The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion
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So, What's On the Bedside Table these Days? -- Part 2
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^ Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have access to such sales and shops again! Used bookshops in university towns always had such great offerings. I miss the annual Newberry Library book sale in Chicago which I used to attend regularly.
When is a Western not a Western? When it’s a Northern! The Wikipedia article on this subject is quite good:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North...
“The Northern or Northwestern is a genre in various arts that tell stories set primarily in the late 19th or early 20th century in the north of North America, primarily in western Canada but also in Alaska. It is similar to the Western genre, but many elements are different, as appropriate to its setting. It is common for the central character to be a Mountie instead of a cowboy or sheriff. Other common characters include fur trappers and traders, lumberjacks, prospectors, First Nations people, settlers, and townsfolk.”
Some authors that are associated with this genre are Jack London, Rex Beach, Robert Service, Ralph Connor, and James Oliver Curwood. I am reading Beach’s The Spoilers at the moment, famously filmed five times (1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, 1955), the highlight always being an epic fist-fight towards the climax. The novel is rousing good fun, based on an actual incident of corruption during the Yukon Gold Rush * , which Beach had witnessed first-hand.
* The key malfeasor was Alexander McKenzie (1851-1922), whom I encountered in my recent reading in North Dakota history. A very nasty guy and machine politician who served prison time for corruption. He conspired, in collaboration with officials he helped place in office, to cheat Alaska gold miners of their winnings by fraudulently claiming title to their mines.
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^ As you may have seen me mention before, I am a big CanLit, Canadian history, and Canadiana guy! I am proud of this because so few Americans seem much interested in their Northern neighbor.
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You just have to learn Spanish! (ha, ha) Out of curiosity I looked at a couple of used books sites and Spanish copies are very affordable.
^ My Spanish reading is SO slow! I can look at a newspaper headline / article and get the drift swiftly, but word-by-word comprehension is another story, because I want to make sure that I get at least 95%, and with literary, academic, or older writing, that is a challenge.Por ejemplo, the first paragraph of La madre naturaleza (copied from Scribd):
“Las nubes, amontonadas y de un gris amoratado, como de tinta desleída, fueron juntándose, juntándose, sin duda a cónclave, en las alturas del cielo, deliberando si se desharían o no se desharían en chubasco. Resueltas finalmente a lo primero, empezaron por soltar goterones anchos, gruesos, legítima lluvia de estío, que doblaba las puntas de las yerbas y resonaba estrepitosamente en los zarzales; luego se apresuraron a porfía, multiplicaron sus esfuerzos, se derritieron en rápidos y oblicuos hilos de agua, empapando la tierra, inundando los matorrales, sumergiendo la vegetación menuda, colándose como podían al través de la copa de los árboles para escurrir después tronco abajo, a manera de raudales de lágrimas por un semblante rugoso y moreno.”
OMG, that second sentence! I get plenty of the WORDS, but I would have to work on it for a while to get the total SENSE. It’s about the landscape, and it looks like beautiful, subtle writing, so maybe I’ll give it a go just for fun… 🙂
Patrick wrote: " but word-by-word comprehension is another story, because I want to make sure that I get at least 95%, and with literary, academic, or older writing, that is a challenge."it is ... but even the very best author's vocabulary is not endless. So usually it gets easier the further on you read. I did work my way through Marquez and Vargas Llosa, and tedious it was ... what with no more than a year of formal Spanish training. (but I can draw on French and Italian, which helps)
^ Certainly that is true. The real question is time commitment, though: Am I willing to put in four or five times as many hours for a book in the original? Spanish and French are the two languages where this might be possible for me. I fear my Latin reading ability is beyond recovery. 🙂
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^ That is a good point. The more formal the writing, the easier it is to get a handle on. For example, Mexican newspaper and magazine writing is MUCH less colloquial than American, and therefore more accessible to me. Really, in many ways Mexico is more like Europe than the United States, which is possibly a good thing. 😏
I have an interesting recommendation of a book I recently read. It’s a Dutch author, but there are translations. There is an English one. It was and is a bestseller in the Netherlands. There also was a movie.https://www.onlinebibliotheek.nl/cata...
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My wife and I headed off to southern Italy for nearly the whole month of September, and I am starting to think about what's going in the book bag with me. Definitely going to include 1-2 Zola novels, probably Eliot's Daniel Deronda (a re-read), and we'll see what else, maybe some Virginia Woolf . . .
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We travel a lot. Even though I have a kindle, I always pack 3 or more print books. I call them my security books. One of my favorite Virginia Woolf’s is Orlando.
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Thanks for the tip about Woolf's Orlando, as I have it but have not yet read it.
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I have a Kindle too, but, like you, I'd never go abroad for three+ weeks without a back-up plan ;-)
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Good Heavens! It has been ages since I read that. I haven't revisited Twain in forever.
