Reading Underwater

Name:
Location: Sydney, Australia

I used to blog about books - until I got the complete Stargate boxed set.

Monday, January 30, 2006

The importance of planning ahead

I exaggerated a bit on Friday when I said that I was up to page 350 of Pendennis because I discovered on my way home on the train that, on page 336, old WM says who Pendennis's worst enemy is.

And it's not anyone you might have suspected.

Mostly because people are either universally well-disposed to the young dandified pup or because Thackeray inserts minor contretemps into the action but resolves them far too quickly to have a sustained enemy for 550 pages.

Actually I suspect he chanced upon the front page of the first part of his serial again and realised he'd forgotten to include an essential ingredient, much like I did a few years ago when I made my wonderful healthy egg and dairy free chocolate cake for my former Beloved who was a vegan and I foolishly neglected to include the cup of raw sugar. The only way it was edible was with lashings and lashings of chocolate icing (made with olive oil margarine which is surprisingly bearabe). So too Pendennis appears to have a tacked on mortal enemy.

Likewise Warrington, his best friend who late in the piece is perceived by some as a potential rival for Pen's possible bride, has a very very very strange back story to expand on WM's obsession with young men ruining their prospects by marrying older women. Marriage seems to be a real social handicap for a young man in Thackeray's world.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Pendennis... still

I'm up to page 340 now and I know how it ends but young Pen is such a personable young man that I'm going to pursue it further. Besides, the title page promised me an account of his greatest enemy and I can't actually work out who that is yet. They haven't got long to appear!

Thackeray had a bit of an idee fixe on pineapples in the mid 200s of the book. I wonder if they were in the news when that part of serial was published. Pineapples are eaten by rich young men of fashion out for a jaunt with theatrical women. They appear in elegant dining rooms as dessert and there's an odd comment about how breeding by a clever Mr Someone or Other has improved the size of the pineapple and reduced its gestation period from nine to three months. I would have thought that pineapples had been happily growing to the same size for the same length of time for milennia. This calls for further research!

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Book Clubs

This morning as I was standing in the rain on the crowded platform waiting for the train that was delayed for 20 minutes by mechanical failure, I realised that a man I see waiting there occasionally was at the beginning of Julian Barnes's new book called George and Henry or something - actually Arthur and George - see http://www.julianbarnes.com/.

It looked like a Christmas book, or at least it was one of the books I was hoping my family would see in a shop and go "oh Mary would like that" and buy it for me, wrap it up and put it under the tree, because not only is it about eminent Victorians who were friends and it was disturbingly long, it was also beautifully bound in cloth with a gold embossed picture on the cover and interesting heavy paper but it was outrageously expensive in that edition. They probably did see it, all decided it was too dear and that I was so extravagant I'd already bought it for myself and gave me homewares instead. The bastards. Little do they know about the new austerity drive.

Anyway, lucky man on platform with "my" book. Last time I noticed him, he was reading Jay McIneray's Model Behavior and I wanted to tell him it's a lazy, sloppy book and he should read the infinitely more fun Easton Ellis's Glamorama instead. But I didn't. That seemed a bit too much information to share with a man I don't know unless we set up a train station book club.

Should I ask to borrow this book when he's finished?

Monday, January 23, 2006

Deja vu

As I was squinting over "Pendennis" on the week-end, I realised I knew exactly what was going to happen next.

I read the next page and I was utterly right.

I don't know whether this is because

A) this sort of Victorian potboiler is completely predictable or

B) I am psychic or

C) I've actually read it before but because

a)it is so forgettable I'd forgotten this or

b)I'm developing juvenile dementia

it doesn't seem familiar at all.

In any case, I don't know the ending so I'm going to plough through for the next three hundred pages if my eyes last that long.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Keeping Up with The Times

By now, you might think "that Mary Bennet only reads books by dead white people" and I must insist that, while I do read a lot of those books, I've also been known to peruse recently published works by living people of at least two different ethnicities.

Really, I have. Many, many such books. (Ask me about Salman Rushdie or Ben Okri or um what's that Japanese man who wrote Sputnik Sweetheart called?)

In fact, the call of the shiny new well-reviewed must-have book in attractive trade paperback has almost led to my utter ruin. I've followed the siren call of the new bestseller and the pretty cover to the extent of my credit and living space .

When I ran out of room on my shelves, and space to put more shelves, I started to hide books under the bed, in the kitchen, under the couch. Eventually, however, my beloved declared that enough was enough, he was sick of tripping over piles of books and I had to get rid of some. That's when I realised that I could hide new books in my workplace.

