J.T. Wilson > Recent Status Updates

Some of the bite returning to Austen’s narrative voice during the Portsmouth chapters.

Anatole’s interest in Natasha Rostov in ‘War and Peace’ - obviously a scoundrel, but one who stirs up Natasha’s erotic interest and nearly drags her into ruin - feels more exciting and plausible than Crawford’s pursuit of Fanny (um, so to speak) only for her to be too pious to be moved by it. I can see why Fanny polarises readers.

50 pages which hinged on whether the family should perform a silly play to amuse themselves, or whether the father would be upset about it! These are stakes so perplexingly low as to seem almost incomprehensible.

Oh to be one of a million daughters attending a series of balls and parties looking for a suitable match, perhaps a baronetcy and five thousand a year.

Even Zola admits he goes over the top in this book, but he still insists within the book that his characters’ behaviour “is a physical and psychological fact”.

“It is possible to be happy without killing one’s husband.”

I realise that around this time last year I read ‘Neuromancer’, a book groping obscurely at a future it could only understand slightly; ‘The Drowned World’ (although set in the future) is actually crawling back towards the protozoaic past.

Feels like a two-act book where I’ve just begun the second.

Who uses words like “archaeopsychic”?

I was going to read ‘Love’ by Stendhal but this will have to be its substitute.

Slightly less repetitive in the last 50-odd pages because she isn’t constantly marrying, having children and then having her husband die on her.

Repetitive.

Strange to be getting through a book at this pace in the Year of Thousand Page Books. This is very very slight.

***CANONICAL LESBIAN SECTION***