The Children of Men (1992) by P.D. James

 Audiobook Review

The Children of Men (1992)

by PD James

  I love the movie version of this book- I've watched it several times over the years, and I finally got around to listening to the Audiobook of the original book by PD James.  James made her name as a writer of detective fiction and it's one of three non-detective fiction books she published before her death in 2014.   I believe there are multiple versions of the Audiobook- I would imagine one before the film and one after to capitalize on the revitalized interest.  Whichever version I heard I didn't like the narrator, who had a stuffy, pedantic English accent (as befits the character in the book).  

  As one might expect, the book tells a related but different story than the film, which was obviously diversified in the hands of director Alfonso Cuaron.  In the book, the harsh treatment of would-be immigrants is mentioned as a concern  but not something encountered by the characters.  In the film, the immigrants and their treatment are at the center of the plot.  I found myself wondering about James and her motivation- my thought is that she was inspired by Margaret Atwood and A Handmaid's Tale, which was published in 1985, so it very well could have been in her mind when she first imagined The Children of Men.  I don't see anything in her detective fiction that would have triggered this dark, dystopian tale of a childless future (and neither did the New York Times, both before and after the movie was released.)

Orbital (2024) by Samantha Harvey

Audiobook Review

Orbital (2024)

by Samantha Harvey

   The New York Times review of Orbital by Samantha Harvey was maybe the first book review I read this year.  The way it was described made me wince- it's set on the international space station and switches between the perspectives of the multi national astronauts onboard as the travel around the planet several times (each orbit is another chapter).  They think about stuff, and stuff happens on Earth- a strong tsunami in the Pacific is the major earth-bound event- and that's the book.

  In January I told myself I'd read it if it got nominated for the Booker Prize.  It did. And then I put it off again because, again, my feeling was this is an example of the uninteresting side of the coin that is combining literary fiction with elements of speculative fiction.  There is, to be sure, a "realist" non sci fi literature of near-earth travel, but I'm just saying setting a book in space is a typical element of science fiction.  In Orbital we've got that and then the thoughts of these astronauts.  I told myself, "I'll read it if it makes the Booker shortlist, and there you go.  I was able to check the five-hour audiobook out of the library the day the shortlist was announced and listened to it at the gym and running for a couple of days.

  I can see the perspective of the Booker committee.  First, it's short, 144 pages, which is an UNDENIABLE advantage in competing for the Booker Prize.  Second it's got an international perspective- the most international perspective, you could argue, which suits the favor that the Booker Prize shows to outward looking fiction.  Third, she's an English lit insider who draws comparison Virginia Woolf for her writing style and themes and her 2009 novel Wilderness was longlisted.

  Personally, I thought it was a good Audiobook because of the length and the different voices of the astronauts- Russian, American, Japanese.  There are also several "set-piece" style descriptions of the Earth itself which are distinctive and memorable. But Orbital is def an example of modernist-inspired fictions where "nothing happens."  I'm sure that statement would drive Harvey nuts, but that is my opinion.   Whatever my personal feelings there is no denying that Harvey has the literary pedigree and that Orbital has the kind of moxy the Booker Judges seem to reward every year so...who knows. Maybe the winner.

The Safekeep (2024) by Yael van der Wouden

 Book Review

The Safekeep (2024)

by Yael van der Wouden

   The Safekeep is the first 2024 Booker Longlist book I've read since they announced last month.  A now common experience is realizing that some of the books haven't been published in the USA yet, particularly galling since that includes two potential winners- the new Rachel Kushner book and Richard Powers latest offering.  Before the longlist was announced, I'd already tackled There There by Tommy Orange and Jim by Percival Everett in my book club.  Another nominee, Knockout by Rita Bullwinkle is my next book club pick.  I'm unlikely to read a new Claire Messud novel, which means there are only a half dozen or so books to look at from the longlist- with two of those not being out in the US.

  The Safekeep got a great review in the New York Times in May, with the subheading describing it as "tricky [and] remarkable."  That is code for "this is a really good book."  I think I put in on my library request list- both the Audiobook and the book itself.  By the time my request was granted, the Booker Longlist had been announced (end of July) and The Safekeep was on it.  Enough time had gone by that I was initially confused about the very nature of the book- thinking perhaps that it might be translated from Dutch and maybe nominated for the Booker International Prize instead of the Prize itself.  As I now know, The Safekeep was written in English by a resident of the UK but it is set in and about the Netherlands in the post-WWII era. 

   Describing a new release of literary fiction as "tricky" tells a potential reader that there is something going on with the plot- as simple as a third act plot twist or as complicated as something that experiments with reader expectations in a modernist/post-modernist fashion.   "Remarkable" just means that it is really good without being specific about how or why.  After listening to the Audiobook I agree with both descriptions, though I would add that I was half way through the listen before I really got on board- which itself is a sign of a good book- one that draws you in.

   When I started listening to the Audiobook I was immediately struck at how little I liked the protagonist Isabel- a young Dutch woman living alone in the house her family retreated to during World War II.  Her Mom is dead, leaving her alone in the house, which is promised to her older brother- a man-about-town type.  There's also a gay brother who left home as soon as he could, and a shy maid that Isabel enjoys bossing around.  Isabel's careful equilibrium is ruptured when she has Eva, feckless Louis' lay-of-the-month thrust upon her when Louis is called away on business and Eva has just lost her apartment.

   At the most basic level, The Safekeep is a spicy LGBT love story set in 1960's Netherlands- and it works at that level.  But then there is the "tricky" and "remarkable" part of it, which defies the format of a blog post.  I'll say this much- I wouldn't be surprised if The Safekeep makes the Booker shortlist. 

  

Kraken (2010) by China Miéville

 Book Review

Kraken (2010)

by China Miéville

  I checked this 2010 fantasy novel out as an Audiobook after reading the book Miéville just published with Keanu Reeves.  Miéville has been on my list for years, but I'm not a huge fantasy guy, so I needed some kind of bump of interest to get me reading listening.  I also liked the fact that the narrator was John Lee- who has done many (all?) of Kazuo Ishiguro's Audiobooks.  He's probably my favorite English accent Audiobook reader.

  Thus, I didn't let the 16 hour listening time phase me.  I also checked out Miéville on Wikipedia after reading the Keanu Reeves book and realized that he has a degree from the London School of Economics and is known as a Marxist, which is just adorable!   Miéville is classified as fantasy because of the strong element of the supernatural that runs through his work, but it's a fantasy that is firmly grounded in the mechanics of contemporary social sciences.  For example, the character Wati, described on Wikipedia as a "living Egyptian afterlife familiar," is, in this book, a union organizers for the familiars union (the witches cat, for example), and that is one of the plot-lines in Kraken.

  In fact, Mieville's world-building of a contemporary (circa 2010) London resembles nothing as much as the street-fighting days of the early to middle 20th century in places like Russia before the Russian Revolution took hold and Berlin before the rise of Hitler.  London is endemically infested with various cults and supernatural criminals, fighting each other beneath the consciousness of the general public but on the radar of the London Police, who have their own supernatural crime unit.

  Kraken has much of what I actually like in fantasy- it's set in the "real world" with the exception of the supernatural plot elements, it draws not just from mythology but also social sciences like economics and sociology and it is written with consciousness of the actual history of any supernatural elements in the plot.  The Keanu Reeves book had similar traits, and I noticed some obvious parallels, specifically the significant role in both books played by inanimate objects imbued with a supernatural consciousness and the use of magic as a kind of practical fix-it to get out of sticky situations. 

  On the other hand its a 528 page "trying to prevent the end of the world" type plot and it was hard not to feel like the book was about 150 pages over-long.  While I, personally, enjoy the world-building exposition in Kraken because I find it interesting, it's hard to ignore the negative impact the exposition has on the plot mechanics of what is a glorified detective novel. 

Brat (2024) by Gabriel Smith

 Book Review

Brat (2024)

by Gabriel Smith

   I've run into people who join multiple libraries so they can get popular books faster, on the theory that people living in dipshit Arkansas aren't going to be interested in the latest- not sure if that actually works or not, but I think about every time I have to wait three months for the latest work of hot literary fiction. Such was the case with Brat by English author Gabriel Smith, which had the good fortune to be released at essentially the same time as the Charli XCX record of the same name.  He even faked an email which purported to say that Charli XCX named Brat after the novel, but that has been debunked.  Still, google this book and the first 10 returns on Google all mention the serendipity of sharing a title with THE album of the summer.

 The numbers haven't been great in the US- I imagine they are better in the UK.  Gabriel, who I surmise is the titular Brat- though the only reference is to a shirt his ex-girlfriend owned that had brat written across the front- is a writer, in his 20's.  He owes his publisher a novel, his Dad just died and his brother and sister in law want/need him to clean up the house for sale in the aftermath of Dad's death, Mom being in the later stages of dementia and confined to a home.

  Gabriel is grief-stricken, handling everything badly, and to make matters worse, large sheets of his skin are peeling off.  It sounds grosser than it actually is: the skin peels away to reveal...more skin. Gabriel haphazardly tries to figure out what is going on with his skin while he deals with a couple of neighbor teens with bad attitudes, a frightening deer-man who may or may not be stalking him with grievous intent, and his bitch sister-in-law.   There's also his Dad's marijuana grow in the attic to attend to, manuscripts and video tapes that change their content with every reading/viewing, black mold and a collapsing roof. 

  In the end there is plenty of atmosphere but only the loosest outline of a plot.  Smith is not concerned with a cohesive narrative, plainly.  It's a fun, hipster-type read and enough to keep interested in his next book, which is hopefully neither a short-story collection nor a memoir, but not a fantastic book.

19th Century Literature + 1900-1919

     POST UPDATED 3/23

    I missed a bunch of these titles I read in 2013 and only saw them now.  Since the original publication date in January, I've been reading a book about the post-Independence Civil War in Ireland and one of these authors- Erskine Childers- is deeply involved in that (non fiction) story!  Makes me want to revisit the Riddle of the Sands, which is reviewed here.

     I've already done a couple 19th century literature compilation posts- I've got 19th century French literature, 19th century American literature and two different 19th century English literature posts I did last summer, so this is what's left. The 19th century is really at the heart of the 1001 Books project, because those are pretty much all books I would never have read (if I hadn't read them already.)  Most of what I learned is that most of the canonical texts from the 19th century are long and boring, and most of them are written from the perspective of rich, white, English/British/European men. 

   Another thing I did on this blog was tag books published between 1900 and 1919 as 19th century, in homage to the term "long nineteenth century" coined by historian Eric Hobsbawm to describe the period between 1789 and 1914.  So, not an exact translation of the term but that is what I did.

POST UPDATED 6/24

   I'm not sure why I left off the handful of books I added to this post when I updated it last year.  They are mostly or all replacement titles from the first revision of the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list in 2008.  It is hard to just happen across new titles from this time period as one goes about your daily business.  For example, my sense is that the Sunday New York Times features a newly published book from this time period maybe once or twice a year, and writes about a newly published editions of a canonical title with about the same frequency.  For example, they don't have a semi-reoccurring "New Editions of Late 19th Century Literature" columns the way they do for genre books.

Published 3/10
Dickens: His Private Life And Public Passion
by Peter Ackroyd
p. 1991

  If ever there was a writer who deserved an eleven hundred page biography, Charles Dickens is that writer.  His output was prolific, and you can say things like "most popular novelist in the 19th century."  His Amazon page hardly does him justice.  What is striking about the life of Charles Dickens is that he was a celebrity in the most modern sense of the word, but be was a celebrity in the UK, Europe and US in the early to mid 19th century.  Certainly you can say that his work defined his generation.

  What most stands out about the life of Dickens is first, his extraordinary energy and productivity,  and second, his life long concern with his audience.  It was an audience that took different shapes.  There was his readership, of course- people who subscribed to the periodicals he edited and the ones which carried his serialized novels.  But there were also the people who watched him as an amateur actor in plays that were put on before aristocrats and wealthy literary folk.  For the last part of his life, his primary source of income was money earned on tours where he would read from his hits.  He spend a considerable amount of time just perfecting his live performance so to speak, and it's interesting to contemplate the way Dickens novels were influence by older forms of art in the UK like Elizabethan Theater.