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I have Finding Margaret Fuller. She is the historical figure who got me started on my current gig of speaking about lesser-known historical women. I actually dressed up as her and used a lot of her own words for the presentation. I forgot about that book, which I haven't yet read, so thanks for the reminder.
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That’s exactly what I was reading.
Curiously, it was YOUR review of Vanity Fair which immediately bumped that to the top of my reading list rather than the usual escapist fun reading I've been indulging in for a while. I went through an Edith Wharton phase a while back where, after reading one book of hers, I was so impressed that I promptly had to devour everything else she'd ever written. I was not let down. Something about the premise and quotes I saw from Vanity Fair made me think I might be finding another gem of that nature so here's hoping!
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "I started Wharton's The House of Mirth last evening. Wharton is so good!"Amen to that and I think House of Mirth is one of her best!
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I am currently reading Twilight Sleep, the rare Wharton which is satirical. The characters from 100 years ago could be living today - the society lady who spends all her time on self-improvement and being a do-gooder. The new fads include meditation and psychoanalysis My favorite Wharton is also humorous - The Glimpses of the Moon.
Just finished the first of six volumes of George Bernard Shaw’s Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead, 1963), including Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, The Man of Destiny, and Buoyant Billions. One’s chances of seeing even Shaw’s most famous plays in adequate stage productions these days is slight. Heartbreak House, for example, requires 10 top-notch actors: Not cheap or easy to assemble.
So reading is the way to go, but even among confirmed readers of the classics, plays (outside of Shakespeare) don’t seem to get the attention they merit. It is too bad. Shaw is hardly just dialogue - his stage directions are exquisite and enable one to readily visualize a production.
The same thought occurs to me as I read each of these Shaw plays, and indeed when I read almost ANY classic play: Where would the audience for this be found today? Because the demands on the audience are pretty intense: A rapt level of attention, an intense sensitivity to verbal nuance, a high level of cultural literacy and sophistication, the willingness to work for the art instead of just letting it wash over you.
I am re-reading Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and near the end of the first section on Cardinal Manning, there is a mention of his admiration of Croker’s Life and Letters and Hayward’s Letters. Now, the Anglo-Irish politician and writer John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), and The Croker Papers, I was aware of; the Papers are on one of my TBR lists. But who is Hayward?It took a little digging to determine that it is Abraham Hayward (1801-1884), essayist and bon vivant, who cut quite a figure in Victorian England, and whose Correspondence was published in two volumes, two years after his death. There is a recent (2009), hefty biography by Antony Chessell; it is a little pricey. The Correspondence is at the Internet Archive, so I immediately downloaded the first volume and am enjoying it greatly. It is a whirl of everyone who was anyone in that era – many dimly remembered now, like Hayward himself.
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The internet is a good resource for more obscure or hard to find works.
The Landlord at Lion’s Head is one of the least-known novels ever published in the Signet Classics series, not even among the most recognizable William Dean Howells titles (The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Modern Instance). It is a powerful study of a young “alpha male” type, Jeff Durgin – amoral, practical, shrewd, but not born into name or money, and not possessed of any striking intellectual gifts that would enable him to become a successful lawyer, doctor, or such. He is therefore powerfully handicapped in the 19th Century world, despite being handsome and self-possessed. But this doesn’t anger him; he is always confident that he will “find a way”. I was reminded of Trollope’s similarly situated Phineas Finn, and both men angle forward by playing off their sexual magnetism, not giving a second thought if this involves “making love” to several women in the same time-frame.Howells contrasts Durgin with a fastidious older artist, Westover (often taken to be a Howells self-portrait). I can’t say as I’d be friends with either man – Durgin is too shallow and brutish, Westover a passive priss. But their relationship fuels the novel effectively. The settings in rural New Hampshire (where the Durgin family inn is located, hence the book’s title) and urban Boston (especially Harvard, which Jeff uneasily attends) are also tellingly contrasted. A sharp and compelling novel overall. I am a big Howells fan.
Rosemarie wrote: "I've only read one novel by Howells, Indian Summer."That is one that I need to get to. He was very prolific - one of the ways in which he is like Trollope.
In A Pair of Blue Eyes, Thomas Hardy offers here one of the most disenchanted and anti-romantic novels predating Modernism – although discussing how is well-nigh impossible without major spoilers.However, one dimension of the anti-romanticism that can be mentioned is the central character Elfride, who is the love focus for four men. Elfride may be pretty, she sure as hell ain’t charming. One reviewer at Goodreads aptly describes her as fickle and vapid, and honestly there can be few characters in all of 19th Century fiction who are THIS annoying.