My buying habits changed recently when I encountered straitened circumstances and am now unable to buy new books, shoes or even meals out for some time. I'm using these weeks to look at the old hardcover friends lurking behind their more colourful successors to see if there are any I haven't read yet.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Thomas Hardy

When I was at school I was not afraid of telling my teachers when I didn't like a book they made us read. I told them that I laughed and laughed at Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd with the incredibe penny dreadful silliness of [warning - spoiler ahead] the poor ruined pregnant girl wandering for miles in the snow, occasionally using an extremely patient dog as a crutch, until she perished. Sure, I get it: life is cruel for rural workers in pre-industrial England, transport is bad, men are bastards and given half a chance will take advantage of their social inferiors.

What I didn't tell them was that I did wipe away a tear occasionally during those awful chapters, especially when the wastrel responsible for the girl's downfall had the good grace to cry over the open coffin containing her and his poor stillborn son.

Now I'm all grown up and probably less hard hearted, I still have to say that Hardy just didn't know when to stop. I read The Woodlanders recently. The extremely wordy introduction said that Hardy liked this book best of all his works because of the story.

The "story" involves a timber merchant with mixed ambitions for his daughter. He sends her off to boarding school but tells a local lad to expect to marry her. When she comes back all educated and well bred, he can't bear to give her away. When the local lad loses the tenancy to his family's cottage after some relative dies because the lad didn't renew the lease and has fallen out of favour with the local aristocrat, the match becomes completely out of the question, even though the young couple are more or less in love. There is also a local girl secretly in love with the local lad but he never really notices.

A young doctor spies the nicely bred girl and starts to woo her. He soon realises he needs to marry her to have his way (unlike a rather less well bred local girl) but being socially ambitious wants her origins to be a secret from society. He despises her family and takes advantage of them by opening a practice in the better part of the timber merchant's house. Meanwhile the local lad has become an itinerant cider maker and refuses to talk to his former beloved becuase of the huge gulf of fortune between them.

Then, the young doctor starts seeing a local much-married youngish aristocratic widow. This very much hurts his tender wife's feelings. He drinks a lot too. He has some kind of accident and is knocked unconscious and two women (the local slut and widow) insist on seeing him on his sick bed. His wife is dismayed and runs off to the horrible forest cottage of her first love.

The cider maker has been ill and doesn't want her to know how ill so he stays in the dark so she can't see how his appearance has altered. He insists she stay inside and goes off to sleep in a bark shelter of some kind so far away she can't here his hacking cough. She tidies up the cottage and cooks him food. She's very happy until her location is found and she has to return home. Her family has barred the husband from the house.

There's some dispute about whether she kept her honour in these circumstances but the girl in love with her first love sticks up for her. Also the man dies from exposure as a result of letting her stay in his cottage!@!!!. She feels that it's her fault (too right it's her fault). She spends a lot of time at his grave with the local girl who loved him.

Meanwhile the doctor has fled to the Continent with the widow. For months and months he lives the life of Reilly, gambling and carousing with European ne-er-do-wells until one night he's bored. He decides to leave for England. The day later the widow is slain by a jealous lover or ex-lover or would-be lover or something. He only just avoided the scandal! He reforms. For the rest of the book he woos his wife back and claims to have mended his ways. And she GOES BACK.

What an odd all-over-the-place story. There were some very nice descriptions of trees and forestry management practices.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Apt quotations

I'm always really impressed when authors introduce each chapter with quotations from poems or other writers. I smile to myself and think how clever this author is to have trawled through literature to have found the perfect bit of Shakespeare or Tennyson or some other poet I haven't heard of, or in more recent works, Baudrillaud or Rimbaud or Derrida. This would have been so hard in the days before the Internet.

I quietly resolve that I'll remember the point of the quotation and see how it applies to what lies ahead. Of course I rarely do and I never, ever go back at the end of the chapter and check.

I'm particularly impressed when the quotations are in foreign languages because this shows that the author has not only read lots and lots but that they're multilingual too. How clever!

But now I wonder how much of that is a complete con job. I read a worthy annotated edition of Stendhal's The Red and the Black recently (and despite 150 pages of notes I couldn't work out what the red and black were) which footnoted eveything that was likely to be remotely outside of the everyday life of the average 15 year old American so "francs" were explained every three pages and Napoleon was explained and so forth. This meant that the dozens and dozens of quotations in French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and English were translated and then attributed where possible. Disappointingly, more than half of them turned out to be made up. The old rascal!

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Did Thackeray's Mum love him?

One of the fun things about old William Makepeace is that he’s quite realistic about how dysfunctional families are. Different branches of families hate each other. People are disinclined to help their poor relations but very very eager to claim friendship with them when their fortunes seem to change. The plot of The Virginians [Warning: spoiler ahead] hinges on dastardly spendthrift English relatives trying to destroy all copies of title deeds to their American cousins’ property so they can claim it for themselves.

This is so much more satisfying than the sugary sentimentality of Dickens.

