Laura
First Hemingway I've read; I was very skeptical that I would enjoy his writing and I remain a facetious reader of his but there's something about him. I would have given this three stars just for the ridiculousness of “Secret Pleasures” but I found it in my heart to forgive him it.
—
“In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.”
The cover is beautiful and the typography is perfect and somehow together they made me think
that this novel was a seafaring version of Warlock or a more readable Moby-Dick or maybe (more fancifully) along the lines of Joshua Allen's Chokeville, but sadly it is not. This was enjoyable to read and worth it if you are ready to spend just under 700 pages with a few generations of people from Marstal, Denmark in the form of their stories told in a range of depths and interestingness in an easy-going narrative style, without that extra punch that would make this a literary door-stop. It was the kind of book that you can read so fast that you skip over words and not miss anything. It‰ЫЄs readable and imaginative and fun and violent and sad, but for the most part everything is laid bare – there doesn‰ЫЄt seem to be much under the surface that the book leaves the reader to discover on their own. A lot of telling without showing.
It‰ЫЄs a bunch of men going to war and boys growing up and teenagers going to sea and a man searching for his father and lonely people becoming family and men going to war again and then again. One woman out of anger and bitterness trying to change a town‰ЫЄs future and then realizing that she was wrong. Lovers coming together after years apart. People dying violently and ships being destroyed.
The story is told in a mix of first-person plural, first-person singular, and third-person omniscient. The shifts were necessary but sometimes confusing, and they made the whole seem a little harder to swallow, especially where it wasn‰ЫЄt clear when that shift occurred. The first-person plural was very effective in portraying a sense of the oral tradition and imagined history, which is great, but I would have liked it more had it been first-person plural throughout, focusing on the collective understanding and impression of events. But then of course you couldn‰ЫЄt get into as much depth with personal relationships and you couldn‰ЫЄt effectively describe events that take place on a ship, and then you‰ЫЄd have a much shorter and tighter book – you‰ЫЄd lose the sense of a sprawling epic history of a time and place.
On that note, however, although this book gives the impression of a sprawling epic, based on the length and the range of years it covers, it really isn‰ЫЄt. There isn‰ЫЄt much historical depth and I never really felt like I could see what Marstal was like in my mind, or understand how it would feel to walk down its streets. Having that more strongly conveyed would have been nice, but the novel went for range, I think, more than depth.
—
There comes a time in the life of a sailor when he no longer belongs ashore. It's then that he surrenders to the Pacific, where no land blocks the eye, where sky and ocean mirror each other until above and below have lost their meaning, and the Milky Way looks like the spume of a breaking wave and the globe itself rolls like a boat in the midst of the sinking and heaving surf of that starry sky, and the sun is nothing but a tiny glowing dot of phosphorescence on the night sea.
I was filled with an impatient longing for the unknown, and there was a ruthlessness to it .... Mystery emanated from the Pacific's vast surface. My papa tru must have felt it once. And when a man has felt it, he doesn't return.
I was reminded of a summer's evening on the beach back home. The wind had died down and the water was completely calm. In the dusk light, sea and sky had taken on a violet tinge and the horizon had melted clean away, leaving the beach as the only fixed point, its white sand marking the farthest edge of the world, beyond which lay endless violet space. When I took my first stroke, I felt as though I was swimming straight into the immensity of the universe above me.
That night on the Pacific I had the same feeling.
Isaksen had consulted the compass and plotted the course. He'd spoken eloquently about our ability to navigate through life even when it was at its hardest, but he'd overlooked one essential thing about the art of steering a ship. You don't just keep your eye on the compass; you also check the rigging, you read the clouds, you observe the direction of the wind and the color of the current and the sea, and you look out for the sudden surf that warns of a rock ahead. It may not be like that on board a steamer. But that's how it is on a sailing ship, and in this respect its journey parallels that of life: simply knowing where you want to go isn't enough, because life is a windblown voyage, consisting mainly of the detours imposed by alternating calm and storm.
Sharp and funny and compassionate and just what the title says. The characters are great and the dialogue and interactions are so true.
