"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall  by Anne Bronte (1848-409 pages)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the second and last  novel written by Anne Bronte in her twenty nine years (1820 to 1849).    Last month I read and posted on her first work, Agnes Grey.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is told in a very interesting way.    It is a novel very rooted in its time and place.    The book is divided into three sections and each is told from a different point of view and narrated in a different fashion.   Part One is from the point of view of Gilbert, a well off farmer.   A mysterious woman, a widow and her son, have moved into Wildfell Hall, a once grand mansion.    Gilbert begins to court the widow, Helen Graham and loses interest in the woman his mother wanted him to marry.   In a search for revenge, this woman begins to spread gossip about Helen.     One needs to keep in mind that in the time and place of the novel a woman was not thought complete without a man and any single woman, widow or otherwise, above the age of twenty five or so was seen as a potential threat to the stability of the community and its morals.    A friend of Gilbert's is also seemingly courting Helen.   When Gilbert behaves in a jealous fashion, Helen gives Gilbert her diaries to read. The diary reveals her abusive marriage to Arthur Huntington.    Helen begins the marriage completely in love.   Over time Arthur seems to become bored with her company and prefers to spend his time with friends from his days prior to marriage.   These friends lead him back into a life of heavy drinking and partying with women of dubious repute in the company of male friends.   He becomes abusive to her and he tries to turn her son to his ways, teaching him to disrespect his mother and use improper language.   In a move of extreme boldness for her day, Helen left Arthur.    There some interesting twists and turns of the plot and throughout it all Helen behaves in a near saintly fashion, returning to her abusive husband to nurse him  through a fatal disease.   

Part 3 begins when Helen leaves Wildfell Hall.   We see Anne has kept some secrets from us.     The ending is much like the ending of Agnes Grey.    

I liked several things about this book.   I liked Anne Bronte's use of differing narrative modes for different sections of the book.    I enjoyed the conversations in the book a lot.    Wildfell Hall shows Anne was rapidly developing as an artist, compared with her first work.    Wildfell Hall is one of the first novels showing a woman leaving an abusive husband.     The abusive husband is a bit of a stereotype of the times (hence the name Huntington meaning he prefers the pleasure of the hunt to the company of his wife).    You can see how deeply Anne felt alcohol was at the root of the problems in her marriage.   She was very unhappy when her husband began to teach their son to drink.    The novel is rooted in the time as there is no longer any great mysterious stigma that attached to a single woman with a child as there was in England in the 1840s.  (Or perhaps one should say a single woman not of the poorer and majority class of people.)     The world of women is a small one in the novels of Anne Bronte.   She explores its limits very well.

I read Wildfell Hall in part because I have decided to read all of the novels of the Bronte Sisters.   There are only seven of them and I like feeling closure on a reading project.    As I was reading I could not help but wonder if almost everyone reads her works mainly because of who her ates were .   ("Ate" is a tagalog word for "big sister" that conveys for me the familial relationship between Anne and her sisters.    A young sister or brother will call  their older  sibling "Ate Jane" and it is meant to convey respect for an elder sister.)     Wildfell Hall is worth reading on its own.    Her work does not have the power, depth and beauty of  the work of her ates but not much does.    I really think anyone into the Brontes, the Victorian novel or 19th century women writers should read all of  the Bronte novels.    

Mel u

Paris in the Spring: Emile Zola on Classics Circuit Tour

I have followed for some time The Classics Circuit, a monthly event in which a particular author's work is spotlighted on a scheduled basis on various blogs.   I have enjoyed and learned a lot from the various posts that have resulted from The Classics Circuit Tour.   One of my reading themes for this year involves reading books by friends and disciples of Gustave Flaubert.   So far I have read Indiana by George Sand and Jean et Pierre by Guy Du Maupassant.     Emile Zola was a disciple of Flaubert so when I saw The Classics Circuit was going to be treating Zola in April I decided it was time for me to join in the tour.    I will be posting on Germinal on April 22, 2010.    (Here is the full schedule for the tour.)    I look forward to reading all the posts that will result from 30 or so participants in the tour.

Zola's (1840 to 1902)    literary output was huge.   I choose Germinal as it seems to be considered his master work.    Germinal is the story of a miners strike in northern France in the 1860s.   I am looking forward to reading it and joining in  the circuit for the first time. 

In May I will be reading Georges by Alexander Dumas for The Classics Tour.      