I worry about poor little Master Thackeray’s childhood though. His fiction is full of mothers and stepmothers neglecting their children. Who can forget how horrid Becky Sharp is to her son, only kissing him in company and ignoring him the rest of the time? And in The Newcomes, the young Colonel is so thoroughly abused by his stepmother he has to leave home at a tender age. Part of Clive Newcome’s unhappiness in his poverty is how his little son is treated by his mother-in-law. He also seems very idealistic about how mothers should be. Early on in Pendennis he eulogises the Madonna:


The maternal passion is a sacred mystery to me. What one sees symbolised in the
Roman churches in the image of the Virgin Mother with a bosom bleeding with
love, I think one may witness (and admire the Almighty bounty for) every
day. I saw a Jewish lady, only yesterday, with a child at her knee, and
from whose face towards the child there shone a sweetness so angelical, that it
seemed to form a sort of glory round both. I protest I could have knelt
before her too, and adored in her the Divine benefice in endowing us with the
maternal storge which began with our race and sanctifies the history of
mankind.

Blergh! How soppy! How Victorian! (no I don’t know what a storge is either) But is this sentimentality because back then nice little boys were sent to boarding school at the age of six and only saw Mum at holidays? Or is this the enthusiasm of a new uxorious father?

Either way, I can hardly wait for the innocent young Pendennis to be led astray in typical Thackeray style by drinking, gambling, horse racing, expensive waistcoats and actresses.

Old books save money

Of course I was exaggerating yesterday. My edition of The Newcomes is only 648 pages long. It took me weeks to read it because this was during one of those rare busy times at work when I’d come home gibbering to myself, too tired to do anything except eat and watch telly.

Every morning and evening for several weeks I’d read about five pages of closely typed Thackeray on the train. When I had time, I’d also read 20 pages at lunchtime.

This was quite economical reading. I paid three dollars for my 1907 hardcover edition at a charity sale at least ten years ago. That works out to be 0.46 cents per page. I usually read a book a week so if I was reading new books for the same length of time, I probably would have read five of them and spent $150. Yay for me. Now I’ve just started reading Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy which I found lurking on a shelf at home. I paid six dollars for it somewhere ages ago. It’s 504 pages long with very fine print. This might take me until Easter to read. By then I’ll save enough from not buying new books to get some FABULOUS shoes.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Jane and William Makepeace Thackeray

People don't really read Thackeray any more. At least no-one I know has ever read anything other than Vanity Fair. I've recently ploughed through The Newcomes and read The Virginians not so long ago.

This is a shame because he was a lion in his day(!), lionised by all, a tremendous literary lion whose roar terrified poor little Charlotte Bronte when she went to the big city after Jane Eyre was published. Mrs Gaskell tells the story of the tiny shy authoress being unable to even make herself heard by the great man.

And he is tremendous fun even if, because his books were mostly serialised, you suddenly find really abrupt changes in plot direction and characters. Formerly beautiful virtuous characters are suddenly insipid when he tires of them. Complicated characters with a complete family trees don't re-appear - was this padding to get to the end of the chapter? At the end of The Newcomes he even confesses to reanimating a character inadvertently who'd died several chapters earliers (I must admit to not noticing this because of the great number of chapters between the two events and my great hurry to get to the end of the 800 pages to see if there was a happy ending.)

I'm always surprised that booksellers and movie makers think people will like both Jane Austen and Thackeray (or Vanity Fair). Probably only because Becky Sharp is almost as much fun as Eliza Bennet. But that's about the only reason. Austen was concerned with young women finding husbands. These men might be soldiers or sailors or curates but you'd never know that England was fighting France or invading India. Thackery had more complicated plots about human virtue and folly but he does tell you all about going fight in the American war of Independence or where young men could make fortunes in order to find wives. And he can be laugh out loud funny at times.

Friday, January 13, 2006

First Post

At the end of Pride and Prejudice, Mary Bennet is the only sister left living with her parents. Jane and Eliza have found marital bliss as Mrs Bingley and Mrs Darcy respectively. Lydia has adjusted to her circumstances as the unfortunate Mrs Wickham and Kitty is said to be take the opportunity to escape home by frequently visiting her married sisters.

Mary is said to be enjoying the solitude or, at least, the fact that she no longer has to be compared to her more conventionally attractive sisters in the local matrimonial market. I like to think of her growing up and older, spending her days reading at the table, in the bath, in trees. At parties she sings out of tune and shares her opinions with any and everyone regardless of what they think of her.

Her sisters would never understand her and, as the years passed, become more reluctant to invite her to visit. Her many nieces and nephews would receive disappointingly difficult books at Christmas rather than lollies.

We never do find out whether there was someone for Mary. But then, maybe Mary preferred it that way. Perhaps she would have started a discreet correspondence with authors of books she liked. Maybe one of these would invite her to share his garrett. But it doesn't really matter.

Mary loved to read and that's a good thing.