  Ackroyd points out that even though Dickens was a man who defined the Victorian Era, he himself was closer to being an "early" or "proto" Victorian in that he was a man who believed in strict, racially based imperialism and wasn't afraid to laugh at cripples on the street. Dickens was also similar to modern celebrities in that he was obsessed with what people thought, and thought people were always trying to find out what he was doing.  For example, when he divorced his wife of 22 years so he could take a much younger mistress (unproven but obvious), he wrote a public letter where he denounced her because he thought everyone was talking about his young mistress, when in fact, nobody gave a s***.  The obsession with negative feedback seems endemic to artistic feedback and celebrity going wayyyy back.

Published 3/18/12
The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal
originally published 1839
this edition Barnes & Nobles "LIBRARY OF ESSENTIAL READING SERIES"
p. 2006

  Am I only the one who can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where the only remaining books are located in a bombed out Barnes & Noble?  If that were the case, this 2006 Barnes & Noble edition of The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal might be the only COPY LEFT of this book in the whole world.

  That would be sad, because this edition of Charterhouse of Parma, translated by Lady Mary Loyd, was initially published in 1901.(1)  It was obviously chosen by Barnes & Noble because it's publication date places it in the public domain.  The Oxford's Worlds Classics edition, translated by Margaret Mauldon dates from 1997.

  I would call Lady Mary Loyd's translation of The Charterhouse of Parma terrible, and therefore this book is essentially useless for anyone who has made an intelligent choice as to which translation they pick- as I did not.

  In particular I would like to point out the translator's use of the word FREAK- apparently in either it's meaning in 1901 OR some early meaning from the 19th century in either French or Italian usage.  I am wholly unaware of what meaning this word could have as of 1901, or as of 1955- when the translation was allegedly revised by Robert Cantwell.

  The Charterhouse of Parma was Stendhal's last work before he died in 1842.   His life/career is the sort that begins to tickle the fancy of a would-be modern Artist, in that he was self-conscious about Romantic canon's of Artistic behavior. In fact, he wrote widely on non-fiction topics, mainly in the are of Art, Travel and Aesthetics that would be familiar to any PBS documentary host.  An Anthony Bourdain of his day, without the food.

  One broad generalization that you can make about early 19th century French Novelists, is that they were able to 'play' with Romantic literary themes in a way that both embraced them and commented critically on them at the same time, with the use of "Realist" techniques.   This complementing use of Romanticism and Realism in the service of Art is a popular mix that didn't really find full exposition until Movies blossomed in the 20th century, but the extent that one art form can inspire another, The Charterhouse of Parma is epic and cinematic in scope in a way that few books were before.

  The "few books that were before" are mostly the novels of Sir Walter Scott who was spinning off hit after hit through the 1820s.   I'm assuming that Scott was familiar to Stendhal. Stendhal's non-fiction background separates him from the "pure" Novelists that were yet to come, but he was def. self-consciously Romantic in temperament and his works powerfully reflect that theme.

  He also fearlessly jumps between time periods in a way that pre-saged Modernist technique.  The use of time like that sweeps the reader along through the narrative, and the transitions require attention.

 However, I can't recommend this version because I personally think the translation is terrible. And what does the word "freak" mean throughout the novel?  Like an emotional freak-out?

NOTES

(1)  The Oxford Guide To Literature in English Translation, 2001 edition, viewed in Google Libary clip form.

PHOTOGRAPH OF ERSKINE CHILDERS

Published 4/10/12
The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service
by Erskine Childers
published 1903
Project Gutenberg Ebook Edition
Read on Ipad/Ebooks

  This is a book where I regretted the Gutenberg Free Ebook format because there are several maps that are crucial to understanding The Riddle of The Sands, the first "spy novel" ever written.  When you consider the amount of market share the "mystery, thriller and suspense" category occupies, it's a wonder that a book like The Riddle of the Sands isn't taken more seriously, but I'd literally never heard of it before seeing it listed in 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (2006 ed.)

  Although The Riddle of the Sands was written in 1903 it's definitely a Victorian, rather then Modern, work of literature.  The Wikipedia article referencing the work of H. Rider Haggard as a main influence, and it's easy to see the family resemblance.  Sands thematic contribution was to, "establis(h) a formula that included a mass of verifiable detail."  Spy novelists later in the 20th century- people like Ian Fleming and John Le Carre- rode that formula to mass market glory later in the 20th century.


   You can also see the impact of the "mass of verifiable detail"  in more "serious" literature- particularly the work of Brett Easton Ellis, William Vollmann or David Foster Wallace- or for that matter the "serious" genre fiction of a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. 


  However the real contribution of The Riddle of The Sands is the pacing- Childers early spy novel is only 300 pages in length, and he artfully deploys time to obtain narrative impact.   It's funny, because as I write this I'm reading Flaubert's A Sentimental Education, and the main issue the critical introduction calls out is Flaubert's deft manipulation of time and it's relationship to the verifiable detail he deploys to obtain realistic impact. 

Gustave Flaubert

Published 4/11/12
Sentimental Education
by Gustav Flaubert
p. 1869
Read Penguin Paperback Edition

   You can't really appreciate Flabuert's novel, Sentimental Education, without getting a sense of the way the main character's name is written.  It is spelled "FREDERIC" without the accents.  In many of the translations they translate his name to FREDERICK, and that just misses so much of the subtlety of the name itself.  A large portion of the plot of Sentimental Education describes the attempt of a young, provincial man trying to "make it" in the big city.   In that regard it is the inspiration for a more contemporary take on the same theme like Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney.

  In Sentimental Education, Frederic Moreau is helped by what is termed a "modern inheritance" - not enough to conquer, but enough to keep him in the game.   Part of what makes Sentimental Education a frankly  scintillating example of the Novel as Art Form is the way Flaubert integrates the exciting current events of the time and place (Paris, France, mid 19th century) with a very insightful, very cutting Novel of manners.

  The way Flaubert depicts Frederic Moreau stumbling through puddles of blood and dead bodies with a kind of spirit akin to that displayed by Alex in Clockwork Orange- a kind of gleeful sang froid, will be recognizable to any critic who has had to cope with the output of hyper-prolific internet rap acts like Odd Future- "SKIPPING THROUGH THE BODIES" I call it.   Well, at the very least, it's nothing new.

   Sentimental Education is also worth reading for the tour-de-force depiction of material possessions- which is definitively a trait picked up by a modern Author like Brett Easton Ellis.  Although writers like France Burney or the Bronte sister depicted social space, they didn't really depict the material dimension of that space- the possessions.   Flaubert, with his lavish depictions both memorializes and satirizes what we call "consumer culture"- he's writing about Paris in the 1840s.

   A third dimension of mastery of the Novel as Art Form that Flaubert shows in Sentimental Education is his manipulation of time in the novel to pull the reader along by the force of events.  Again, this is a big, big difference between Sentimental Education and earlier Novels- they are very, very clumsy when it comes to time.   Many fields of Artistic endeavor have seen a general shortening of length- or compression- of the form- whether it be MP3s or the Short Story.

  It's important to be able to appreciate Sentimental Education as a satire similar to the effect that Burgess was going for in Clockwork Orange or Ellis in American Psycho.  At the same time there is the very real and realistic depiction of human emotion that certainly came from "with-in."   I suspect that's an ingredient to every classic novel that many non classic novels lack- people don't care about the characters.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Published 4/17/12
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Originally published in 1796
This Edition "Burt's Home Library" published 189?
Read on Amazon Kindle

  I'm in my knock-down/drag-out phase with the titles remaining on the 1700s portion of the 2006 edition of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die.  I'm essentially down to a couple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau titles, and three early English novels that run about 1000+ plus, each.(1)

 I don't what I will do celebrate this accomplishment. But I'd like to point out that it will have taken me about four and a half years to complete this task.  I don't want any recognition, please- how embarrassing to be known for some tiny part of one's life.

 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship made it to the "bottom 10" category because it is towards the end of the century and is a text in German translation.  The Germans are hardly represented in the 1700s portion of the 2006 Edition of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die- just Goethe x2.

    I frankly question whether the exclusion of Friedrich Schiller's On The Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters.  Let me make the case for including On The Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters and excluding a title like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile Or; On Education, or, for that matter, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

(1)  On The Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters was published in 1796.
(2)  On The Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters is the stylistic equal of those included in the 1700s section of the 2006 Edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. Books like Rousseau's, Emile; On Education, Reveries of a Solitary Walker & Confessions.
(3) On The Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters is easier to read an more relevant to contemporary life then ANY of Rousseau's books. Can we not read about Jean-Jacques Rousseau in history books without him getting four books on the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list?

  THERE! I said it.  As for Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, I bring up Schiller because they were big bros back in the 1780s-1790s Frankfurt/Strasbourg.   They were also hooked up with Johann Herder, who was a big boss in the German Enlightenment philosophy scene of the late 18th century.

 A key interesting part of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the way Hamlet is used in the plot.  I guess Shakespeare had only recently been translated into German, and the main character's introduction to and obsession with Hamlet gives parts of this book a real pop cultur-ey sheen- like he could just have easily been obsessed with a rock and roll band, or, for that matter, a Romantic era poet.

   Wilhelm Meister is what they call a "bildungsroman."  I discussed the bildungsroman, briefly, in my recent review of Kim by Rudyard Kipling.  In English translation bildungsroman is a genre of literature best described as a "Coming of Age Story."  Originally developed in 18th century books like Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the bildungsroman combines picaresque techniques of plot mechanics and character depiction to the moral philosophizing of French writers like Voltaire and Rousseau, to whom Goethe is clearly in debt, at least in a literary sense.

  Goethe is a giant to be sure, but I found The Sorrows of Young Werther to be the bigger hit.  I guess Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship gets the credit for "founding" the Coming of Age Novel, so give credit where credit is due, but I certainly didn't enjoy it in this translation.

  Unfortunately I almost certainly read a bad translation that dates from the 19th century, which let to problems both with the formatting of the Ebook- like- the Chapter heading appears at the bottom of the page with no text under neath, to a complete absence of footnotes, introduction and end notes.   Something I've learned after reading only two books on the Kindle is that I miss the Oxford Worlds Classics edition- the most recent one of those I read was Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot and the experience was frankly superior.

  As someone who held out on buying an Ereader I can frankly see justification FOR holding out.  The argument being basically, who are you that you read so much and so fast that you need an Ereader?  At the same time I can't argue with the convenience of the device.  The fact is, you can fill your head with garbage whether you read regular books or have an Ereader, and the same is true about reading books in specialty fields.

  I don't think though that the Kindle will increase the amount of time I read each day, it will just decrease the amount of time between books- changing it from a decision process "Which book do i read next?" to an automatic function. That's bound to speed things up.

NOTE

(1) Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson, Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett, Amelia by Henry Fielding and The Adventures of Caleb Williams by William Godwin.

Author Claire Harman

Published 5/17/12
Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered The World
by Claire Harman
originally published in Edinburgh by Canongate Books Ltd. 2009
American publication by Henry Holt and Company 2010

   Almost every facet of this book is worth singling out for praise:  The original publisher, the Author, the concept itself, and the execution of the concept.  It's all very inspiring for me, personally, on every level. Jane's Fame could have been called "The Rise of Jane Austen."  Harman tells the story of Austen's posthumous rise to world-wide, multi-century popularity in a crisp narrative style that maintains the best practices from both academic and general audience non-fiction.

   Since Jane Austen didn't really "rise" until the mid 19th century, Harman fills out the first few chapters with details related to the career and publishing of Jane Austen's works while she was alive.  The level of detail attended to is minute, for example, the index entry for "Mansfield Park, economies in production of, 46-47." discusses how it was published on commission (vs. the publisher buying the copyright out right.) and the thinness of the page and smallness of the type, a function of the economic impact of the Napoleonic Wars.

  The critical moment in Jane's Fame is the publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh in 1869.  Prior to that date, Jane Austen was the 19th century equivalent of a "Cult Artist"- she had her fans- including important fans, like the very Authors who were more highly regarded by the general public then herself, but she didn't have a wide Audience.   Other Artists had "made it" to that point by 1869.  The mass Audience for a novel or a novelist was in existence, when Memoir was published.

  Austen was a prime beneficiary of the rise in the Academic humanities programs of the American and British University system in the 20th century, and her "Canonization" within that system has certainly created a positive feedback loop between Jane Austen and the general reading Audience- I'm talking about everyone who reads a book in this general reading Audience.

  The clearest evidence of that feedback loop in operation of the "Austen Revival" of the 1990s, which mainly manifested itself in movies and television.    According to a Google Ngram of Jane Austen vs. Charles Dickens, mentions of Jane Austen sky rocketed relative to Dickens in the 1960s, before tapering off afterward. Those who would have been students in high school's and universities during this period were making the movies and television shows in the 90s.
 