One of the best parts of the book:
“You know, Taylor,” said Dame Lettie, “I do not feel I can continue to visit you. These creatures are too disturbing, and now that I am not getting my proper sleep my nerves are not up to these decrepit women here. One wonders, really, what is the purpose of keeping them alive at the country's expense.”
“For my part,” said Miss Taylor, “I would be glad to be let die in peace. But the doctors would be horrified to hear me say it. They are so proud of their new drugs and new methods of treatment – there is always something new. I sometimes fear, at the present rate of discovery, I shall never die.”
Dame Lettie considered this statement, uncertain whether it was frivolous or not. She shifted bulkily in her chair and considered the statement with a frown and a downward droop of her facial folds.
Miss Taylor supplied obligingly: “Of course the principle of keeping people alive is always a good one.”
I had wanted to read this book ever since I read Anatole Broyard's praise of it in Intoxicated by My Illness which I read for a class a few years ago. My expectations were high, and the first third of it especially fulfilled those expectations, and slowly sloped downward to the end. Part I, especially, “The Old World”, is full of what sounds silly to say but regardless is in fact exquisite prose. I don't usually go in for exquisite prose, but Hazzard did it for me. Hazzard's style is just off-kilter enough to seem fresh (she drops the subject in multi-clause sentences and drops the last word of cliched phrases) and to keep my reading pace slow. It was strangely exhausting to read, to see so far into the depths of the characters she explores, one or two at a time, and then to see further into them again later when secrets are revealed, where I didn't expect to find secrets.
—
“When Sefton Thrale said the word ‘global' you felt the earth to be round as a smooth ball, or white and bland as an egg. And had to remind yourself of the healthy and dreadful shafts and outcroppings of this world. You had to think of the Alps, or the ocean, or a live volcano to set your mind at rest.”
—
“Charmian Thrale's own reclusive self, by now quite free of yearnings, merely cherished a few pure secrets .... She did not choose to have many thoughts her husband could not divine, for fear she might come to despise him. Listening had been a large measure of her life: she listened closely–and, since people are accustomed to being half-heard, her attention troubled them, they felt the inadequacy of what they said. In this way she had a quieting effect on those about her, and stemmed gently the world's flow of unconsidered speech.”
—
“He found these women uncommonly self-possessed for their situation. They seemed scarcely conscious of being Australians in a furnished flat. He would have liked them to be more impressed by his having come, and instead caught himself living up to what he thought might be their standards and hoping they would not guess the effort incurred. ...
“The room itself appeared unawed by him–not from any disorder but from very naturalness. A room where there had been expectation would have conveyed the fact–by a tension of plumped cushions and placed magazines, a vacancy from unseemly objects bundled out of sight; by suspense slowly dwindling in the curtains. This room was quite without such anxiety. On its upholstery, the nap of the usual was undisturbed. No tribute of preparation had been paid him here, unless perhaps the flowers, which were fresh and which he himself if he had only thought.”
Marvelous and thought-provoking. I really enjoyed Fun Home and was worried this would be too much of a good thing, but it's an excellent complement to Bechdel's earlier memoir. There is Freud and Jung and psychoanalysis and Virginia Woolf and dreams and Adrienne Rich and Winnie-the-Pooh and writing and letters from her father to her mother and Sylvia Plath and Dr. Seuss and Stonehenge and professional envy and Anne Bradstreet and every good thing. She draws all these threads together into a stunning story of growth and discovery, weaving back and forth across time and therapists and girlfriends and bringing it all together in I don't even know what – something fabulous that hits home. It made me think a lot about my own childhood and my own relationship with my mother, which is nothing like Bechdel's and yet very similar.
Also: Maud Newton interviewed Alison Bechdel back in the spring; read it here.
Charming and funny, but there is a subtle darkness and sadness underneath the surface. I read it exclusively on the beach (on Lake Huron and then Lake Erie) and the sunburn was worth it. Reminded me of Emily Carr's Klee Wyck, but with more appreciation for the child's perspective and imagination. I loved that Sophia is always shouting and screaming, so stubborn and selfish and single-minded, like a real kid.
