Patrick’s Comments

Patrick’s comments from the Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) group.

Note: Patrick is not currently a member of this group.

Just finished and highly recommended: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It. Having greatly enjoyed the 1936 movie version, I took up the novel and was interested to discover that it is very different in many respects and covers a much longer time-span than even the two generations of the movie. A rich and wonderful reading experience, completely absorbing. One startling development that is not in the film knocked me right off my chair.

I especially relate to this novel because I have lived on its Northern Wisconsin turf. “Butte des Morts” is Neenah in the northeast, close to where I resided in Little Chute. “Iron Ridge” is Hurley in the northwest, the great northwoods area that I often visited. The timber and paper industries are at the core of the narrative.

Ferber is adept at what critics call “solidity of specification”, description of exterior elements as in Balzac. You always know how the rooms are furnished, how the characters are dressed. (I was surprised to have it pointed out that Trollope, even writing at the length he does, doesn’t much bother with this, and it is true.)

^ Nice description, tells a lot in one sentence.

I’ve been meaning to read Ross Lockridge’s Raintree County for years, and now that I’m doing so, I can confidently report that it is a great book. Sort of James Joyce crossed with Americana, but not intimidating. The framework of the 1066 pages is the celebration of July 4, 1892, in a small town in Indiana, but there are numerous flashbacks incorporating the 50 years before that.

Lockridge famously committed suicide as the novel was climbing the bestseller charts in 1948; the book really took it all out of him, and beyond that, he was mentally unprepared for fame and notoriety. John Leggett’s joint biography of Lockridge and Thomas Heggen, author of Mister Roberts and another late Forties suicide, Ross And Tom: Two American Tragedies, is one of the most moving books I have ever read

Thank you kindly!

I retired in 2020 as a result of (1) COVID decimating my private English teaching business in Querétaro, Mexico, and (2) turning 62 and becoming eligible to receive my Social Security benefit. No regrets. I’m really enjoying it.

Filling the gaps is very enjoyable. There are some titles that should have turned up in one of my many literature courses, but they just never did!

Thank you so much! I am kind of helpless at group reads because I read too many books “at once”, but I will look at everything.

I like the “Catching Up” idea because even though I have been an enthusiastic reader all my life, there are always gaps to fill, and my retirement is an ideal time to do it.

Pocket bio: Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea. More detail at Goodreads profile.

Yes, that is an obscure one that really interests me.

I’ve started James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea, his fourth novel and first sea novel. I love Cooper’s work and plan to read it all; I also love everything nautical!

My Cooper project has a long way to go, admittedly. So far, I have read two of the Leatherstocking novels, The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer; The Spy; and Wyandotté (a neglected gem). That leaves more than 20 novels and a LOT of non-fiction.

Wait.

Anne Brontë writes from a male POV very convincingly. Gilbert Markham is a deeply flawed and not terribly self-aware character - in other words, quite realistic!

Petra wrote: "The daughter of a friend of mine has this trait. Since young, she just goes with the flow of events and adapts on the turn of a dime. Nothing phases her, she merely naturally adapts to changes in h..."

Buddenbrooks is a great novel. I strongly recommend it to one and all.

The context of the quotation is that Tony (Antoinette, a young woman) is newly divorced in an unforgiving mid-19th Century German culture. But she is unflappable. She embraces her new status and finds satisfaction in it.

The emphasis is on the word “new”. Every altered situation in life affords new possibilities, if we will only see them. “One door closes, another opens.”

I have never felt homesick abroad because I try to focus on what IS in front of me, not what isn’t. I think that is what Mann is getting at.

While reading Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family this morning, I came across this observation:

“But Tony had the lovely knack of being able to adapt readily to any situation in life simply by tackling its new possibilities.”

Isn’t that great? That’s how I want to be and how I try to be. It has been so helpful in adjusting to life in new countries (first South Korea and then Mexico).

Last night I finished a long read, Albert Camus: A Biography by Herbert R. Lottman. Great book. Of course I knew the tragic ending was coming, but I still cried.

No, I haven’t ordered it yet. It is definitely the right version, though.

I was in the middle of Tenant before this group read (I am hopeless at group reads), and will finish the Project Gutenberg text I started, even though it is the edited 1854 version,

I love both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The pair suggests a breadth of subject matter and treatment that makes me so curious as to where Anne would have gone next. People who think that we only pay her attention because she was a Brontë are very wrong. She would have been rediscovered by now in any case.

It is amazing that Penguin, of all publishers, could muck up a textual issue.

This is interesting information about the different editions. There was a first edition in 1848, and then a second edition that year with some slight revisions and a new Preface. In 1854, a publisher came out with the unauthorized edited version that unfortunately served as the basus for most later reprints.

In 1992, Oxford published a new critical text based on the first and second editions. The Oxford paperback of course prints that text. I do not know about the most recent Penguin edition.

I am almost done reading the Project Gutenberg version. Unfortunately, it is the 1854 text. I will have to buy the Oxford paperback and re-read the novel at some point.

On the Internet Archive, there is an 1848 American edition that looks complete superficially, but was actually “heavily emended...and has no independent authority”.

Whew!

Katy wrote: "Not sure where you are all at in the book, but an interesting thing to me is the use of doubles in the book --
* Two cities
*Darnay is tried as in both England and France
*Lucie Manette has both an..."

Oh yes, absolutely.

I have always felt that the title A Tale of Two Cities is pure genius. I am an urban guy, and it stimulates my curiosity instantly.

As the crow flies, London and Paris are only 215 miles apart (compare New York / Boston, 190 miles; New York / Washington, 204 miles).