  The specific details of that 1990's film revival filling up multiple chapters towards the end of the book is forgivable, considering Amazon reviewers actually give Jane's Fame negative reviews for not including a discussion of Kiera Knightleys portrayal of Elizabeth Bennett.  Idiots are passionate about Jane Austen, it's just a fact. Jane Austen has a huge Audience, and this book describes how, exactly, she gained this huge Audience.  Worth reading for that reason alone.

 A note about this book- the same Author wrote a biography of Frances Burney called Fanny Burney back in 2001.  Meanwhile, I purchase Margaret Anne Doody's Frances Burney: A Life in the Works, and Amazon never connects the two books together.  Surely someone interested in one Frances Burney biography would be interested in another?
   

Robert Musil

Published 5/22/12
The Confusions of Young Torless
by Robert Musil
p. 1906
Penguin Twentieth Century Classics Edition
Translation by Shaun Whiteside 2001
Introduction by J.M. Coetzee


    The truth is that up till this point I hadn't read a single Penguin Twentieth Century Classics Edition of any Novel from the 2006 edition of the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list.  Obviously, though, I haven't read a single book from the 1900s portion of the list itself- which is fully 700 of the 1001 books to Read Before You Die.  That seems kind of insane to me.  If you can do the 1700s, 1800s and 2000s in 300 books, you can do the Twentieth Century in MAXIMUM- 300 books.   I'm going to publish my own book called 500 Novels To Read After You Retire.  Who wouldn't rather read 500 books then 1001?

   One of the reasons I purchased The Confusions of Young Torless is unfamiliarity with the Author, Robert Musil.  Musil is best known for his unfinished work,  The Man Without Qualities, or in the German, Der Mann ohn Eigenschaften, but The Confusions of Young Torless is a nice little introduction with the added bonus of an upper class Austrian boarding school setting and dark, gay, sexual sado-masichism as only an Austrian boarding school in the late 19th century can breed. Torless' Confusions wrap up in about 150 pages, and the Novel is informed by the morally concerned coming of Age narratives that stretch back to Goethes The Sorrows of Young Werther within the German language literary world. 

   In addition to being pleasantly short and embedded with gay sexual themes,  Robert Musil has high snob value among literratuers.  And the fact is the non-specialist is unlikely to tackle The Man Without Qualities. That is because A Man Without Qualities is almost (more then?) a thousand pages long AND IS UNFINISHED.  

   So I would say that The Confusions of Young Torless makes my 500 Novels To Read After You Retire list due to the combination of readability, snob appeal/value & gay sex scenes.  The Man Without Qualities, does not make the list. 

Alessandro Manzoni 

Published 5/29/12
The Betrothed
by Alessandro Manzoni
p. 1827
this translation 1834
Kindle/Amazon Digital Services Edition


   You would think that every classic would have such a densely written Wikipedia Entry as The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, but such is not the case.  The Betrothed is often called the first historical novel in Italian history- published in 1827, it was not long in appearing in English translation, with a specifically American translation appearing seven years earlier.   On the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list, Alessandro Manzoni is a one-hit wonder.  The Betrothed itself is tedious in exactly the same way as Sir Walter Scott's novels are.  The laborious use of the past as the setting for a novel in the early 19th century equated with the use of "period y" sounding writing.  THAT MEANS ITS BORING TO READ.

  The consciously antique y language might have been a sensation in the early 19th century, but it's fair to say that Modern readers prefer the clean lines of Jane Austen to the clunky anachronisms of Sir Walter Scott and his followers.   Placing this book outside of the "followers of Sir Walter Scott" category requires considering non-literary factors like the historical role of The Betrothed in fomenting Italian nationalism.  Not to belittle that role, but it's outside the aesthetic concerns of this blog.

Nikolai Gogol

Published 7/2/12

Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
p. 1842
1842 English Translation by D. J. Hogarth
Read on an Amazon Kindle

     Nikolai Gogol is the first Russian-language author to appear in the 2003 edition of the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list, and in that regard he's a category creator.  The category is, "The Russian novel."  If you look at the history of the novel before Nikolai Gogol emerged, you are talking about English, French, German, Italian and Spanish language works. After the Russian language Authors begin publishing, you have to go until nearly 1880 before another language appears on the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list (Swedish, The Red Room by August Strindberg, published in 1879.)

     In the present day, Russia is a foot note in the world market for culture.  Despite impressive achievements in a variety of Artistic endeavors, the market/Audience size for sales of cultural products is pitiably small.   Russia in that regard is more like Brazil, India or China in terms of having a market for culture that lags behind either the Audience size or cultural tradition or both.

  To talk about the "world market for culture" is to talk about cultural products with a severe slant towards the cultural products of the post-industrial West:  English, French, German, Spanish and Italian language products that appeal to their own populations and same-language speaking markets in other countries.  Thus, Russia, and the Russian language novel is the interesting case of a relatively minor Audience for a cultural product producing an out-size number of practitioners of that art-form.

  From the very beginning, you get the sense that Nikolai Gogol is writing with two Audiences in mind: A largely hypothetical Audience of Russians, and the already existing foreign Audience of novel readers in countries like Germany, France and England.   That is a dual focus that is similar to the perspective of a contemporary musical artist trying to emerge from some underground scene into the main-stream pop environment- they have to producer Art with one eye on each Audience, and the compromise can drive you mad.

 At least, I suspect it drove Nikolai Gogol mad.  Dead Souls is a famously incomplete novel, incomplete in that it is split into two volumes and the second volume contains substantial omissions of crucial episodes that render the work confusing.  Nikolai Gogol burnt two complete versions of Volume II and finally starved himself to death in the throes of madness before completing the third, existing version.

  The plot of Dead Souls: A disgraced government bureaucrat rides around the country-side to buy the rights to dead serfs who remain registered as living with the government to the end that he can then use the souls as collateral to borrow money to buy an estate, is both congruent to the modern reader and a distinctly Russian setting.   Critics have habitually de-emphasized the importance of the plot in favor of a celebration of the style and characterization of Gogol's writing, but the mordant humor and exotic character behavior help explain the long-term success of Dead Souls in English/French/German/Spanish/etc translation.

  Nikolai Gogol wrote "short stories" before they existed as a genre, thus he is often omitted as a "founder" of the short story.  He published five volumes of short stories between 1831 and 1835, in addition to books of essays and plays.   Dead Souls is the last work he is credited with Authoring as well as his only Novel. 

The Crystal Palace

Published 7/7/12

Victorian Noon: English Literature in 1850
by Carl Dawson
p. 1979, The Johns Hopkins University Press

  This is a survey of English Literature circa 1850, with an eye towards inclusiveness well summarized in this quote:

     English book reading habits were essentially serious... of the 45,000 books listed by the London Catalogue (sic) as published between 1816 and 1851, 10,300 were works on divinity.  Sermons were bought, and presumably read.  Newman's Tract 90 (of controversial interest to be sure) sold 12,000 copies before it finally went out of print in 1846...In a list of 117 new books noted in the Athenaeum on October 23, 1841, thirty-nine were on religious subjects, eleven were poetry, ten medical, thirteen travel and only sixteen were novels.  p. 109, citing John Dodds, The Age of Paradox.

  On the later sample of 117 works published in fall 1841, 13% are novels.  Over the course of the 1816 and 1851 period, we're talking 5800 novels, or 135 novels a year.  This is a period before serialization of novels is acceptable, so assume that this number increases vastly after 1850 as serialized novels are increasingly published.

  What is interesting to note here is the disproportionate role that those novels play in our understanding of this period.  If you look at the other categories of literature: religious subjects, poetry, medical and travel- they are assigned little attention- I'm talking about the works in those categories during this specific time period- not the categories themselves.

   Dawson's main point in Victorian Noon: English Literature in 1850 is that critics were slow to embrace the novel even as the general reading public flocked to buy them

Ivan Turgenev

Published 9/20/12

On the Eve (Накану́не)
 by Ivan Turgenev
published in 1860

  A common progression for classic 18th and19th century Novelists is a prior career writing literature besides Novels.  For example, Sir Walter Scott was well known for his verse.  Numerous Authors wrote plays before they wrote Novels.  Ivan Turgenev is another good example.  Turgenev was writing plays in the 1840s, short stories in the 1850s and Novels in the 1860s.

 If you look at his popularity among an English language Audience, it is clear that interest in Turgenev did not really pick up until the 20th century began.  If you look at what was happening in terms of criticism of Turgenev, it's easy to point to the publication of the 13 volume complete works of Ivan Turgenev in English, with a foreward by Henry James- published between 1903 and 1904. (1)  Henry James was ringing the bell for critical recognition of Turgenev as a "classic" Novelist as early as the 1890s.

 I think, obviously, you have to read an Ivan Turgenev Novel from the perspective of "Modern" rather then Victorian literature. The hero/anti-hero Insarov is a Bulgarian patriot who is obsessed with liberating Bulgaria from the Turks. He falls in love with Elena, who is a female protagonist who ranks with the subject of Madame Bovary for early-modernist portrayals of young women.

  Turgenev left Russia after the publication of his main work, Fathers and Sons in 1862.  Eventually he made his way to Paris, where Henry James describes meeting him for the first time:

       I  found reason to meet him, in Paris, where he was then living, in 1875. I shall never forget the impression he made upon me at that first interview. I found him adorable; I could scarcely believe that he would prove--that any man could prove--on nearer acquaintance so delightful as that. Nearer acquaintance only confirmed my hope, and he remained the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension and of what is called the consciousness of powers, that one almost doubted at moments whether he were a man of genius after all. Everything good and fruitful lay near to him; he was interested in everything; and he was absolutely without that eagerness of self-reference which sometimes accompanies great, and even small, reputations. He had not a particle of vanity; nothing whatever of the air of having a part to play or a reputation to keep up. His humour exercised itself as freely upon himself as upon other subjects, and he told stories at his own expense with a sweetness of hilarity which made his peculiarities really sacred in the eyes of a friend. I remember vividly the smile and tone of voice with which he once repeated to me a figurative epithet which Gustave Flaubert (of whom he was extremely fond) had applied to him--an epithet intended to characterise a certain expansive softness, a comprehensive indecision, which pervaded his nature, just as it pervades so many of the characters he has painted. (Ivan Turgenev by Henry James)

   Considering the role that Henry James played in terms both of criticism and original works in the history of Modern Literature, that is a significant endorsement that was being pitched to the Audience for literature in the early 20th century

.   It was also a push that distinctly came from the United States and France rather then England. Turgenev died in 1883- so the increase in Audience size for Turgenev in the 20th century was already happening before his death.

   It's almost more appropriate to read Turgenev with other books published in the first decade of the 20th century to get a good idea of how the largest Audience perceived his work.  The transition from Victorian to Modern was ongoing between 1850 to the 20th century, so you get works of both types during this period- Dickens was active up until his death in 1870.

  Understanding the birth of "Modernism" is just about the most important event for an Artist or critic to understand.  How Modernism impacted the Audience, how it impacted different Artistic disciplines, how it impacted specific Artists  who were the first to be called Modernists in their respective Artistic discipline.

 In Literature, a lot of that definition happened retrospectively.  When a specific Artist draws retrospective interest for previously published works of Art, that is an example of a Critical Audience leading the general Audience for that Artist.  

 This is the reverse of the normal process of Artist/Audience reception, where the most valuable criterion for a work of Art is its recentness and critical attention is determined by the size of the Audience for a specific Artist.



FOOTNOTE

(1) Encyclopedia of Literary Translation Into English, Volume 2: M-Z,  Oliver Classe, editor. Published by Fitzroy Dearborn of London, pg. 1431.

Jean Simmons as Maud Ruthyn

Published 12/3/12
Uncle Silas
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
published in 1864- serial in Ireland, three volume book in England

Jean Simmons screen testing for the Audrey Hepburn role in Roman Holiday

   Wikipedia calls Uncle Silas a "Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller" as well as an "early example of the locked room mystery subgenre."  Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer descended from (French) Hugenots.  He inhabits the same literary space as Wilkie Collins and is a forerunner of Bram Stroker and Arthur Conan Doyle.  Uncle Silas should be properly seen as a stand-out work in an area that produced a lot of non classic literature.   Sensationalistic literature was often inspired by the news and the Audience for "Victorian Gothic mystery-thrillers" or the literature of the sensational over-lapped with the Audience for non literary sources like crime pamphlets and daily newspapers.

This is a good representation of what Uncle Silas- the character is all about- kind of a Scooby Doo villain vibe if you know what I mean.