"A Personal Matter" by Kenzaburo Oe

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe (1964, translated by John Nathan , 157 pages)

Six months ago I am sad to say I had never heard of Kenzaburo Oe.   Now, after having read and posted on four of his novellas, two novels, a work of non-Fiction on Hiroshima survivors, and a collection of short works by atom bomb survivors selected and edited by Oe I consider him one of the great literary artists of the 20 the century.   I see him as creating  wisdom much as I see Samuel Johnson as doing.     The wisdom of Oe is that of a world turned inside out on itself, that of Johnson is of a world sure of itself.   The best of Oe feels not so much written as discovered.  

A Personal Matter is the most popular of the novels of Oe.    The central character Bird is very hard to like, in part because it is hard not to see yourself in him.    His estranged wife has given birth to a son who seems to have a severe birth defect resulting in terrible brain damage.    Bird secretly wants his son to die but he must go along with the doctors who say they can possibly operate on him once he gets stronger and save him.    Bird is not gratified by this as the odds are very high that the child will be severely handicapped mentally.    Much of the few days in the life of Bird we see him trying to escape from thoughts pressing in on him that he knows are a violation of acceptable morality.   He wants very much to go on a trip to Africa and he spends a lot of time thinking about this.   He indulges in a great deal of sexual activity with an ex-girl friend that he care little about, he drinks too much, he gets fired from a job he does not like,  and shows little real interest in anything.   He does love the poetry of William Blake.   

A Personal Matter is saturated with animal references and metaphors.   I did an informal count as I was reading the novel and there are about 150 such references.

The meagerness of her fingers recalled chameleon legs..the toad like rubber man rolling the tire down the road....Bird stared for an instant in the numerous ant holes in the ebonite receiver...the glass chatter at the bottle like an angry rat...like a titmouse pecking at millet seeds..like an orangutan sampling a flavor..Bird and Himiko exchanged magnanimous smiles and drank their whiskey purposefully, like beetles sucking sap..whiskey-heated eyes dart a weasel glance...

There are numerous references to sea urchins, grasshoppers and shrimp.   Some of the animal references are amazing in their cleverness and all of them made me see more deeply into the world projected by Oe.   (Oe  has a brain damaged son.)  

A Personal Matter is a very intense work.   Once you realize the central character Bird wants his son to die it is hard to like him and also hard to admit we do not understand why he feels that way.    The novel is very explicit sexually.    Attitudes toward suicide are considered briefly.    A Personal Matter kept me in suspense throughout.   I wanted to learn what would happen to the child and how things would turn out among Bird, his wife, and his girlfriend.    Oe is not afraid to look a monster in the face.   His work can help us do the same and if it turns out one of those monsters is buried within ourselves and our mythic past then at least we know it.  

The next work of Oe that  I will read will probably be Somersault (1999).   This is Oe's longest work and departs from his autobiographical mode.   It centers on a religious cult.   Oe has just had his latest novel, The Changeling published in English by Grove press.   Oe has said he will write no more novels and with the publication of this work he sees himself as ready for death.   

Here is a link to all of my Japanese literature posts.

Mel u

"The Key" by Junichiro Tanizaki

The Key by Junichiro Tanizaki (1956, trans. from Japanese by Howard Hibbett)

The Key is one of the last works of Junichiro Tanizaki 1886 to 1965).   It is the seventh of his works that I have now posted on since I first discovered him when I read his marvelous and amazing work The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi.  

The format of The Key is extremely inventive and near unique.  It is in the form of two diaries, one might almost call them dueling diaries.    One is by the 55 year old man and the other is kept by his wife, age 44.    It is a very erotically charged book.    The long married couple have a strained relationship.   The wife says numerous times that she both loves and hates her husband.    She is very frank in her description of how she feelings about the declining physical prowess of her husband and about her growing revulsion toward his aging body.   The wife has a very powerful sexual hold over the husband, though his love for her has faded away over the years.   At age 44 she is still very attractive to the husband.    Her body is described in detail in the diary of the husband.    Part of the theme of The Key is sexual fetishism, the reduction by men of women to body parts seen apart from a human to which the parts belong.    This is one of the themes of the work of Tanizaki.   Sexual fetishism can be seen as like a metaphor for the reduction of the human to the mechanical.