Hence, although A Pair of Blue Eyes is a fascinating performance, I do have difficulty in seeing WHY all these men are so taken with Elfride. Is prettiness enough? *
* I will admit that as a gay male reader, enchanted love-object descriptions of young women in 19th Century novels often fly right past me unless the women have intelligence and character to match their looks. When they don’t - Elfride here, Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Lorna Doone in the eponymous novel - well let’s just say that those passages are not my focus or my road into the story.
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Rosemarie wrote: "Sometimes prettiness is enough, until they get married!"I daresay that the stereotype of male desire then (and still today, among some men) did not include female intelligence and especially not agency, since the male was supposed to have the agency. Of course, there are many heroines in 19th Century fiction who DO have those qualities; I think of Helen Graham in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, who is intelligent, artistic, mature, beautiful rather than “pretty”, and who has had defining, trying life experiences that have made her self-sufficient, and no one’s shrinking partner. A very appealing human being, in short; it is no wonder to me that Gilbert Markham falls strongly for her. The novel also benefits from her being seen as both object (in Markham’s letters) and subject (in her own diaries); it is even-handed.
I am always trying to fill in my gaps of “minor” 19th Century novelists, although I don’t really believe in “minor” - it makes a writer sound dismissible. Two of the books I have going right now by authors I haven’t read before overlap interestingly on the theme of inheritance, which could be a very big deal if a family had a fair amount of money. The Entail, by the Scottish writer and businessman John Galt (1779-1839), shapes up as tragic, with the ghastly character of the monomaniacal Laird, Claud Walkinshaw, dominating the proceedings. Ravenshoe, by Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), is comical / adventurous in tone.Interestingly, both Galt and Kingsley (brother of the more famous Charles) spent time in the colonies, Galt in Canada and Kingsley in Australia (where he set some of his novels). Galt’s son Alexander was one of the key figures in the founding of the Canadian Confederation.
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Rosemarie wrote: "I've read a couple of books by Galt, but not that one."It’s not one of his best known ones, I think. But since I am interested in law, the title appealed to me.
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Many Victorian heroines in books by men are frustratingly passive, even given the reality of the times. Dickens has a whole cadre of sweet, young, devoted girls/women, possibly influenced by his love for his sister-in-law and later his very young mistress. Trollope has some of these too. My favorites are the ones with agency. Not surprisingly, many of them are written by women - such as Helen Graham mentioned above, Jane Eyre, and Dorothea Brooke.
Robin P wrote: "The Entail sounds something like The Master of Ballantrae.Many Victorian heroines in books by men are frustratingly passive, even given the reality of the times. Dickens has a whole cadre of swee..."
Absolutely true, although Trollope can go the other way too. In Phineas Finn, which I am reading now, the key women - Laura Kennedy, Violet Effingham, and Madame Max Goesler - are all depicted as decision makers, although sometimes their decisions don’t work out. Female agency is decidedly important in this novel.
Thomas Love Peacock (BOTD 1785-1866) is one of the 19th Century authors that I have been meaning to get to for EONS. I recently finished Nightmare Abbey, which like most of his conversation-novels is quite short, and am almost done with Crotchet Castle. I was immediately reminded of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, which preceded Peacock and, then unpublished, can’t have been an influence. But there is certainly an affinity. The dialogue in such Shaw plays as Heartbreak House has a somewhat Peacockian flavor, too.
Peacock’s writings are an instance where you really need the notes to penetrate a lot of the references. His characters are often barely disguised versions of notable figures such as Coleridge; he has a lot of fun with them.
Good to know. Nightmare Abbey is on my TBR list. I just haven’t been in the right mood.
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It's funny!
Renee wrote: "Good to know. Nightmare Abbey is on my TBR list. I just haven’t been in the right mood."It can be read in an evening, so that’s a plus.
The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910
Books mentioned in this topic
Byron's Women (other topics)The Talk of the Town (other topics)
The Woman in White (other topics)
The Absentee (other topics)
The Absentee (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Alice Munro (other topics)Maria Edgeworth (other topics)
Maria Edgeworth (other topics)
Mark Twain (other topics)
Mark Twain (other topics)
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The historian James Bryce (1838-1922) first published his history of the Holy Roman Empire in 1864, and revised it several times over the coming decades. When I taught World History, of course I could not resist using Voltaire’s quip (“Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”); it is the sort of thing that students remember. But there is a lot more to the story, and although this Bryce treatment is demanding, it is not at all musty. Catch this tart comment:
“Men were wont in those days to interpret Scripture in a singular fashion. Not only did it not occur to them to ask what meaning words had to those to whom they were originally addressed; they were quite as careless whether the sense they discovered was one which the language used would naturally and rationally bear to any reader at any time. No analogy was too faint, no allegory too fanciful, to be drawn out of a simple text.”