"Solid Objects" by Virginia Woolf

"Solid Objects" by Virginia Woolf  (1920-reprinted 1944-4 pages)

From Parliament to Trash Picker

A Descent into Madness?

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

One of my long term reading projects centers on reading the complete fiction of Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941-UK-there is some background information on her in my prior posts).    I have read and posted on seven of her novels and a few of her essays and short stories.    Sometimes the short stories of Woolf seem to be neglected.   Maybe that is because of the towering status of her four most important novels.   To me the short stories can be sort of seen as a "training ground" to read The Wave, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando  and The Lighthouse.   I know not everyone likes short stories (an attitude I shared about 1.5 years ago) but I have found her stories to be pure delights.   

"Solid Objects" is a total gem, a perfect example of a world compressed into a few pages.    I am basically doing this post to urge those who are into Woolf to read this story as soon as they can.    I liked it so much I read it three times.   One time for a first impression, a second time to savor it again and be sure I understood it and a final time just for sheer pleasure.    

As the story opens two upper class males are at the beach.   John is a member of Parliament and a candidate for an important party office.    Charles is his close confidante and good friend.     John sees a shiny piece of glass and picks it up.   In his mind he wonders how it got on the beach.   Is it from a treasure chest that has been on the ocean floor for years?   He picks it up and, to the bewilderment of his friend, takes it home and puts it on his mantel as a treasure.  

A huge change begins to overtake John as he develops an obsession.

"John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything — china, glass, amber, rock, marble — even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there — thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece."

One day on the way to an important meeting at Parliament John spots a very unusual piece of colored glass in the trash.   He cannot reach it so he forgets the meeting and returns home to fashion a special took for picking up items like this.    John becomes totally consumed by his search for great found objects.     A once distinguished member of Parliament basically becomes a trash scavenger.  

"He now began to haunt the places which are most prolific of broken china, such as pieces of waste land between railway lines, sites of demolished houses, and commons in the neighbourhood of London."

He begins to neglect his duties and he is not reelected to Parliament.     When his friend Charles goes to visit him to console him for his defeat John seems barely concerned at all and wants instead to show off his newest finds.  

John gets more and more into his new pursuit.   He begins to dig through garbage dumps with his special stick and a bag to place his treasures in.   People begin to pretty much forget about him.

"Day after day passed. He was no longer young. His career — that is his political career — was a thing of the past. People gave up visiting him. He was too silent to be worth asking to dinner. He never talked to anyone about his serious ambitions; their lack of understanding was apparent in their behaviour."

In a very brilliant closing scene Charles asks John why he has given up.   John tells him  he has not given up at all.    Each man is talking about something very different.    John means to the horror of Charles that he has only just begun his life work of looking for treasures only he can understand in the trash of London.

I have told much of the plot of this story, I know.   I do not regret it as the wonder of it is not so much in the very clever plot but in how subtly John's descent into madness is portrayed.   Or maybe it is his escape from Madness or a move from one obsession to another.   

This is a very good short story I endorse totally.   I think it may have something important to say about the meaning and import of Virginia Woolf.

Do you have a favorite Woolf short story?   Please share your experience with us

You can read this story HERE

Mel u

Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner

Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984,  184 pages)

International Anita Brookner Day

July 16, 2011

I want to start my post on Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner (1928, UK) by thanking Thomas of  My Porch, one of the co-sponsors of International Anita Brookner Day, for sending me a copy of this book.   I am very appreciative of his expense and efforts in sending this book internationally to me.  

My first Anita Brookner was A Start in Life.    The second was Leaving Home.  I totally loved and think I understood the first line of Leaving Home "Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature".


I liked both of these novels.   The people in her novels all seem to lead very careful well ordered lives.   It is a world where one spends hours wondering if it would be a better idea to wear a light or a dark camel colored coat to tonight's lecture at the British Museum on 14th century Baltic ceramics.   The novels of Brookner are Northern cold climate books, not works of the Tropics.

The Hotel Du Lac won the 1984 Brookner Prize.     There are a number of very good blog posts on it that you can find links to  on the web page for International Anita Brookner Day.    The story line is pretty straight forward.    It centers on Edith Hope, a well known writer of romance novels who has been sent to a hotel in Switzerland to recover from a scandal about her own personal life.

