Australian Wins Pulitzer
Pavlov's Cat recommends 'March' by Geralidine Brooks which recently won a huge international literary prize. It retells Little Women from the point of view of the absent father and is based on the life of Louisa May Alcott's real father.
Someone lent me it to me a couple of months ago but I was put off partly by thinking an extract I read in one of the week-end papers was overwritten. And then I told myself that because my reading was alternating between real Victorian novels and Patrick O'Brian yarns, I should avoid more of the same. But really I think I was afraid to start it because a lot of continuations of much loved books are disappointing (Pemberley anyone? That AWFUL sequel to Gone with the Wind??)
But I'm shallow enough to read it now Ms Brooks has won the Pulitzer! Go Aussie Go! I remember enjoying her book about Nine Parts of Desire about women and Islam and her sig other/husband/partner?? (Tony Horowitz??) wrote a hilarious book I only vaguely remember about being in the middle east as a foreign correspondent's hanger-on. Disappointingly, I've checked and it's called Bagdad without a Map . The other book I was thinking of had a title like Zombie Babes and Kalishnikovs. Annoying when the truth gets in the way of good ideas.
Someone lent me it to me a couple of months ago but I was put off partly by thinking an extract I read in one of the week-end papers was overwritten. And then I told myself that because my reading was alternating between real Victorian novels and Patrick O'Brian yarns, I should avoid more of the same. But really I think I was afraid to start it because a lot of continuations of much loved books are disappointing (Pemberley anyone? That AWFUL sequel to Gone with the Wind??)
But I'm shallow enough to read it now Ms Brooks has won the Pulitzer! Go Aussie Go! I remember enjoying her book about Nine Parts of Desire about women and Islam and her sig other/husband/partner?? (Tony Horowitz??) wrote a hilarious book I only vaguely remember about being in the middle east as a foreign correspondent's hanger-on. Disappointingly, I've checked and it's called Bagdad without a Map . The other book I was thinking of had a title like Zombie Babes and Kalishnikovs. Annoying when the truth gets in the way of good ideas.
posted by Mary Bennet | 3:01 pm
2 Comments:
Brooks does not make the mistake of writing anything that even tries to be a 'continuation' in the sense that the other books you cite try for this. It's more a picking up of a minor character and making a whole new story out of him.
Also, it's well and truly an adult book in the sense that no child could make head nor tail of it, again unlike the originals, and it takes in the implications of the Transcendentalist movement and its beliefs (Bronson Alcott, on whom the character is very firmly based, was a friend and peer of both Emerson and Thoreau) as well as the horrible realities of the Civil War and its effects.
I guess you might hate it anyway, in which case I apologise in advance for my recommendation -- but I never really know what other people mean when they talk about things being 'overwritten'. To me there's good complex/ornate writing and bad complex/ornate writing -- just as there's good simple writing and bad simple writing.
I think Brooks may well have tried to write in a style that suited the thought and writing of the period, when long sentences were the norm, but I think she does that very well.
'Overwritten' is my lazy shorthand for bad ornate writing - something like 'this bit of prose jarred with how I thought people from the period would write'. From memory, the extract involved the disjunction between what March was including in a letter home all about the beauty of the sunset and what he was actually seeing in the extremely squalid of the camp. In any case, this reaction might have been to the context of reading this in a newspaper.
I read all of the Little Women books when I was far far too young. When Amy went on a tour to the Continent I thought she was going to Australia, the only continent I'd heard of.
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