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“They went closer to the house and could feel how the island had changed. It was no longer wild. It had become lower, almost flat, and looked ordinary and embarrassed. The vegetation had not been disturbed; on the contrary, the owner had had broad catwalks built over the heather and the blueberry bushes. He had been very careful of the vegetation. The gray juniper bushes had not been cut down. But the island seemed flat all the same, because it should not have had a house. From up close, this way, the house was fairly low. On the elevations, it had probably been pretty. It would have been pretty anywhere, except here.”
—
Sophia dictates a study about worms to her grandmother (brought to mind when a couple of days later I read about the young Alison Bechdel dictating her diary to her mother in Are You My Mother?). After a worm stretches itself out and breaks apart:
“Both halves fell down on the ground, and the person with the hook went away. They couldn't grow back together, because they were terribly upset, and then, of course, they didn't stop to think, either. And they knew that by and by the'd grow out again, both of them. I think they looked at each other, and thought they looked awful, and then crawled away from each other as fast as they could. Then they started to think. They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn't know how, that is, in what way. ....
“Presumably, everything that happened to them after that only seemed like half as much, but this was also sort of a relief, and then, too, nothing they did was their fault any more, somehow. They just blamed each other. Or else they'd say that after a thing like that, you just weren't yourself any more. there is one thing that makes it more complicated, and that is that there is such a big difference between the front end and the back end. A worm never goes backwards, and so for that reason, it has its head only at one end. But if God made angleworms so they can come apart and then grow out again, why, there must be some sort of secret nerve that leads out in the back end so that later on it can think. Otherwise it couldn't get along by itself. But the back end has a very tiny brain. It can probably remember its other half, which went first and made all the decisions. And so now ... the back end says, ‘Which way should I grow out? Should I go on following and never have to make any important decisions, or should I be the one who always knows best, until I come apart again? That would be exciting.' But maybe he's so used to being the tail that he just lets things go on the way they are.”
Amazing. Fun and tragic and agonizing and hilarious. I have never enjoyed so thoroughly a book in which so many people are killed. The characters are simultaneously archetypes and originals; they're just the kind of people you'd expect to populate a town like Warlock, but then you begin to see through them and it's a bit sickening to know them too well. At the same time, they have convictions and reactions that I believe in but don't always understand, but my lack of understanding makes me appreciate it all the more.
For me, the American western is cozy and familiar but yet distant, in the same way the British worlds of Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Powell, and Barbara Pym are – times and places that I feel connected to but don't really know. The story's ending was inevitable but for most of the book I couldn't see how it could make it there, and it was heartbreaking when it did.
I dog-eared a lot of pages, much more than any other book I've read recently, and I need to go back to them all to decide what passages to quote here.
“The pursuit of truth, not facts, is the business of fiction.” – Oakley Hall, from the Prefatory Note
A good story. It would be three stars, but the illustrations are worth one star all their own, especially the ones of the bookstore. I was surprised at how close the movie kept to the book, with the exception of the Station Inspector's character. The one thing that bothers me is that the reason for Papa Georges's anguished bitterness about his lost career isn't really clear. I think the movie kind of hinted at the Great War as being part of the reason, which makes sense, but in the book it seemed to be more about increased competition in movie-making that resulted in him being “forced” to sell his films so they could be made into something so banal and ignoble as shoe-heels. A little heavy-handed and pretty silly when you think about World War 2 on its way in a few years when selling some films to keep soldiers in boots would be well worth the sacrifice. Well, that's a bit sanctimonious and blowhardy of me, I guess; the story takes place in the early thirties, so whatever, Laura. Maybe the idea is just that it is torture for a great artist not to be able to fulfill their purpose, and for all I know that is entirely plausible; not being a great artist I wouldn't know.
“‘If you can see a thing whole,' he said, ‘it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives .... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.'“
—
“Fulfillment, Shevek though, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
“Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
“It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.
“So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”
Loved paging through this, and the preface and introduction are both interesting. I hadn't given much thought to how important art and image are in Dance but seeing this will inform my next read. There was enough of the novels in here that it kind of felt like revisiting the whole series, which was great. Reminded me of how much I love those books.