As we read the two diaries (we read an entry by the man then one by the wife covering the same same time sequence) we see how each views the other.    We are given a deep look at a very flawed marriage with little but habit to hold the partners together.    We get to know the 20 year old daughter and a man of that age the parents think would make a good husband for her.   There are some very interesting and exciting plot twists here and it is a bit shocking to see how explicit this 55 year old novel is.    There are no extremes in the language but it is erotically powerful.   The ending came very much as a surprise to me.    Taniazki sometimes likes to completely turn us on our heads at the end of a novel and make us see that we got things wrong as we were reading.     The Key gives us great insight into its characters and the format is very interesting.   It is also a lot of fun to read.    Tanizaki is on my read everything they have written list (or in this case translated into English).   I am near to completing this goal now.   I will read next The Diary of a Mad Old Man, published by Vintage Press in the same volume as The Key.

There is in print (from Vintage) a collection of seven short stories as well as a work of artistic theory.    Another one of his novels has been translated into English, Two Women, A  Cat and a Man as well as a partial autobiography.    Both of these are available for low prices on Amazon.com sometimes and I will read them also.   There do appear to be numerous untranslated works also.   I am grateful to Vintage Press for the wonderful production quality of this book and for bringing so many works into English.

To me Junichiro Tanizaki should be on any list of great novelists.    Many consider him the greatest Japanese novelist (for sure in the top five).   His work is a world class cultural treasure.     He also translated a number of western classics into Japanese and was widely read in classical Japanese literature, American writers such as Faulkner (The Sanctuary is mentioned as being read by the husband in The Key) and European classics.

I wish to thank Michelle for suggesting this work to me some time ago.   I have found her blog  su (shu) a consistent source of great insight that has given me lots of good ideas.

"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" by Lisa See

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (2005, 258 pages)

Please leave a Comment if you have seen the Movie

how does it live up to your expectations?

Last month I read and really enjoyed Lisa See's most recent book, Shanghai Girls.  Shanghai Girls is a historical novel set in Shanghai and California, starting in the 1930s and ending in the 1950s.   As soon as I finished Shanghai Girls I added Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (set in China in the 19th century) and Peony in Love  (set in the 17th century) to my to be read list.   I was really happy when I saw hardback editions of both of these books for sale for 85 percent off the list price.    I decided I would read them in the order Lisa See wrote them.

The narrator of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is Lilly, in her 80s at the time she tells the story.   The second important person in the novel is Snow Flower.   The novel is a beautifully told story of the relationship of these two women.   I knew that marriages were arranged by professional matchmakers in this era but I did not know that matchmakers also arranged what are meant to be life time friendships between women, normally starting about the time of foot binding, about 8 or so.   The two women bound together are called "old sames".   This book is the story of the life long relationship of Lilly and her old same Snow Flower.   

Central to the book's plot and themes is the practice of foot  binding, which begins when a girl is about 8, takes up to six months to complete (all the bones in the toes have to be broken) and in the process killed  ten percent of the girls who under went it. The purpose of foot binding is to make the girls more attractive as marriage partners and as submissive daughter in laws.   Lower class girls (called "big feet girls) do not get their feet bound.   The process is horribly painful and is described in  in a fashion that made  me cringe.   It leaves those who feet are bound near half cripples for the rest of their lives.    The novel lets us see the very degrading way in which women were treated in China in this period.   A woman who gave birth only to female children was considered worthless.   In one very brutal scene the husband of Snow Flower beats her so severely that she miscarries.   He justifies his action after the fact by saying the child would probably have been a girl.   The saddest part of this is that no one including his wife sees any problems with his actions.

Just like in Shanghai Girls a lot of things happen to the central characters, most of them bad.   I learned a lot about life in China in the 19th century.   It made me see how foot binding was a  central element in the life of Chinese women.   This practice continued well into the 20th century.    

Snow Flower and The Secret  Fan is a very good historical novel.   It lets the reader see and feel what it might have been like to live in 19th century China.    It is just a bit predictable that something bad is going to happen soon in the novel but I could not predict what the bad event would be.   Unlike in  Shanghai  Girls there is closure in this book.    This novel and two of her others are currently being made into movies.  

I enjoyed this book a lot.   I was interested in seeing what would happen to the characters,   I learned a good bit about life in China and I am for sure glad my three daughters will not have to have their feet bound!-   I will read another of Lisa See's novels, Peony in Love  soon.    