I must say that what I liked best about The Hotel Du Lac, I really loved it, was the lengthy description of The Hotel Du Lac itself.   It seems like a wonderful place to be a regular guest.   The staff and the other guests were just marvelously done.

I did a bit of a study of the first two or three pages of the novel.   I think we can learn a lot from some of Brookner's word choice.   The word "grey" appears three times in the first paragraph.   A character is described as "tight lipped", "older" and "apologetic".   A personality is referred to as "dim" and "low".   The room of the hotel is done in colors of over cooked veal.   The bulbs are weak and twinkle drearily.   There are 100s of these expressions throughout the novel.    Brookner,  is painting a picture for us.        Brookner was an art historian before she became (at age 53) a novelist.    The use of all these colors is very much part of the tone of the book.   I can see why some find her work almost oppressive.

There is a kind of a surprise ending at the close of  The Hotel Du Lac.   I will not give it away other but I really liked it and was a bit shocked I admit.

I enjoyed this book.   It is a work of very subtle intelligence.   The descriptions of the hotel are really wonderfully done.    The people we meet in the hotel are interesting and it is fun to get to know them.

Please share your experiences with Brookner with us.


Mel u
  

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson (1997, 176 pages)

The Passion is the third novel by Jeanette Winterson that I have read.  I first read her very interesting Powerbook   which I liked best for its many epigrammatic turns of phrases.   I saw it as a kind of metaphysical novel about the relationships between stories and our own created realities.   I next read her perhaps most famous novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a core GLBT text that is considered autobiographical.    I liked it but preferred the prose style of Powerbook.

The Passion, which I completed a few hours ago, is now my favorite Winterson novel so far.    It is in theory a historical novel set in Napoleonic Europe (1799 to 1815 ) mostly in Venice, Moscow, Paris and ending on the Island of St Helena where Napoleon died.    It centers on two characters.    Henri, a young soldier who becomes a cook for Napoleon.   It was interesting to see his attitude toward Napoleon who was almost a god like figure to him. I admit I have always wondered why Napoleon generated such fanatical loyalty among his followers.    This book tries to answer that question but I am still puzzled.     The adoration and power of one man, Napoleon is one of  the more interesting themes of this book.   The other and more important central character in the book is Villanelle,  the daughter of a Venetian boatman who is born with web feet.   The mysterious, seductive, semi-sinister city of Venice plays a very important part in the city.     Moscow and Paris play a secondary role.    Henri is along for Napoleon's million man march on Moscow (only about 100,000 came back) but he is one of the lucky ones.    Nothing ever makes him lose his faith in his beloved Emperor.   We are left to wonder how much of the power of Napoleon came from a general homoerotic fixation on him and his sex life.

Villanelle is the more interesting of the two characters.   Not surprisingly, she is sexually  ambiguous.    Eventually the two central characters connect.

People will read and love this story for the many wonderful lines.   It reads almost like a fable or fairy tale version of history.   There is a very subtle highly evolved philosophy of history operating behind the scenes in The Passion.    A number of fun and funny things happen along the way, a lot of them involving confusions of third parties about the gender of Villanelle.  

I endorse this book for sure to those already familiar with and fond of the prose style of Winterson.    I could perhaps see some saying the style is too self-consciously "clever" and saying the appeal of the work is pretty much in the many wonderful turns of phrase and find it to lack character development.   Of course if we take it as a fairy tale we do not really expect a  lot of character development and personally I liked some of the lines so much I did not care much about the  other elements of the novel.  

There is a lot to think about in The Passion.

Please share with us your experience with and thoughts on Winterson.

Mel u

In Sleeping Beauty's Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales by Mitzi Szereto

In Sleeping Beauty's Bed:   Erotic Fairy Tales  by Mitzi Szereto (2009, 338 pages)

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.  (But keep your copy of In Sleeping Beauty's Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales for yourself)"
— Albert Einstein (with some slight editing!)

Not long ago I read and really enjoyed Pride and Prejudice:   Hidden Lusts by Mitzi Szereto, an erotic take on  Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice (1813).     I thought it was very well written and a lot of fun.