“It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running.”
“The clothes of most of the women who passed were like caricatures of the clothes in the shop-windows, but when they stopped to look you saw that their eyes were fixed on the future. ‘If I could buy this, then of course I'd be quite different.' Keep hope alive and you can do anything, and that's the way the world goes round, that's the way they keep the world rolling. So much hope for each person. And damned cleverly done too. But what happens if you don't hope any more, if your back's broken? What happens then?
“‘I can't stand here staring at these dresses for ever,' I thought.”
I picked this up from one of the “New Books” stands at the public library and borrowed it on the strength of the blurb from Pynchon on the back and in spite of the American flag on the cover. Erickson writes the whole novel in a series of paragraph-bursts, much shorter than chapters, which seemed to be a clever way of trying to make the sometimes dense and difficult more palatable and engaging. The story is told in a sort of circular and self-referential way that was enjoyable and not pretentious – history repeating itself and fiction unknowingly reflecting real life, past and future, things reacting to each other and cancelling each other out versus creating something new. A number of (mostly) unnamed public figures were described in ways that made naming them apparently unnecessary, perhaps only for older American readers, but being a twenty-something Canadian I struggled a bit (I got Obama and Bowie easily enough of course but the others were more difficult), but not enough to distract me from enjoying the book. Parts of the story didn't make sense and probably weren't intended to make sense but nevertheless did distract me if only slightly from enjoying the book. I have to confess that it is strange for me to enjoy a book with politics and race as two of its major themes, but there you have it – I am still capable of surprising myself.
It took me a long time to warm up to this book, but by the end I was rather charmed by it, although that's not the term to use for such a book. It felt slight to begin with but things slowly built up on each other to make it into something more than the sum of its parts. The ending was a tad abrupt and the wrap-up awkwardly cute. I finished it on the bus home from work on Friday but today I'm still thinking about it.
My favourite part of the book (the end):
On my way downstairs to make us some tea I see the dining-room table still out there in the garden on the lawn in the moonlight.
It looks unexpected. It looks unsafe, anomalous. It changes the garden. The garden changes it.
It strikes me, as I look at it, that the table is way beyond my control. Up until this moment, I mean, I believed I owned that table. Now, looking at it out in the open air, I know that I don't. I know for the first time that I maybe don't own anything.
If it rains tonight, the wood won't warp immediately. But if we leave it out there for long enough in the open air, it'll split. It'll buckle open. It'll stain. It'll have little tracks all over it where wasps and other creatures have gnawed at it for nest material. Its legs will sink into the grass, grass will come up and round the sides of its legs. Bindweed will find it. Heat and cold will ruin it. Greenness will swallow it up, will die down and spring back up around it, will make it old, ruined, weathered.
I don't know what I'll think tomorrow or the next day, but this is what I think right now.
It's the best thing that could happen to anything I ever imagined was mine.
Sometimes I judge a book by the way it makes me feel when I'm reading it without bothering to examine where these feelings come from. This book made me feel aggravated and unhappy and I don't want to understand why. It was a fast read and not without spirit or a sense of humour or some level of identification or discovery but by the time I was finished I was too unsettled to want to think about it anymore. Although perhaps it was something I ate.
From the Epilogue: “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.”
A cross between Anita Brookner and Ivy Compton-Burnett, I think. I‰ЫЄve heard Barbara Pym thrown around as well but I didn‰ЫЄt quite see it; Wesley isn't as cozy and smooth. Also Jane Austen, but nah. People have said Anita Brookner's like Jane Austen too but no. Just because you're a lady writing about domestic lady things with marriage at the end doesn't make you like Jane Austen.
I actually considered abandoning this book during the first chapter because I couldn‰ЫЄt get into the writing style, but I stuck with it and am glad I did. The dialogue at times is so stilted but in a good (sometimes hilarious) way (hence the Compton-Burnett connection). The bawdiness was fun and not stilted. It was an engaging read, though not particularly amazing, so it‰ЫЄs really 3.5 stars but it was the kind of book that made me feel nice, so it‰ЫЄs 4 (like I‰ЫЄve said a lot – a scale of 5 is just not enough). I‰ЫЄll definitely read more Wesley in future, more for comfort‰ЫЄs sake than anything else.