Mel u

Reading of Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End" to begin April 1-

Not two long ago I read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford for the first time.     I see The Good Soldier as among the very best novels ever written.    Ford had a huge literary output  (some 80 books) and helped numerous other now  canon status writers of the first half of the 20 century (including Joyce, Conrad, Hemingway and Pound).    I began to look for other works by Ford.    Everything lead to his four part work Parade's End.  Anthony Burgess has called  the work the best novel in the English Language.   (The work is artistically a whole.   It was published in four parts for business reasons.)    When pressed on this he said ok maybe it is second best behind The Good Soldier.   We know this is probably meant to be taken as hyperbolic but  it is without rival as a novel of WWI and the Imperial British Sensibility at the zenith of the empire.   The book is considered to be in part a great work of genius, though a flawed one.   I wanted to find out for myself.   I am inviting others to read  Parade's End starting around April 1, 2010.   There will be no time schedule or anything like that.   I do not see it as a read along just kind of people reading and posting on the book in around the same time frame.   I accept in the end no one may read along on this and that is ok.   I have my full time to devote to reading if I wish and I know others do not so my schedule cannot be followed by most.   I also know that many will not find the work to their taste.       I read the first chapter this morning and I really liked it but I could see others as seeing it as too mannered and elitist.    My hopes are very high for this book.   I plan to do at least one maybe two or three posts on each section.  If anyone does a post on the book I will link it here and if they like I would be happy to guest post it here.

I invite any and all to join in and go at their own pace and wishes.   Penguin Press has a nice edition of the work with a brilliant introduction by Max Saunders (foremost authority on Ford).   I hope to begin reading this about April 1, 2010.

Please let me know if you are interested in joining in

rereadinglives@gmail.com

Mel u

"The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980, translated from Italian by William Weaver-1998-501 pages)

The Name of the Rose is set in the 14th century in a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy.    Umberto Eco (1932.) is a serious medieval scholar, a philosopher, literary critic and a semiotician.   Semiotics is the study of  any process that involves signs to create meaning.   Signs are seen as any form of communications.    It is also a study of the forms of language and communications.   In literary theory it studies the way in which a work of literary art communicates its meaning and the melding of form and theme.    The Name of the Rose is many things.   It is a study in the way in which books communicate.   The monks in the monastery were in many cases very into the reading life.   Semiotics as literary criticism treats a work as part of a tradition that takes its meaning in  part from the books that come before it.   It  gives us a very good look at life in a medieval monastery.   I really enjoyed the parts of the book where we got a look at life outside the monastery and at the lives of the monks prior to their entry into the order.   It also goes into great detail on the  theological theories of the era in various conversations the monks have with each other.    We also see behind the highly structured theories of the day to the real way the people of the time thought.    We see the barbaric ways of the inquisition, we see what the brothers eat and what it takes to run a monastery.   We get a great look at the library and what was involved in the reading life prior to the invention of the printing press.   Some of the brothers seem to have entered the order not so much out of religious conviction as to escape from the harsh life of the era in a way that allowed them to pursue their love of reading and learning.    There are interesting conversations on a number of topics.   One of them relates to the question "Did Jesus ever laugh and why or why not?".      The monks also talk about whether the love of learning is actually a sin in that if all you need to do is to love God in the right way (as their religion claims) why would you need  to read and learn?     There are some very good things said about the reading life in this book.   

To know what one book says you must read others?

At times this can be so.   Often books speak of other books.   Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or is it the other way around:  it is the sweet fruit with the bitter stem.  In reading Albert, couldn't I learn what Thomas might have said?

Books are not made to be believed but to be subjected to inquiry.   When we consider a book, we must not ask what it says but what it means, a precept the commentators on the holy books had very clearly in mind.

 Here in brief is the semiotic view of the reading process:

The good of a book lies in its being read.   A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their terms speak of things.   Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts:   therefore it is dumb.

The plot of The Name of the Rose centers on a series of murders in the monastery.   Our lead character is called into investigate these murders.   In doing so he makes use of the scientific procedures of the time as well as methods of Aristotle.    The book can really be seen as a study of the reading life and how the monks, some very well read in Pagan texts as well as the holy writ, see the world in terms of the literary works they have internalized.   We have seen this topic before in the works of Junichiro Tanizaki and Natsume Soseki.   If you read their works you will come to see the cultured classes of  Japan in the middle ages had much the same relationship to texts that the monks in The Name of the Rose do even though their religious views are totally diverse from one another.   

The Name of the Rose is not a light read.   I found the medieval philosophy classes I took many years ago very useful in understanding some of this work.    I think it has an excellent change of being classified as a classic one day.   This is Umberto Eco's first novel and my first read of his works.   The Name of the Rose seems to be for sure the most read of his books.    I am very glad I read it as I has been on my mental to be read list for a long time.    If anyone has read other novels by Eco, I would love to hear  your comments on them.


Mel u