Fairy tales are one of my interests.   I devoted a day to them during Irish Short Stories Week I.  Fairy tales are one of the vehicles for the passing down of the folk wisdom of a culture.    They have been collected and seriously studied for a long time now.   

In Sleeping Beauty's Bed:   Erotic Fairy Tales by Mitzi Szereto (USA)  is almost two books in one. of   It is a serious study of the erotic implications and history of the fairy tale across numerous cultures.   I was glad to see that Szereto's knowledge of fairy tales goes beyond the Euro-Centric bounds of most works on the fairy tale.     The format is a good one.   There is a genuinely erudite introduction to the fairy tale followed by erotic rewrites of fifteen tales.   Each tale is also given a historical introduction that tells us about the history of the rewritten tale and its recurrence in various cultures.   

The stories felt just like fairy tales as I read them but with a twist.   I will just look at three of the very most famous fairy takes to give you an idea of the stories.   

Everybody knows the story of Cinderella.   Even if you never read it anywhere I know you must have seen it on TV numerous times.     Cinderella,  a step child reduced to household slave to her evil step mother and two step sisters, goes to the Prince's Ball.   The Prince meets her and falls in love.   She disappears at midnight leaving only a shoe behind.   The Prince wants to marry her and sets out through 

his small kingdom looking for the woman whose foot can fit into this very small shoe.   As the story is rewritten the shoe is not a shoe and the foot is not a foot.   Once you read it you will have to concede that maybe this is the "adult meaning" of this story all along.    One thing Szereto says is that erotic fairy tales are in part a form of "servant's revenge" in which wicked stories can be told about  their betters without fear of punishment.    How the prince goes about looking for the proper fit of his "foot" in the tightest "shoe" in the kingdom is pretty much x-rated once you get the idea.   It is hard to resist  the Freudian take on this story once you hear it.  

I think "Little Red Riding Hood" was my favorite retelling.   It is just hilarious once you give yourself over to the malicious fun of the story.    I will just say Little Red Riding Hood is all grown up and she is a serious menace to  any Wolves or Princes who are foolish enough to trifle  with her as she goes deep in the woods to grandmother's house.    I think you will laugh when you find out what is under that hood.

"Repunzel" is a very funny rewrite.   I will just say when she lets down her hair  I at first said "Sweet Repunzel thanks for letting down your hair but that was not quite what I expected!"

In Sleeping Beauty's Bed:  Erotic Fairy Tales by Mitzi Szereto is a very funny, well written and researched work.   I liked it a lot and endorse it to anybody who likes a bit of naughty fun on occasion.   Don't forget it is also a serious work of learning.

Here is Mitzi's biography (from her Amazon pages):

"MITZI SZERETO is a bestselling author and anthology editor of multi-genre and erotic fiction and non-fiction, blogger for the popular ERRANT RAMBLINGS: MITZI SZERETO'S WEBLOG (http://mitziszereto.com/blog), and the creator/presenter for the internet TV channel MITZI TV (http://mitziszereto.com/tv), which offers a quirky take on London.

Her published titles include PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: HIDDEN LUSTS; RED VELVET AND ABSINTHE: PARANORMAL EROTIC ROMANCE; IN SLEEPING BEAUTY'S BED: EROTIC FAIRY TALES (solo short story collection); THE NEW BLACK LACE BOOK OF WOMEN'S SEXUAL FANTASIES (non-fiction/survey); GETTING EVEN: REVENGE STORIES (crime/multi-genre); DYING FOR IT: TALES OF SEX AND DEATH (erotica/multi-genre); WICKED: SEXY TALES OF LEGENDARY LOVERS (erotica/romance/historical); the EROTIC TRAVEL TALES anthology series (erotica/romance); THE WORLD'S BEST SEX WRITING 2005"…

I was provided a free E-Book by the author.   