  The story of Uncle Silas involves a young heiress, Maud Ruthyn, who is sent to live with her creepy Uncle Silas.  Uncle Silas may or may not be scheming to murder poor young Maud because if she dies before she reaches 18, he inherits her estate.   Although this novel is part of the gothic/thriller genre, it does not involve any explicit supernatural plot points (Ghosts, for example) and I think the ability of Le Fanu to evoke the supernatural without being cheesy about it is a key reason that Uncle Silas has endured as a mid period Victorian classic, albeit a minor classic.

This is the cruel french maid Madame de Rougierre with Uncle Silas in another adaptation

  A stand out minor character is Madame de Rougierre and I wanted to mention that the character of the evil french maid re-occurs in Victorian literature.  It's funny, because Le Fanu himself is descended from French immigrants to Ireland.   But just generally speaking the evil French Victorian period maid is an under-developed character archetype. I think you could get lots of play with it artistically, especially since "naughty french maid" is an already established motif with wide-spread familiarity.   Cruel French maid wears more clothes and is craftier then naughty French maid- and cruel French maid is specifically mid-period Victorian whereas naughty french maid can be from any time period.


      Dickens famous evil French maid- Hortense of Bleak House- was actually based on a real life murder- but where Hortense of Bleak House actually is the murdered, in Uncle Silas, Rougierre ends up being a pawn of the real villains.  Thus, Le Fanu successfully manipulated an Audience that had no doubt read the books of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens Bleak House.

Carmilla the Vampire from Sheridan Le Fanu:  The scene depicted here is actually a direct lift from the book- the victimized heroine wakes up and see Carmilla, covered in blood, standing at the foot of her bed in a state of undress. 

2013

Published 3/24/13
In A Glass Darkly
 by Sheridan Le Fanu
p. 1872

  Sheridan Le Fanu is a good example of an interesting Author who I only read because he has two books in the 2005 edition of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die.   His obvious counter-parts are Wilkie Collins- a near contemporary, and Edgar Allan Poe- who wrote a near half-century before on a different continent.   In A Glass Darkly is actually a collection of short stories/novellas that Le Fanu collected and framed with a Doctor/investigator who presents each story as a "case study."  It's kind of narrative device that would bring delight to the heart of an earnest post-modernist, though in the case of Le Fanu he was probably just trying to make a buck rather then challenging narrative convention.

  The highlight among the collected tales is the early Vampire story at the end- the Vampire in question being a Lesbian seductress named Carmilla.  Le Fanu is clearly within the scope of the "Victorian Novel of Sensation" a group of books that laid the groundwork for the modern genres of horror and detective fiction, as well as being a precursor for horror and mystery films of all varieties.

A more modern take on Carmilla, the sexy lesbian vampire from In A Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu

  Many of the conventions that characterize detective and horror fiction derive from these books- certainly Le Fanu and Collins were in the minds of early pioneers of film, particularly the German Expressionists who created many of the early horror movies.

  Unfortunately, the potential for In A Glass Darkly to be used as unacknowledged source material is vastly diminished by the fact that everyone else has been exploiting the same material for 150 years.  It certainly does make a welcome break from other late 1860s early 1870s classics:  The Devils, by Dostoevsky,  Middlemarch by George Eliot, Spring Torrents by Turgenev, He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope and don't forget War & Peace by my man Leo Tolstoy.  Super stoked for that title!

   The late 1860s and early 1870s certainly a feel a ton of Russian authors- including the greatest hits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky so, spoiler alert: There is a lot of Russian lit coming down the pipe-line.

"I'm Kiera Knightley I like to play Victorian period literary figures like Anna Karenina. blah blah blah acting craft."

Anna Karenina
 by Leo Tolstoy
p. 1873-1877
first English language translation 1886

Published 4/1/13

  The classic Russian novels of the mid 19th century are interesting because they present an early example of the "British Invasion" phenomenon.  In the British Invasion, British rock bands, influenced by old Blues records and the example of 50s and 60s American rock pioneered, created a brand of popular music that "invaded" the United States, from whence rock music had been invented.  In doing so they forever changed the landscape of the art form, in addition to showing up the native Artists and making a pretty penny.

 The mid 19th century equivalents of the Beatles and The Rolling Stones were Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dovstoyevsky.  When their classic novels began to make it into English, critics and the general audience alike were stunned by their superiority.   In Dickens & His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism Since 1836,  George Ford that it was this "Russian Invasion" that was the proximate cause of a half-century long decline in critical acclaim for the work of English novelist, Charles Dickens.

  Having read Dickens and now Anna Karenina essentially back-to-back it is easy to see why this is so. Whereas Dickens is skilled at depicting characters and scenes, Tolstoy deftly charts the interior thoughts of his intertwined husbands and wives.  Anna throws off her husband, Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, for dashing Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky midway through the book and everything is down hill from there.

Jude Law plays Count Alexei 1: Kiera Knightley's husband.

    The travails of Anna, Alexei 1 and Alexei 2 are paralleled by two other married couples:  Prince Stepan "Stiva" Arkadyevich Oblonsky and Princess Darya "Dolly" Alexandrovna Oblonskaya and Konstantin "Kostya" Dmitrievich Levin and Princess Ekaterina "Kitty" Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya.  Dolly and Kitty are sisters.  Kostya and Kitty are close to being Tolstoy and his wife.   Despite the long names, Anna Karenina is clearly derived from the models provided by English Novels of the 18th and 19th century.  But Tolstoy adds a vast, inner life for his characters to his military sponsored horse races and Moscow balls for the Russian urban elite.

  A century of readers have appreciated Anna Karenina as one of the first fully developed "psychological novels" and the accomplishment is all the more stunning because Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina and it took 20-30 years to really penetrate into the Audience for the English language novel, and when it did people (rightly) hailed it as a Masterpiece and breakthrough, rendering former efforts pale by comparison.  Anna Karenina is like the mid 19th century version of Guns N Roses Appetite For Destruction taking a year to reach number one on the Billboard 200 Top Selling Albums Chart: A legendary accomplishment that defies believe. 

Published 4/15/13
Demons
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
p. 1872

  The idea of a political avant garde existing alongside an artistic avant garde seems like a particularly 19th/20th century concept from the perspective of 2013.  Sure, Al Queda and their cohorts fit the description of "political radicals" but you could hardly call a bunch of Muslims hiding out in caves a political "avant garde."  They are like the opposite.

 In the United States, we've got the tea party movement and again, while they are certainly best described as "radicals" they are hardly avant garde. Again- they are like the opposite. The fact is that the people who are potentially politically avant garde are now well ensconced inside the capitalist industrial complex, whether they are professors, grad students, culture industry employees or independent professionals.

  Dostoyevsky was the first novelist to really dig into this 19th century political avant garde.   His contemporaries might include a character here and there on the margins of a multi-plot Victorian Novel but it was up to Dostoyevsky to bring the now well known figure of the feverish (figuratively and literally) Russian intellectual/political conspirator to life.  Dostoyevsky's radical milieu in Demons:  A group of alienated Russian upper class communist/nihilists; is completely without parallel in contemporaneous depictions of society by other Novelists.

  At the same time, Dostoyevsky also features a disorienting and confused first person narration that foreshadows modernism.  Of all the 18th and 19th century novels I've read in the past several years, this was the first one where I had to go online to answer questions like "Who is the narrator?" "What is the plot?"  This kind of narrative confusion is often ascribed to ALL Russian novelists, but if you've actually read Turgenev and Tolstoy you will understand me when I say Dostoyevsky's technique out paces both in its ability to disorient.

  The Russian novelists are interesting because I believe them to be the first loose group of Novelists to break out of a provincial literary scene and into the limelight to be hailed as geniuses.  This is something that happens again and again and again throughout the 19th and 20th century in a variety of Art disciplines: studio arts, novels, films, etc.  Some small group of Artists come from the margins and rewrite how the main stream thinks about their artistic discipline.  So the Russian Novelists of the mid 19th century, being first, are of particular interest.

  Many of the novels on the 2001 list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die between 1870 and 1900 are Russian novels.  So there will be a lot of discussion of Russian novelists on this blog for the foreseeable future.

  Demons was actually what I would call a tough read- I didn't particularly enjoy it and had trouble staying focused, but I was certainly cognizant of what Dostoyevsky was bringing to the table in terms of plot, theme and style.

Published 5/19/13
The Enchanted Wanderer
by Nickolai Leskov
p. 1873
Russian Classics Series Progress Publishers p. 1958

  Here's a good example of an author I would have never read were it not for the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die (2006 ed.) list.   The Enchanted Wanderer was a tough get: no Kindle edition, no Oxford World's Classics edition, doesn't exist as a stand-alone volume, etc.

  There are several Russian entries on the list that are Novellas and not full fledged Novels.  Many of these Russian hits were initially published not as serials but rather in a single printed journal/magazine.   These publications were small editions and rarely repressed.  The initial press of The Enchanted Wanderer was unusual in that the first run of the Journal it was printed in sold out, requiring a second pressing.

  Leskov is closer to the works of Gogol vs. the Tolstoy/Dostoevsky end of the spectrum of Russian novelists of the mid 19th century.  Like Gogol, Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer harkens back to an earlier mode of storytelling rather then mirroring the developments taking place in England during the early to mid part of the 19th century.

   Leskov's Enchanted Wanderer character, the narrator of the story, tells his listeners about his crazy-ass life: his start as an indentured serf, hitting the road with gypsies, working as a horse conisseur working for the Russian army, being kidnapped into slavery by Tartars, escaping from that slavery, working for a nobleman again as a horse picker... and... that is basically it.  You get a pretty rich picture of the Russian scene outside the major capital.  In particular his depiction of the vast Russian steppe is unique in Russian literature to this point, as far as I have read/know.

Published 5/21/13
Spring Torrents
 by Ivan Turgenev
p. 1872
The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading
Translated by Constance Garnett
with an Introduction by Mary Albon

   Really, the history of the reception of Russian literature in the English speaking world begins and ends with a single person, translator Constance Garnett.  Between the 1890s and 1930s Garnett translated dozens of Russian novels into English.  The list of Garnett translated works includes all of the hits of Russian lit:  Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Fathers and Sons, The Possessed etc., etc.  Thus, when you read a Russian novel in English today, you are most likely reading a public domain edition of a Constance Garnett translation.  It's a testament both to her skill and the market for public domain translations of foreign language novels that her versions are still read today.

  Spring Torrents is yet another Russian novella from the 1870s.  Turgenev wrote Torrents about a love affair between a young Russian nobleman and the daughter of an Italian confectioner living in Germany.  The Russian seeks a buyer who his estate- to finance his marriage- and is seduced by the prospective buyer- a decadent and wealthy Russian noblewoman of peasant parentage.  Unlike the bigger hits of 19th century Russian lit, Spring Torrents is a mere one hundred and fifty pages, and the breezy tone is closer to an English novel from the middle part of the 19th century then other heavy Russian novels in the same time period.

 It's nice to read a breezy Russian novel from the 1870s because, let's face it, War & Peace, Anna Karenina,  Crime & Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov are some heavy fucking lifting, from a readers perspective.

Published 6/5/13
Virgin Soil
 by Ivan Turgenev
p. 1877

  Virgin Soil is Turgenev's longest novel, and it only goes roughly 300 pages.  Reading Virgin Soil after tackling other classics of the mid to late 1870s like Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, and The Hand of Ethelberta and Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy makes it well clear why Russian novelists created such a sensation in the 1870s.

  First of all, Turgenev's story about Russian intellectuals abandoning their class to "help" the working class is exciting and (relatively) novel.  Second,  Turgenev's male characters are the restrained, effete heroes of the Victorian British period novel, they are emotional, histrionic spectacular literary disasters

  Coming after Daniel Deronda, Virgin Soil was a refreshing breath of air, and I tore through it, eager to read a novel about something OTHER then the problems of the British middle and upper classes with marriages and wills.  Seriously, what happened to the novel in England that led it to get so dull and obsessed with marriage and wills.   Literally every single novel written by Eliot, Trollope, Hardy and Dickens involves some combination of an impossible/troubled  marriage or a disinherited heir or both in fact, looking back through the British novels I've read this year, the only exceptions are the so called novels of sensation, children's books, and the Russians.

  It's not that I don't appreciate a good marriage/will derived plot, but enough already.  It's been like 50 solid years of these stories and I'm yearning for a new look.  ENTER THE RUSSIANS.