This is one of those books that probably resonates very deeply with those who have lost someone close to them; however I‰ЫЄm lucky enough still not to have experienced a death of a parent (or even a grandparent) which made this a really sad read but less powerful I think than for those who have had that experience. However, the story about a journey that is supposed to be something, but you don't know what, to find your way to some other self you didn't think you could be, is still very powerful.
Maybe this is a minor thing, but I identify most with the painful feet experience, for a couple of reasons. First, I‰ЫЄve been wearing cleats to play ultimate frisbee for the last (cough) 12 years and they have always given me some form of trouble; it‰ЫЄs been better the last couple of years with my latest pair but in other years, my god, new blisters with every game, toenails bruised and busted and detached. So I know all about the torture that a seemingly-well-fitted pair of foot coverings can inflict under stressful conditions. Second, when I started reading this book in earnest, I had just returned from a long working weekend, which meant being on my feet all day in shoes that looked nice and were perfectly comfortable at work when I did little besides sit at my desk all day, but were killer when there was a lot of walking and standing and running and dancing to do. My feet were swollen and raw for days afterward, and even now they‰ЫЄre still achy. So the foot-torture (and that torture as a metaphor for something else) is something that I could definitely identify with.
And I also very much identify with the sense of not being able to go any further but going further anyway – pushing at my limits and seeing how far I can take things. I am not into extreme anything and I will probably never in my life go backpacking or even camping if I can help it, but I can identify with the drive to push yourself further than you think you can go, and then going further. It‰ЫЄs kind of one of those crazy things about being human or whatever.
I heard a lot of breathless enthusiasm about this book, so my expectations were high. This is a 3.5 star upgraded to 4 because it was a good read and, theoretically, I would give this a re-read in later life. Unfortunately I have little to no knowledge of the classics which I think prevented me from enjoying the story as much as I might‰ЫЄve – I mean enjoying more than just a layer or two – but regardless the story and the writing drew me along. I kept expecting to get bored in the second half – I kept thinking, what more could happen? There can‰ЫЄt be much more to this story, right? But it kept moving and I stayed interested, almost in spite of myself. I‰ЫЄm not sure if that had to do with the writing itself or with the narrator‰ЫЄs voice or with the backwards-murder-mystery aspect.
I enjoyed Richard‰ЫЄs voice and, as always in first-person narratives, the tension between what he thought about what he and his friends were doing versus what I thought about what they were doing. He comes across as likeable for the most part but there is the eternally nagging sense that he‰ЫЄs a bit of a monster. Although Richard‰ЫЄs characterization was strong– in so much as he remained in the background, as an invisible observer – the characterization of his male friends was a bit thin. I had a hard time telling the difference between Henry, Charles, and Francis, aside from their most obvious features – but that may have been because I paid less attention at the beginning of the story. My favourite part of the story was Richard‰ЫЄs winter alone in Hampden, my least favourite the visit to Bunny‰ЫЄs parent‰ЫЄs house for the funeral. It would be a fun book to reread (after getting some small grasp of the classics of course) and see what I missed and how the characters seem different after seeing them through to the end.
This was a fast read (two weekend sittings). Engaging and fun, but it never managed to get good. Am I horrible to say that it seemed to be trying too hard to be a Coen brothers film? Someone somewhere described it as failing to congeal, and that is pretty much it. Some great elements, some very entertaining and affecting parts, but never amounting to more than their sum. Maybe I'm missing something but I thought the intermissions were completely out there. The glowing gold was a bit much for me too. A few too many anachronisms among what was otherwise a great historical setting and evocation of the time. Warm‰ЫЄs back story was unnecessary and a cheap way to plump up the ending – I would rather have heard more about their previous assignment. I find the endings of most books disappointing, but here it worked well and ended neatly, which helped me forgive some other parts.