical" commentary on itself, it may be an artists' book most of all.
(read & reviewed March 2017; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
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