   Virgin Soil also had the benefit of being timely:

In 1877 with the publication of Virgin Soil, his longest and most ambitious novel, he became world famous: a month after it was published fifty-two young men and women were arrested in Russia on charges of revolutionary conspiracy, and a shocked public in France, Britain, and America turned to the novel for enlightenment. Its effect on American readers was enormous: as powerful, in its way, as the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been. For Turgenev the novel was one more attempt to present the Russian situation with detachment, and above all he sought to show to his critics that he had not lost touch with the younger generation. (THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS)

     Seriously though give me disaffected Russian intellectuals over anxious teenage British girls any day.   The level of tediousness that creeps into mid to late Victorian novels can not be overstated.  Can not.

Published 6/18/13
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson
p. 1883

  Man the Victorians really delivered some children's lit hits.  You read them today- I'm talking about Robert Louis Stevenson,  Lewis Carroll  and the guy who wrote Water Babies- and the only reason you would consider them children's books is because the main characters are children.  Otherwise, they Victorian versions bear about as much comparison to contemporary kids lit as their standards of hygiene compare to our standards of hygiene.

Long John Silvers also... a restaurant.

  The whole idea of childhood in the Victorian period was waaaaaay different then the molly coddling that certain classes of children are subjected to today.  First of all, Victorian children worked in factories for 16 hours a day.  Victorian children were more like little, poorly educated adults.  The tolerance for "childish" behavior was limited/non existent.

 This is probably why Victorian children's lit is so great:  because it doesn't condescend to the target Audience.  Much of what we consider to be "Piratical" behavior and terminology comes directly from Treasure Island-  Long John Silver the erstwhile cook/conspirator of Treasure Island fame is the pirate par excellance.  When you watch a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean, you are talking about an idea that was essentially stolen from Treasure Island, which must have still been under copyright protection when Walt Disney was building the original ride.

   The main difference for me between reading the so-called "Childrens Lit" of the 1880s vs. the "Adult" lit is that I actually enjoy the Childrens books.  The adults- Russians aside are a tedious bunch and once I'm done with this survey I very much doubt I will ever return to Trollope, Eliot or Hardy ever again.

BURY ME AT POWELL'S BOOKS

Published 6/25/13
Max Havelaar
Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company
 by Multatuli
p. 1860

  This book was the hardest get on the list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die, 2006 edition. According to my bibliography, I read books published in a the same year in September of last year.  That is almost nine months of trying to obtain a copy to read.  I finally located my copy at Powell's Book Store in Portland, which is the most amazing book store in the world.  The only Book Stores that come close are those on Charing Cross Road in London, and maybe the sadly defunct Cody's in Berkeley.  I could literally spend a lifetime in Powell's, and never get bored.  I've got a long history of hanging out in book stores and libraries, and it's fair to say that I regard the libraries of my youth with something regarding the same pleasure that a professional athlete regards the playing fields of their youth, and these days book stores are the closest I get.

I didn't end up purchasing Maldoror by Lautreamont

         Max Havelaar is translated from the Dutch (strike 1)  and it's a "novel of social significance" (strike 2;)  strike 3 maybe are the very characteristics that made it interesting to me: a diversity of narrative voices and a willingness to insert lengthy poems and songs into what is supposed to be a book at the injustices suffered by the natives of Indonesia under their Dutch overlords in the early to mid 19th century.

 Havelaar is a higher ranking official in the Dutch Colonial Empire, but he is not happy about it.  Much the same way George Orwell would a century later, Eduord Dekker (the true name of author Multatuli,) used his time serving as an administrator in a colonial empire to criticize the injustices of the same regime.  According to the translator penned afterword in this edition, Dekker experienced the same events that Max Havelaar does in the book.

  Havelaar essentially seeks to expose certain unjust practices that the natives suffer at the hands of their (native) Administrators.  Specifically, the native overlords force the citizens to plant cash crops for free and then take those crops as their "due" and leave the natives to starve.  Havelaar is rewarded for his valiant attempts by being ostracized and fired.  Apparently, he never got over it.


  Besides the direct and obvious comparison to Orwell the other author to mention is Joseph Conrad.  Max Havelaar takes place in essentially the same universe as Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, and this book reminded me of that one.  Multatuli/Dekker has a more eccentric narrative voice then Conrad.
   

Published 7/2/13
The Nose
by Nikolai Gogol
p. 1836
Read in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, Penguin Classics Edition

  This is another one where I had to actually break down and buy the book.  The Nose is an early short story by Nikolai Gogol- mid 1830s, and it's probably the shortest entry on the entire 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list. I'm interested to see how the list handles the increased popularity of the short story in mid 20th century literature.  Personally I am NOT a fan of the format: It's like getting a 7" of a band- great as far as it goes but how much time can it possibly occupy?

A human nose.

 

That being said it's clear why this short story, written in the 1830s, would be included because the surrealist tone is way ahead of comparable literature.  This is probably the first entry on the entire list, chronologically speaking,  that would pass as work of modernist fiction.

Published 7/18/13
Marius the Epicurean
 by Walter Pater
p. 1885

  I'm calling shenanigans on the inclusion of this title in the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list.  Really?   Marius the Epicurean is one of the 1001 Books I simply must read before I die?  How so?  I read the accompanying essay in the 1001 Books book, and I read the book itself, but I am left flabbergasted that someone thought this was a book that everyone needs to read prior to death.

  Marius the Epicurean is a young Roman living in the second century AD, 161-177 AD to be exact.  The "plot" is basically a coat hanger for the author, Walter Pater (who is known as a historian, not a novelist) to explicate on various ethical, religious and philosophical themes.  I suppose that as a piece of early experimental fiction it is worth noting, but you've already got Ben Hur and The Temptation of Saint Anthony in the same 10 year time span, the former is a better novel set in a similar time period, and the later is a more experimental novel set in the same time period.

 At least Marius the Epicurean is short and easily tamed.

Published 7/23/15
Against the Grain
by Joris-Karl Huymans
p 1884

 Both Against the Grain and Marius the Epicurean represent a divergence from the themes and forms of the late Victorian novel.  Along with The Temptation of St. Anthony, these three novels represent a step away from the Victorian novel and towards the experimental path of the novel in Modern times.

  The protagonist of Against the Grain is the Duc Jean des Esseintes, the last of his once prodigious and virile line, living in isolation from the world, obsessed with sensuousness and decadence.  Against the Grain has much to recommend itself to modern Aesthetes- Huymans captures the lushness and ennui that was to become synonymous with the modern condition.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Published 8/5/13
Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane (1896)
Penguin Classics Edition

Movie Review
Fontane Effi Briest
d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)

  A rare (first?) double, thanks to Criterion Collection to upload Fassbinder's Effi Briest to Hulu Plus- apparently out of the goodness of their heart seeing as it is not part of the Criterion Collection itself, nor a part of the recent Eclipse Collection of early Fassbinder films that Criterion just released last month. I'm not complaining!  It felt cool to read a recent-ish(1990s) translation and then watch Fassbinder's take on it in the same general time frame.

  Effi Briest is who you would call the German Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina- i.e. the cheating wife whose exploits form the basis for a break out novel which uses adultery as a theme.   Briest is closer to Karenina then Bovary- her milleu is the landed aristocracy of late nineteenth century Prussia.  Young Effi Briest (17 going on 18) is married off to the "much older" Baron Geert von Innstetten (38) in literally the first chapter of the book.  She is spirited off to the Baltic resort town of Kessin, where her new husband is the head Prussian in charge.

  While there she has a brief illicit affair with the charming though strangely named Major Crampas, a "cavalier" but not  a "gentleman" who knows her husband from back in the day.  A major difference between the book and film is that the book only alludes to the actual infidelity through the off hand comments made by Effi until the point at which her husband finds evidence.  In the film, it is clear that they are meeting up for illicit physical rendevous because you see them kissing and embracing.

  A huge difference between Effi vs. Bovary/Karenina is that the ruinous affair is not discovered in Effi Briest for more then six years.  During that time life continues as normal until a freak accident with her child causes a maid to force open her desk drawer in search of a bandage.  When he goes to replace the contents post accident, husband discovers the incriminating letters.  He then challenges Crampas to a duel, kills him and divorces Effi.  Effi of course lives for a few years and then dies because she lacks a will to live.

   I was expecting a more arty take on the source material from Fassbinder then what I got.  It was more or less a straight up adaptation.  The one thing he does do that is slightly unconventional is use lengthy quotes from the movies as interstitial title cards to draw audience attention to particular themes in the novel.  The best example of this is the ghostly Chinaman that Innstetten invents to keep Briest in line.  After Crampus points out to Effi that Innstetten has created this story to keep her in line, Fassbinder refers to it on multiple occasions through the use of the interstitial title card, with a quote from the book summarizing Innstetten's controlling motivation.

   I'm just personally fascinated by stories of disintegrated marriages- I can't get enough of the theme. What I'm doing right now- reading all these classic books and watching films, is an attempt to gain perspective on my own experience without having to bore my friends and family to death talking about.  One of the themes from my own failed marriage: a serious minded man with a woman who wants to be fun and free, is echoed by almost everyone of these 19th century novels which deals with the subject.  Inevitably though in these books the marriage is between an older, wealthy man and a younger, poorer woman.  That was not the case with me.

   This one is worth a look.

Published 8/13/13
The Kreutzer Sonata
by Count Leo Tolstoy
p. 1889

  Yet another head scratching inclusion in the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die.  This Novella is, I believe, the fullest exposition of Tolstoy's fervent believe that sexual abstinence before marriage should be required both of men AND women.  He also thought men should abstain from alcohol and red meat. And this book was really successful at convincing Russians to adopt hie belief system, upon publication, Russia became the first country to ban the consumption of alcohol, and to this day the ban remains in force, making Russia the dryest non-Islamic nation in the entire world!  It's quite a triumph for Tolstoy and his belief system, but somehow he doesn't get credit, which is  a shame.

Published 9/3/13
Gösta Berling’s Saga
by  Selma Lagerlöf
p. 1890

  Gösta Berling’s Saga by Selma Lagerlöf is another delightful discovery: A magical realist type exploration of the world surrounding a group of Swedish steel mills and their surrounding communities, Gösta Berling’s Saga is an appealing read for any fan of the more established areas of magical realist literature as well as fans of world literature in general.  It's the expansion of the novel from the traditional playing fields of England, France, Russia and America that I find most exciting about moving from the 19th to the 20th century.  When you compare the English novels of the 1890s to the non-English novels from the same time period it's clear that some kind of a torch has already been passed in terms of experimentation and thematic expansions.

   Gösta Berling’s Saga combines the established tradition of the English/French/Russian novel with the mythic echoes of the Scandinavian sage.   Another Scandinavian writer who did the same thing later was Haldor Laxness of Iceland- both authors won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Isn't that convenient? When a Scandinavian author wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is awarded by a Swedish panel.

  Even though the Saga is set in the 1820s the book carries plenty of witches, trolls, devil worship and evil bears that you can only kill with a silver bullet.  In other words, it is an enjoyable, readable romp, and worth taking in.

Published 9/12/13
The Real Charlotte
by Somerville and Ross
p. 1894

  Somerville and Ross were the pen names for a couple of Anglo-Irish women- lesbians- by all accounts- who were best known for their comic masterpiece, Some Experiences of an Irish RM.  These days, it's The Real Charlotte that the true literati embrace, though I frankly question to what, if any extent, Somerville and Ross are read in America in 2013.

  Almost every review I've seen mentions that you need to read The Real Charlotte more then once to grasp the subtlety and beauty of the plot, to me it just read like a denser then usual marriage plot.  The Real Charlotte at issue is a complex, anti-heroine type which makes her more interesting then your typical late 19th century British female protagonist.

 The idea of the "Irish Novel" being somehow distinct from the English tradition strikes me as risible.  So far I think there have been exactly three novels from Ireland- all three by female Anglo-Irish writers- maybe four in total?  All of them featuring plots that resemble contemporary English influence.  Actually I think Anthony Trollope wrote a novel set in Ireland- so- five.

Emperor Nero in Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewcz- YOU SO CRAY EMPEROR NERO!

Published 9/19/13
Quo Vadis
 by  Henryk Sienkiewicz
p.1895

    Quo Vadis is a historical romance set in the time of Nero.  The heroes are early Christians and the plot revolves around Emperor Nero and his legendary persecutions of Christians during his reign.  Quo Vadis was a huge international hit as soon as it was translated into languages besides Polish, and Sienkiewicz even won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.  Henryk Sienkiewicz was a prolific writer- according the Nobel Prize website, the complete edition of his works runs sixty volumes, but Quo Vadis is what he is remembered for.