Mel u

Sarte and Camus-Short Stories by Nobel Prize Winning French Existentialists

"The Wall" by Jean Paul Sartre (1952, 8 pages)
"The Guest"   by Albert Camus (1955, 9 pages)
"The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus (3 pages, 1954)

 Two Nobel Prize Winning French Existentialists

One Refuses the Prize, One Only French Technically

The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded 107 times.    France, at 15, has had more winners than any other country, the UK and the USA are tied for second at 11 each.    Today, in observation of July in Paris , a reading and cultural event,  I will post on two short stories by French writers.   So far I have posted on two works for this event, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo and Ubo Roi by Alfred Jarry.    Today I want to take a quick look at short stories by two super influential Nobel Prize winner, Jean Paul Sarte and Albert Camus.    In a nothing is every as simple as it appears in Paris note, Jean Paul Sarte refused the award and Albert Camus was only technically French.   

Sartre and Camus are both post WWII cultural giants, capturing and helping create the sensibility of a world in which old values have been destroyed.    It is no coincidence that Kenzaburo Oe, whose main theme maybe " finding the courage to live in an ethical way a in world in which the old values are all gone", wrote his dissertation on the work of Sartre and made a visit to Sartre his top priority when he made his first trip to Paris.   Albert Camus's The Stranger and The Plague have long been among the most read post WWII non-Japanese literary works on Japanese college campuses.   

Both of these writers are classified as Existentialists (if you wish some background information there is a good article here.)     

I found it very interesting that both of the two short stories here are about a prisoner awaiting execution and his purely capricious escape.   Both of them are in the hands of jailers who basically have no real idea why the men should be executed but are just "following the rules".  

Jean Paul Sartre (1905 to 1980-France) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964.     He refused the award because he said by accepting an award from a western institution he was siding with the west against Asian interests.   He also did not want to be  reified by the Award into a "Nobel Prize Winning Author".   It has been a very long time since I read anything by Sartre.   Decades ago I read his magnum opus Being and Nothingness and his perhaps most famous literary work, his play No Exit (Hell is other people).   "The Wall" really does do a good job of bringing to life a lot of his basic themes.   As the story opens we are at a small prison.   The jailers are tasked with interrogating the prisoners about a topic that does not interest them (if they even understand it) and the prisoners know it is already stated in their paperwork that they are to be shot.

"The four men asked each one his name and occupation. Most of the time they didn't go any further--or they would simply ask a question here and there: "Did you have anything to do with the sabotage of munitions?" Or "Where were you the morning of the 9th and what were you doing?" They didn't listen to the answers or at least didn't seem to. They were quiet for a moment and then looking straight in front of them began to write."

"The Wall" is simple and easy to follow.   No need to be put off or intimidated by the very heavy cultural import of Sartre.

You can read "The Wall" HERE.   It is worth your time even

Albert Camus (1913 to 1960-Algiers) is French as a result of colonial conquest.    Much of his work and life was fighting what he saw as the wretched rule of the French in Algeria.    He is considered a core Existential novelist but he totally repudiated this label.   (You can learn more about him here.)    His most famous works are his two novels, The Stranger and The Plague.   (I have not yet read either of these works but I was recently kindly given both of these works by a patron of my blog from New Delhi to whom I am very grateful and will, I hope, read them both this year.)

"The Guest" reminded me a lot of Frank O'Connor's very famous short story, "The Guest of the Nation".    Both are told from the point of view of soldiers fighting in a cause they only at best half believe in and barely understand the causes behind it.   Both jailers really believe in their hearts that their captives are simple men just like themselves, puppets.   In the world of the values which they understand it is very wrong to execute these men who are near brother to them.   "The Guest" is set, I am assuming, in Algeria.   The captive is described as an "Arab".  No name, no description, just as an "Arab".   The Arab committed a murder but one justified under the values his captor understands.   The jailer knows he is in danger form two quarters.  If he lets the man go, as he wants to, the authorities will give him a terrible punishment.  If he allows the captive to be executed, then the relatives of the man will target him for death.   He is trapped by the authorities on one hand and what he thinks are authentic values on the other side.  


"The Myth of Sisyphus" is a retelling of the classic myth as the fate of modern man.

"The Guest" is very well done and very much worth reading.   You can read it on line here.

Mel u

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1784, 100 pages)

"A German Narcissist, How Attractive"

Frasier Crane-

I have always been kind of nervous or intimidated from trying to read anything by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 to 1832-German-I have seen him listed with his first name as Wolfgang also) because his master work is a very long poem, Faust.   By and large the only long poems I have read in translation are the Greeks, Ovid, Virgil, and Dante.    