 It's hard to discuss Quo Vadis without mentioning Ben Hur. Ben Hur was published in 1880, by American writer Lew Wallace.  Ben Hur also depicts the time of Rome after Christ but before the Emperor was converted. Considering how deeply, deeply unpopular the "Swords & Sandals" genre is today, it's funny to consider that Ben Hur and Quo Vadis were the first hit Novels to bring the historical romance genre to the time of Christ.  It seems so very obvious in retrospect, but it probably had something to do with the fact that best Romans were pagans and so writing about them would inevitably be an un-Christian affair.

 In fact, the stand out portion of Quo Vadis is his upfront, graphic depiction of the violence that was common place in the Rome of Nero.  He also does an excellent job depicting Romans as Romans- with rich detail and insight into their psychology that is lacking in Ben Hur.  The Christians kind of come off as one dimensional goody two shoes, and Sienkiewicz is not shy about dragging the Jews into the fray.  Despite the fact that none of the characters are Jewish, he manages to reference the Jewish persecution of early Christians in Rome about 50 times.  It kind of seems like he was trying to make a point independent of the plot.

  

Published 10/10/13
The House By The Medlar Tree
by Giovanni Verga
p. 1881
Translated by Raymond Rosenthal
University California Press

 Pretty sure I could have died without reading this book.  Seems like a kind of charity inclusion on the list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die to give the Italians some action in the period between 1850 and 1900, because I think this is their only entry.  As the introduction by Giovanni Cecchetti makes clear, Verga was an avid follower of developments in the realist novel and kept up with Balzac and then Zola- he literally had the relevant French literary journals and books shipped to Italy to keep up.

  The House By The Medlar Tree is a pretty straight forward exploration into the lives of a family of poor Italian fishermen living in a small village in southern Italy.  It is also just as fun to read as that description sounds.  I haven't gotten so little out of a book in years, it was all I could do just to finish.  19th century realism, and 20th century Japanese films, are the current bane of my existence. But yet... I must endure.

Published 10/22/13
Some Experiences of an Irish RM
by Somervile & Ross

p. 1899

   Some Experiences of an Irish RM is so unpopular that it doesn't even have it's own Wikipedia page.  Some Experiences was the first in a trilogy of novels about a Resident Magistrate, a Judge appointed by the English to administer justice upon the Irish during their centuries long occupation of that Nation.  The case can be made that Irish literature was the first example of colonial literature, though that position is undercut by the repeated presence of Anglo-Irish writers in 19th century fiction representing the "Irish" point of view.

   At this point, I'm so close to the 20th century, literary modernism and the birth of the movie that is hard to even concentrate on such a retro feeling piece of lit.  I had trouble paying attention, and I wouldn't be able to tell you the names of any of the characters without going back to my Kindle. It's hard for me to imagine a world where Some Experiences of an Irish RM would be on my own personal list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die, but I was not consulted.

  I have no idea who the Audience is for Some Experiences in 2013.  Not me.

Of course Gillian Anderson has played Lily Bart in a movie version of Edith Wharton's 1905 novel, The House of Mirth

Published 11/12/13

The House of Mirth (1905)
by Edith Wharton

  I read this whole novel under the mistaken impression that the Author was Evelyn Waugh.  So.... yeah.  Evelyn Waugh is a dude, of course.  Pretty funny that. Although the modernity of milieu (upper class New Yorkers around the turn of the century) is fresh, the story is a familiar one, the decline and fall of a young woman with taste and no money, raised to marry, and who fails to marry.

  Hard to imagine that Henry James was in his proto-stream of consciousness mode at exactly the same time Wharton was turning out work that could have been published 80 years before without even changing the names of the characters.  Frankly, I preferred The House of Mirth to James' dense and near unreadable The Ambassadors.  They both document the same people, more or less, but The House of Mirth is a lark and The Ambassadors is a slog, and The Golden Bowl is damn near unreadable.  All three books were released within a couple years of one another but the difference between Wharton and James is like the difference between a horse drawn carriage and a car.   Some surface similarities, but the car has an engine, and the carriage has a horse.

  I rather liked Lily Bart, the Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair) of the book.  To read the novel through history is to become intimate with a succession of fascinating, beautiful women who are obsessed with marriage.  It's quite the cultural quirk when you stop to think of the specificity and limited life experience of the main characters of all marriage centered novels written until well into the 20th century.

 It certainly shows you who the fuck the Audience was for all these novels- the exact same women.  These women actually appear in the pages of The House of Mirth, a kind of precursor of the celebrity culture of the 20th century.  During her decent into obscurity in the last third of the text, Lily Bart runs into "fans" who read about her set in the society pages of the newspapers.   Bart's decline mirrors the later day rise and fall of "celebutantes" today and "it girls" of yesterday.  Lily Bart is maybe the first character in a Novel of this nature who comes off as a modern girl.

 Certainly her tragic death (at the hands of morphine she took in drop form to sleep) is very contemporary.  I can't remember a similar drug od ending any other marriage plot type novel.

Published 10/31/13
Les Chants de Maldoror
 by Lautreamont AKA Isidore Lucien Ducasse
p. 1869

 A non event when written, Les Chants de Maldoror was revived by the Surrealists in the early 20th century and held up as an early example of surrealism.  It's theoretically about a character named Maldoror who is like a Vampire or something, and he goes around and does a bunch of vile shit.  I think that is what happens.  The imagery is rather disturbing at times.  In one notable passage Maldoror (I think it's Maldoror?) rapes and murders a young girls and then pulls her intestines out through her vagina, marveling at the evil of it all. There is a dark, twisted side to surrealism that is often underappreciated by Americans who associate surrealism with 60s hippie culture, but that is some dark shit.  And Les Chants de Maldoror is some dark shit.

Published 11/5/13
The Golden Bowl (1904)
by Henry James

    Hooooo boy.  The Golden Bowl is the beginning of the end for modern literature.  I'm just speaking as someone who has basically read every major novel BEFORE The Golden Bowl, including those by Henry James, and The Golden Bowl is by far the most difficult novel to read including every novel written before The Golden Bowl.

  The difficulty stems from James' choice to use a quadruple first person narration that switches between perspectives with no central narrator.  James used a similar technique in The Ambassadors, published the year before, but there the only narrator is the central character.  Here, each member of the two couples at the heart of the book, each take turns making page long narrative statements that rarely reference outside events.

  By the end of The Golden Bowl I had gone online several times to read the Wikipedia plot summary but still couldn't follow the narrative.  I don't like to simply summarize plot but I feel its appropriate here because even having read the book I wouldn't be able to summarize the plot myself without spending another five hours plus reading it AGAIN. (1)

  The Golden Bowl revolves around a father/daughter relationship and their respective spouses: the older husband of the daughter and the younger wife of the father.  The intensity of the father daughter relationship "causes" an adulterous affair between the other spouses.  Saying that makes the plot sound simple but the reality is that you can read the entire book, as I did, with only having a vague idea about what is going on besides "father/daughter" "adultery" and "London and America."

 I'm telling you, I am no pansy when it comes to difficult Novels, but The Golden Bowl really is a bridge too far.  If there is a "slippery slope" toward the narrative incoherence epitomized by James Joyce, Henry James is the point where the slope starts pulling the rock irresistibly downwards.  I can see how literary academics would positively revel in The Golden Bowl, but I'm at loss to say how anyone could enjoy it.


NOTES

(1)  From the Wikipedia entry for The Golden Bowl by Henry James:

Prince Amerigo, an impoverished but charismatic Italian nobleman, is in London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, only child of the widower Adam Verver, the fabulously wealthy American financier and art collector. While there, he re-encounters Charlotte Stant, another young American and a former mistress from his days in Rome; they met in Mrs. Assingham's drawing room. Charlotte is not wealthy, which is one reason they did not marry. Maggie and Charlotte have been dear friends since childhood, although Maggie doesn't know of Charlotte and Amerigo's past relationship. Charlotte and Amerigo go shopping together for a wedding present for Maggie. They find a curiosity shop where the shopkeeper offers them an antique gilded crystal bowl. The Prince declines to purchase it, as he suspects it contains a hidden flaw.

After Maggie's marriage, she is afraid that her father has become lonely, as they had been close for years. She persuades him to propose to Charlotte, who accepts Adam's proposal. Soon after their wedding, Charlotte and Amerigo are thrown together because their respective spouses seem more interested in their father-daughter relationship than in their marriages. Amerigo and Charlotte finally consummate an adulterous affair.

Maggie begins to suspect the pair. She happens to go to the same shop and buys the golden bowl they had rejected. Regretting the high price he charged her, the shopkeeper visits Maggie and confesses to overcharging. At her home, he sees photographs of Amerigo and Charlotte. He tells Maggie of the pair's shopping trip on the eve of her marriage and their intimate conversation in his shop. (They had spoken Italian, but he understands the language.)

Maggie confronts Amerigo. She begins a secret campaign to separate him and Charlotte while never revealing their affair to her father. Also concealing her knowledge from Charlotte and denying any change to their friendship, she gradually persuades her father to return to America with his wife. After previously regarding Maggie as a naïve, immature American, the Prince seems impressed by his wife's delicate diplomacy. The novel ends with Adam and Charlotte Verver about to depart for the United States. Amerigo says he can "see nothing but" Maggie and embraces her.

Published 12/5/13
The Mother by
 Maxim Gorky
p. 1907

  Russian Literature is a pretty decent sized category on this blog.  17 different works: 8 films and 9 novels/short stories. There are also some unreviewed novels: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment that just haven't made it up yet.  Russian literature is interesting because it is, in a sense, outsider literature and in the way that all outsider literature functions, it reflects brightly on the source material, in this case, the English novel of the 19th century and the European Cinema of the mid 20th century.  But generally I'm interested in literature that moves from the outside to the center.  In terms of the interest level in Russian Literature- several of the review here have more then 100 page views: When The Cranes Are Flying, the 50s Russian Film, has 551 page views.  Anna Karenina has 110 page views. Dead Souls has 113 page views.  Those are decent numbers.  At the other end of the spectrum: The Nose, Virgin Soil, On the Eve, Oblomovka-- all under 50 page views a piece.

  The Mother is notable because it is late- 1907 publication date, and the hey day of the Russian Novel being well over.  There was plenty of real world turmoil in Russia during the beginning of the 20th century that certainly interfered with the production of cultural documents.  The Russian Revolution proper happened in 1917, and The Mother, with it's overtly Revolutionary message, functions as an example of Art in as being vanguard or avant garde.  Despite the revolutionary political message that is overtly part of the narrative, The Mother itself is not particularly avant garde/modernist in terms of narrative structure or development.  Rather, The Mother is a Russian take on the realist/social literature of Emile Zola.

The House on the Borderland (1908) by William Hope Hodgson

Published 11/21/13
The House on the Borderland (1908)
by William Hope Hodgson

  The question of "what is literature?" comes to the forefront in the 20th century.  The continued growth of a "popular" Audience for newspapers, magazines and novels far out paced the growth in critical/serious /academic attention to literature, especially in the area of market impact.  The critical/serious/academic community was slow to come to terms with this development.  The attitude of late 19th century/early 20th century literary critics towards "popular" literature and art is well treated in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence Levine.

 In literature, perhaps the earliest genre to challenge the divide was science fiction/fantasy/horror.  The Gothic tradition of horror was present at the birth of the Novel itself, and had periodic revivals between the end of the 18th and end of the 19th century: A period over one hundred years.   The earliest common example is The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, published in 1794.  Gothic/horror fiction "revived" 25 years later in the 1820s.  This period saw more well developed literary themes, typified by books by Authors like Charles Maturin (See Melmoth the Wanderer published 1820) and James Hogg (See The Private Memories and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published 1824), moved the genre of gothic/horror away from simple reoccurring motifs like "deserted castle," "ghosts in the hall" into the more serious and advanced area of literary themes like doubling.

 After the Gothic literary revival/amplification of the 1820s, Edgar Allan Poe happened.  Poe is perhaps the patron saint of genre fictions, since he straddles the horror/detective/literature divide so effectively. Poe "invented" the Detective story, though it is important to note that the full blossoming of detective fiction did not take place until a half century after his death.  In terms of horror, Poe established it as a powerful genre to use in the short story format, and as that format increasingly gained a popular audience through printed magazines and newspapers, Poe's artistic vision but increasingly be seen as prophetic.

 By the last 25 years of the 19th century, genre fiction was becoming increasingly popular AND artistically diverse, spawning several Authors who would essentially define new Genres of popular fiction.  The most significant of these is H.G. Wells.  You can certainly nit pick with the statement that Wells "invented" science fiction but in terms of a popular understanding of that word, yeah he did. Science Fiction was differentiates from prior fantasy/horror novels by the use of science and a complete withdrawal from classical/romantic /gothic tropes of description, plot and theme. Wells was not the only one inventing new popular genres, during the 1880s H. Rider Haggard wrote Adventure/fantasy cross-over novels that laid the way for what we would today call "Action-Adventure" literature.

  The 20th century would bring a virtual explosion of literature in all these areas, and in new mediums like the graphic novel/comic book, film, etc.  One early 20th century development was the evolution of supernatural horror- which is essentially a synonym for "Gothic Fiction" between the late 18th century and the early 19th century into something different.  That something different would come to fruition in the pulp fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, but Lovecraft was a phenomenon of the 1920s.  The House on the Borderland is the first novel to head down that road of post-Gothic supernatural horror.

  Framed as a typical "discovered narrative" ("We were fishing in the wilds of Ireland, Jeeves and I, when one day I uncovered this worn out journal in a tiny crevasse by the shore, entranced, we began reading immediately.") The House on the Borderland quickly detours into a weird, surreal narrative about a man in a house at the end of time.  There are snorting pig men, fifty page descriptions of the end of the universe, and enough "unknown madness" type purple prose to fill up a London tube car.  And it is FANTASTIC.  I'm not sure if Hodgson was appreciated at the time or if he was "rediscovered" due to a combination of Lovecraft's popularity and his obviously surreal tendencies but either way I really recommend this book.

Bob Hoskins played Verloc in the most recent film version

Published 12/3/13
The Secret Agent (1907)
by Joseph Conrad

  Don't get me wrong: I've certainly gained a sophisticated appreciation for the marriage/property obsessed Novels of Victorian England, but it isn't really until you get to Joseph Conrad that I start to warm up to a novelist on a personal level.  For me, Conrad is the beginning of my personal interest in the art form, from Conrad, through Orwell, to Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, it is easy enough to trace a direct line from Conrad, and The Secret Agent, Conrad's only(?) "London" novel is an excellent example, and perhaps the first example of what I would call the paranoid tendency in Literature.

 This posture, the idea that the world is a dark place filled with conspiracies and conspirators- none of them benevolent- was not an idea invented by modern Novelists or modernists generally, but it is a posture that contrasts dramatically with the positivist tone of the Victorians.  The plot of The Secret Agent is simple enough: Verloc is an agent in the pay of an unnamed foreign power (Germany I think?)  A change of Ambassador creates a situation where he is forced to justify is status as an agent provocateur by, you know, actually doing something.

  Verloc tries to destroy the Greenwich observatory, but only succeeds in killing the mentally disabled younger brother of his wife, which leads to his wife murdering him, which leads to one of his cohorts robbing her, which leads to the wife killing herself.  It's a messy, murky web of despair, and you can actually feel the ugliness seep from the page.

 In other words, after literally a hundred years of young girls whining about their marriage prospects, and young upper glass brits worrying about who is going to inherit which property from whose will,  The Secret Agent is a breath of fresh air- as is true of ALL of Conrad's books.

This paperback edition is 600 pages, people.  600 pages! The Forsyte Saga is 900 pages! That is 1500 pages.

Published 12/10/13
Old Wives Tale (1908)
 by Arnold Bennett

   Man these Edwardian era English novels give no ground to the lengthy style of 19th century fiction.  I suppose there is nothing particularly amiss about The Forsyte Saga clocking in at 912 pages in print because, after all, it is a trilogy of books, making each book roughly 300 pages.  But then to go from The 900 page Forsyte Saga directly into Arnold Bennett's Old Wives Tale.  Well, Old Wives Tale is itself 624 pages in print.  The fact that I read both books in Kindle is critical because seriously, am I going to actually pay for 1500 pages of social-realist-esque fiction published in England in the first decade of the 20th century?  Never.  It would NEVER happen.  They won't teach these novels in English literature class because they are too expensive.  So if it weren't for the free, public domain editions available through Amazon, I would have never read either book.

 The Old Wives Tale tells the entire lives of two mid-late Victorian sisters: Sophia and Constance, who are raised the daughter of an infirm shopkeeper and his younger wife.  Sophia runs off to Paris with a travelling salesman, while Constance marries the help.  The book is structured in four parts.  Part one is their childhood. Part 2 is the married life of Constance.  Part 3 is Sophia's life in Paris and then Part 4 is their reconciliation and eventual death.

 The part to focus on is Sophia's Parisian "adventure."  She is quickly abandoned by her proliferate husband after he blows through a ten thousand pound inheritance.  Sophie ends up running a French boarding house that will ring bells for anyone familiar with Eugenie Grandet, La Pere Goirot, Lost Illusions, Therese Raquin, Drunkard, Nana or Bel Ami.  In other words, Bennett depicts the world of the Parisian boarding house.  I'm not sure if he is the first novelist to do this in the English language, but it sure feels like it.  The easy resemblance between Bennett's description and, say, the way Zola wrote about Paris in Nana (published 1880) makes me wonder about Bennett's own reading habits.

Published 12/12/13
Iron Heel (1908)
by Jack London

  A very clear trend in the 20th century portion of the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list is the sheer proliferation of Novels.  For example, Iron Heel was published in 1908.  It joins five other books from the same year:  The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson, The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett, A Room With A View by E.M. Forster, The Inferno by Henri Barbusse and Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells:  All published in 1908.

  Compare the time span for six books on the same list from the 18th century.  You can start with The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox published in 1752 and get all the way to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1765, for a span of 13 years.  If you take a similar approach in the 19th century, you are liable to go 5 years for the same number of titles.  In other words, a great many more "classics" were written in the 20th century.

  Fortunately the increase in the number of titles is matched by a corresponding decrease in the average length of each book.  Iron Heel is only 300 or so pages.  Like everyone else, I equate Jack London with stories about outdoor adventures, and before I started Iron Heel I assumed it was the name of a steam ship or a she wolf or something of that nature.  Instead, Iron Heel is a work of socialist/dystopian sci fiction/fantasy with a heavy emphasis on lengthy exposition.  In fact, Iron Heel is little BUT exposition, to the point where it reads more like a work of political science futurism than a novel.

  Iron Heel actually reminded me most of a Criterion Collection title, the Alexander Korda/H.G. Wells collabo Things To Come.  Both books work within the sci fi/socialist cross over that was itself firmly within the category of Utopian/Dystopian Fiction. In these works, the Author typically tries to describe the functioning of the alternate society.  Here, Wells leaves out the happy ending and focuses on a protracted civil war between the Oligarchic "Iron Heel" which is basically a term for the industrial/capitalist elite of the late 19th century in collaboration with the Government and the Judiciary and the Socialist, from whose perspective the "manuscript" is written.

  The purported author of the manuscript that is "discovered" in the distant future and whose transcription is the entire book itself is a kind of Sarah Connor figure- the wife of the leader of the Socialist Revolution, who is actually named "Ernest."  Although the prose could favorably- favorably- be described as "turgid,"  Iron Heel remains shocking in terms of the pessimistic and bloody future that London lays out half a decade before the First World War.

  It is clear from Iron Heel that were London alive today he would be saying "I told you so" about the Wikileaks/Snowden revelations about the National Security State apparatus. Before reading Iron Heel I knew that London was a leftist but I had no idea about the depth of his pessimism and his capacity to anticipate the totalitarianism of the 20th century.

Helena Bonham Carter starring as Lucy Honeychurch in the 1985 Merchant-Ivory production of the 1908 novel by E.M. Forster.

Published 12/17/13

A Room With A View (1908)
by E.M. Forster

  I'm sure I'm not the only person who associates the books of E.M. Forster with the films of Merchant-Ivory Productions.  In fact, A Room With A View is perhaps the best known of E.M. Forster's books as well as the quintessential movie version of the book.  Released in 1985, the movie version stars Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch, the familiar young female protagonist familiar to readers of any novels at all written before 1908.  The movie version also paired Dame Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett with Dame Judi Dench as the novelist/ troublemaker Eleanor Lavish.  A sterling and iconic cast to be sure, casting being a particular strong point of all of the Merchant-Ivory/Forster adaptations.

 It is impossible to discuss the Novel itself without referring to the relationship between Henry James and  E.M. Forster, which from my perspective looks like the relationship between a master and a student picked up early on.  A Room With A View shows a concern with fashion and style- in the same way that Patrick Bateman's monologue about Huey Lewis and the News functions in the American Psycho novel.  Lucy's prediliction for playing Beethoven on the piano is a central metaphor/plot point, and the idea of Italy as a stylish place for young English heroines to go is developed more like a Henry James novel than any other examples that come before it (Standard English Novel marriage plots taking place in Italy.)

  Forster shows several narrative/stylistic techniques in A Room With A View that are arguably "better" or "more sophisticated" than the techniques of Henry James himself.  For example the A Room With A View starts in what I would call "in situ" by which I mean that all of the pieces have been arranged without any reference in the novel itself.  Forster knows that his Audience knows "how this starts."  You compare that with any James novel and it's clear that Forster has advanced, because omitting the first 40-50 pages of exposition creates a more visceral connection with the reader.

  It also produces a length that is close to the novel equivalent of the three minute formula for a pop song.  You can sit down and read A Room With A View in a sitting if you dig the plot.  You CAN NOT say that for the other novels that were being published around that time.  Even Henry James himself.  From that "in situ" start it is easy to see why A Room With A View  would make a good film adaptation-  Forster saves the adapter the difficulty of pairing down Lucy's back story, a familiar component of similar novels at that time and before.

 I haven't actually watched the movie version but looking at the pictures of Helena Bonham Carter on Google Image Search I'm going to search for it now.

Published 12/19/13
The Inferno (1908)
by Henri Barbusse

   The Inferno (L'enfer) is a proto existentialist work about an unnamed protagonist who finds a hole in the wall of his boarding house room, allowing him to spy on his neighbors in a variety of "shocking" behaviors: adultery and homosexuality included.  This might be the least popular Novel on the 1001 Books List. The Inferno only has a "stub" Wikipedia page.

  Considering the racy subject matter, seems like a property ripe for a revisiting but until we get the movie version, the fact that the original is brief and an early trip to the play fields of 20th century existentialism is about all that needs to be said.

Fantômas

Published 12/31/13
Fantômas (1911)
by Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre

  Yeah well I'm not going to hold a book review of a pulp book about a sociopathic French serial killer until 2014.  Some books are so nerdy that this blog is the only place where I bring them up, Fantômas, a French pulp fiction series that was just in time to be adopted by the film industry and spread world wide, is an anti-hero, endlessly hunted by a well-meaning Parisian detective.  The original was published in 1911 and translated in 1915.  Fantômas never really took off in the English speaking world, but it is easy to see his influence in the world of comic books and super heroes, since he ran around in a mask and had an almost supernatural ability to disguise himself.

  It is worth mentioning that the criminal activity of Fantômas is extremely gory- the first number includes him ripping the throat of a noble woman for ear to ear, and the denouement involves an innocent man being guillotined in place of the guilty criminal.  This book is also notable because it carries the "influenced the early Surrealist/Dadaists."  Unintentionally, I'm sure, it's hard to read Fantômas as a particularly inspired early edition of the true crime/detective genre, with an anti-hero as the recurring protagonist instead of a hero/detective.

A young Edith Wharton

Published 1/24/14
Ethan Frome (1911)
by Edith Wharton

  I am powering through the first 20 years of 20th century literature, in doubt thanks to the combination of genre fiction and shorter length works of serious fiction that have begun to populate the 20th century section of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die.  Clocking in at a scant 150 pages, Ethan Frome is more of a novella than a novel.  Either way I'm not complaining. Unlike the House of Mirth, which was a fairly conventional marriage-plot type book enlivened by Wharton's awareness of Henry James' output, Ethan Frome seems more indebted to Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, with a "retro" rather than "modern" feel and characters who are far from the glamour of London/Paris/New York.

  The plot of Frome revolves around the titular character and his longing for his wife's impoverished cousin (and his house mate) Mattie Silver.  Like a Hardy or Eliot novel,  Ethan Frome is a novel about small people living unhappy lives.  Not a novel with a moral agenda in mind necessarily, but certainly not one which celebrates its dour subject matter.  Like the work of Henry James, Ethan Frome foreshadows the awakening of the self-consciously "serious" novel which sees itself not as popular entertainment but as a sophisticated art.  This is a move that was a half century in coming, and an event that didn't fully come into focus until after Henry James had his various statements.