I just completed through Dailylit.com Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.    I like reading things via dailylit so I was looking for something else to read.    I saw that The Sorrows of Young Werther was only 48 episodes long (you can customize your experience to make the installments longer and get a new one as soon as you want) and I knew the basic gist of the work so I decided to read subscribe to the feed.    I read it over the course of five days and I am very glad I did.   

The Sorrows of Young Werther  is a very famous, very influential work about a young man who  examines his feelings and reactions to everything around him in great detail.    It is in theory a love story but it is really about depression and romantic anguish.    The story line is not complex.   A young man falls hopelessly in love with being in love with an unobtainable woman.     The narrative is in the form of a series of letters by Young Werther to his friend about his horrible feelings of sadness.   There are many exquisite descriptions of the beauty of nature and of his feelings.     As anyone who will read this book will know in advance,  he kills himself in the end.   His death has been seen by some as being glorified.    To me it seems a horribly stupid action by a selfish young man.     Werther came from an affluent family and was in the process of being educated.      I do not wish to offend anyone, but I wished his friend had drug him, kicking and screaming if need be, for a week at the best brothel in Berlin.     If he had been born a few years  latter Flaubert or de Maupassant could have taken him!

I think one of the ways we can look at this work is that it is not a celebration of the creation of romance out of false  feelings but an exhibition of the negative effects of fixating on our sensations only.     I have seen posts and articles that say The Sorrows of Young Werther is a great romance era work.   Maybe this is totally wrong and it is an anti-romantic  work.   Generations of readers have swooned  over the romantic notions of Young Werther.    To me he is an idiot and I think Goethe means us to see it that  way.    I am kind of over stating my case and simplifying my reaction to see if others will take off on me for this. 

This work is for sure in the category of "High Art" and should be on all life time reading lists.    It is not hard to read or difficult to follow.   

Nicole of bibliographing has an excellent post on this work as does Amateur Reader of Wuthering Expectations 

Mel u

My Second Year Blogaversary -Some Reflections on Book Blogging

My blog is two years old today.      To the readers of my blog I can say only 

.

My blog is a very big part of my life now.    I have been so fortunate to have  great readers from all around the world united by our love of books.  (OK and a whole lot of students wanting home work help!)    

Welcome to the start of year three-Charles-
co-editor of The Reading Life

I hope my blog will continue to gain more readers.   Some bloggers say that they just blog for themselves and maybe a few friends but I think most of us want to feel someone is reading what we post.    When I first began my blog a very experienced blogger told me in time my blog might take on a life of its own.   I think somehow that has happened and I am grateful for it.

Odd blog fact-the city worldwide from which I have the most visitors is New Delhi, the top three countries are The USA, the Philippines and India.    The most read post is one I did on a short story by Katherine Mansfield, "Miss Brill".

The readers I am most grateful to are those who take the time to leave a comment.   I follow a lot of book blogs (500+).   Some book blogs are beautiful works of art, some are as well written as  the best of novels, some are like a free class in a top university in comparative literature, some are half book blog half something else.   Some book bloggers tell you a lot about their lives, others never tell you their name or even if they are a man or a woman.   

There has been some posts in the blogs I follow about professional book reviewers and academics trashing book bloggers as unqualified to give an opinion and not worth listening to.   Of course I laughed to myself that they are just running scared when I read that.  I know for a fact many book bloggers have a collection of advanced degrees in various fields and I know enough to realize that this does not much matter.    One of the great things about book blogging if you think about it a bit is that it is a world without credentials.   It is the truth of what you say that matters.

Some book bloggers love to read about Fairy Queens in paranormal romances, some are into The Faerie Queen.   Some of us read mostly classics some only brand new free books from publishers.    Some of us have 1000 + followers and are into every hop and meme in the book blog world and some people just post in a solitary way.   We are all united in our love of reading.    Some of us grew up in very bookish families but many of us felt isolated as children.    Not long ago on one of the book blog hops the weekly question was "how many people in real life do you have to talk about the books you read with".   About one third of the people said "no one".

If you have never left a comment, try it now!

Mel u