 Like the work of Gertrude Stein, Wharton knew of James and sought to bring his insights to bear without being transparently imitative.

August Strindberg doing his best David Lynch impression.

Published 1/7/14
By the Open Sea (1890)
by August Strindberg
Penguin Classics Edition

  I've got a bad case of Sweden on the brain!  Swedish rock bands (Hologram show review), Swedish films (Bergman entirely) and Swedish novels.  By the Open Sea was a tough get- had to actually order the Penguin Classics edition off of Amazon to read it.  I've been thinking a lot about Strindberg because of all the Ingmar Bergman films I've been watching.  Strindberg got his start as a play wright, and surely it is no coincidence that Bergman directed many of his works while he ran the Malmo Civic Theater prior to his film career taking off.

 By the Open Sea is Strindberg doing a character study of a "nervous intellectual" with Nietzschian overtones.  He is no Nietzchian super man to be sure, quite the opposite, so sensitive is he that a bad cup of coffee disables him for hours at a time. Axel Borg is appointed the government fisheries adviser in a remote part of Sweden.  Upon arrival he strikes up an instant dislike for the populace, leavened only by his rapid engagement to the comely Miss Maria.

 Of course, it all goes wrong, up and down, for old Axel, and by the end of the 185 page book he is reduced to not showering, not bathing, and being pelted with rocks by the small children of the village.  By the Open Sea is another early entrant in the proto-existentialist world that was spurred by Nietzsche's work in the 1880s.

Published 1/9/14
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
(1914) by Robert Tressell

  I wasn't particularly irate at having to read this 650 page ish portrait of workers in the building trades in Edwardian England, even though half the book is simply diatribes about the plight of the working class, because it was free, and because I have plenty of time.  At the same time, be me so humble to suggest that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell is not, in fact, one of the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die.  Although this list is exclusively fiction with a heavy emphasis on the Novel, this same subject (the plight of the English working class) is best treated in a non-fiction title, E.P Thompson's, The Birth of the English Working Class.  Even in terms of fiction there are better titles that are not even included in the 1001 Books volume.

 For example, Frank Norris wrote The Octopus(1901), which is essentially about the same subject/different milieu (Californian agricultural workers vs. English building trades.)   To its credit, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is about as quick a read as a 600 page plus, early 20th century novel focused entirely on the plight of the working class can be.  Would I suggest anyone else in the world read this book? No I would not.  Replace it with The Octopus by Frank Norris, that is my suggestion.

Published 1/14/14
Sons and Lovers (1913)
by D.H. Lawrence

  Bring on the sex and psychology!  And sexual psychology and psychological sexuality.  If you wanted an intellectual theme for the first half of the 20th century, you could do worse than picking "Thinking About Sex: Parallel Developments in Psychology and Literature" as your choice.  The narrative of Sigmund Freud occurs outside literature, but his thinking is so crucial to developments in 20th century literature that it is almost impossible to talk about 20th century literature without crediting Freud for some of the themes he brought to the table.  Maybe the seminal, specific work to really pin down Freud's influence on literature is his 1899 work, Interpretations of Dreams and its concomitant ideas about the unconscious.  Also crucial to his influence on literature, but less to his credit, are his theories on sexuality, many of which were outlined in the first decade of the 20th century.

 You certainly can't get serious about Lawrence without first understanding how deeply he was influenced by the writing of Freud.  Given the difference in language and general time lag in absorbtion of new ideas during the turn of the century period, it was plausible that Lawrence "never read Freud" as he claimed in a 1914 letter, but it is also possible that he is straight up lying, and certainly accurate that he "had heard" about Freud from multiple contemporaries who were directly involved in the psychoanalytical "movement" that trailed in the wake of Freud's most crucial contributions.

  In Sons and Lovers the reader is presented with a complex Mother/Son relationship that has multiple psycho-sexual elements- along the line with what more explicitly Freudian influenced Artists would present a half century later.  The main relationship is between Paul Morel and his mother, a "ubiquitous moral presence with great ambitions for her gifted son."  Much of Sons and Lovers is recognizable as a successor to George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, but even in 1913 Lawrence was breaking ground in the depiction of physical sexuality in the English novel.  Although 18th century literature could be quite bawdy, and while the French carried on a separate tradition of frank literature about sexual relations, the English saw it disappear for close to 160 years.  Lawrence's 1920 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned for almost 40 years in the United Kingdom.

 Unfortunately the development of "internet pornography" has simply obliterated a couple centuries of sexual mores, making the crazed virginal attitude of Paul and his childhood girlfriend seem almost insane in comparison.  Perhaps that is part of the lasting appeal- at how FRAUGHT the sexuality becomes in his books, coupled with the fact that he is the first writer in the English novel to combine sex and psychology.  Man, what a winning fucking combination for 20th century art.  For real.

Bettie Page being menaced by a cannibal in a scene that derives inspiration directly from Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Published 1/16/14
Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Tarzan of the Apes is a classic example of the porous border between "high" and "low" art.  Tarzan turned into one of the most enduring fictional characters of the 20th century, alongside contemporaries like Sherlock Holmes(1887), The Invisible Man(1897) and Dracula(1897.)  Tarzan is different from earlier popular fictional characters because the move from printed literature to film was almost instantaneous.  The first film versions of Tarzan were silent movies released as early as 1918, which, if you consider the interruption of the first World War, is basically simultaneous.

  The movie version of Tarzan took off in 1932, when Johnny Weissmuller played the role.  You can see the impact in an Ngram comparing the relative popularity of Tarzan, Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes:

    In this Ngram you can see Tarzan crushing Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein before plummeting to earth in the 1930s.  Thereafter, Tarzan and Sherlock have both played second fiddle to the Nineteenth century character Frankenstein, perhaps because Frankenstein is considered the "first" monster book in literature and thus attracts a disproportionate amount of attention from the academic community relative to the other two characters.

  All this supports the proposition that Tarzan of the Apes- the first book- is worth a look precisely because it has proved to be so enduring, the true definition of a classic.  At the same time, Burroughs is not the most skilled novelist, and the vile racism that permeates his treatment of the African cannibals is as difficult to stomach as the frank depictions of the evils of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin.  The difference being that Stowe was criticizing the institution of slavery, and Burroughs is trying to entertain a broad popular audience for adventure novels with gory sensationalism.

Published 2/4/14
The Rainbow by
D.H. Lawrence
p. 1915

  D.H. Lawrence is interesting  because he introduces modern themes but without many of the modern stylistic features that would come to characterize capital "M" modernism.   The best example is his treatment of sexuality, most famously in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but many of his books deal with sex in ways that are new and, dare I say, bold.

  In one sense, The Rainbow is a conventional multi-generational late Victorian/Edwardian family novel.  In another, more important sense, The Rainbow was declared obscene by the English government, and all copies were seized and burned after publication in 1915.  While I obviously think the censorship is ridiculous, I can see where they were coming from.  The third main character, grand daughter Ursula, lives in an openly sexual relationship that specifically DOES NOT end in marriage.  In fact, Ursula's refusal to marry the Polish emigre Anton Skrebernsky is the narrative center of the novel.

 From a formal/structural sense, Ursula's segment of The Rainbow overwhelms the novelty of the first two chapters, which are fairly conventional accounts of love among rural Englanders in the mid to late 19th century.  This topic is thematically of a piece with every Thomas Hardy and George Eliot novel, so the contrast between those first two portions and the third, radical portion concerning Ursula is almost jarring.

  The Rainbow is ALSO long- close to 600 pages I'm thinking? And considering the first two thirds of the book are nothing new or fresh, it makes the third, radical portion tough to reach.

Gemma Arterton plays Tess d'Urbervilles in the 2008 BBC Miniseries

Published 1/16/14
BBC Miniseries version
of Tess d'Urbervilles
 f. Gemma Arterton (2008)

  So I've been watching a couple "brit coms" on the Hulu Plus "British" channel, and one night I thought, "Hey, I wonder if they have all those great BBC miniseries where they do classic novels? Answer, yes. They do.  Thomas Hardy published his novel in 1891, but unless you know that it would be hard to guess it, because the book is set in the 1880s (maybe earlier?) and all the 'action' takes plays in rural England.  What I like about Thomas Hardy is that his shit is DARK.  There is hardly a single happy moment  during the whole of Tess whether it be the book or miniseries.  Watching it spool out on the television, it almost seems like Hardy is trying to punish some Tess-like woman who did him wrong when he was younger.

 The central theme of Tess, for me, is that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.  Tess is told early on that she belongs to an ancient, hallowed family, and this knowledge spurs what can only be called a series of poor life choices: she gets raped, has a baby, baby dies, becomes a milk maid, gets married to a dude who doesn't know she has a dead baby, she tells him against all advice, he freaks out, etc. etc. etc.

 Of course, it all ends in murder, and Tess being executed for murder.  Her travails almost reminded me of what the lead actress in a Lars Von Trier movie typically has to put up with. There is something unapologetically modern about the darkness of Hardy, even if his plots and settings are quintessentially Victorian, and this miniseries captures that perfectly.  And Gemma Arterton isn't half bad.  She certainly has "quivering with repressed desire" down to a formula.

 Sorry about the utter lack of SD/so cal local music coverage this month! 

Cool cover for the "book version" of The Thirty-Nine Steps

Published 3/6/14
The Thirty-Nine Steps(1915)
 by John Buchan

  9/10 people who have heard of The Thirty-Nine Steps are thinking about Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film version.  John Buchan's novel is typically credited with being the first "true" spy novel in the way we understand it today, though any mention of that needs to also credit the 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands by Irish author Robert Childers.  The Riddle of the Sands has many of the plot elements of the spy novel in place, specifically the discovery of a secret plan by Germans to invade England, but it is the The Thirty-Nine Steps, with its narrative of chase and retreat, that formalizes the conventional plot/stylistic elements of the spy novel as we know it today.

  The protagonist, Richard Hannay is a self-described "colonial" from South Africa with training in mining.  He's a kind of early James Bond type. 

Published 3/20/14
Of Human Bondage (1915)
by W. Somerset Maugham

 Of Human Bondage is a top novel of the early 20th century, thoroughly modern if not quite modernist.  Supposedly autobiographical in nature, Of Human Bondage tells the story of Philip Carey, an orphaned boy with a club foot, who is sent to live with his Uncle and Aunt in their vicarage in rural England.  Maugham takes Philip through school, then off to Germany and Paris; where Carey/Maugham tries and fails to become a painter.   Then it is back to London, where Carey decides to pursue medical studies.

  Carey falls for the completely unsympathetic, unlikable Mildred, a shop girl, who Carey literally ruins himself for, only to be betrayed in the most awful and contemptible fashion REPEATEDLY.  Maugham himself was gay (he also got married because being Gay was totes uncool in the UK in the early 20th century) but Of Human Bondage has the strong scent of a gay man trying to make sense of heterosexual relationships in the same way that a deaf person tries to appreciate music.  Carey has some idea that he should be in love with a woman, but has trouble really feeling it.

  The happy ending, with Carey settling down with the daughter of his friend, seems grounded more in prudence then romantic love.  Of Human Bondage is a clear forerunner to the genre of 20th century literature where a son of the middle class loses his way to bohemianism and uncertainty.   Any fan of Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris or On The Road will enjoy Of Human Bondage- but be ready for a 600 page book. 

Published 3/25/14
The Bunner Sisters (1916)
by Edith Wharton

   Turns out I'm quite a fan of Edith Wharton.  Such a fan that even her lesser hits have appeal.  The Bunner Sisters is a Wharton outlier: First, it's a novella/short story (75 pages) and not a novel.  Second, it's was written as early as 1891 but stayed unpublished till 1916- unusual for Wharton to hold onto a story for so long without publication.  Third, it's milieu is the lower class in urban New York.  Although Wharton was fond of having her central characters struggle with issues related to poverty, they typically do so in an environment where their friends o have money.  I'm thinking of Lily Bart in the excellent The House of Mirth (1905). Another good example of poor character/rich setting is the central couple of The Glimpses of the Moon (1922)

   In both those books the "poor" characters are poor because of some historical accident related to their family history but they are firmly "upper class" in terms of their tastes, demeanor and plot points.  On the other hand The Bunner Sisters are firmly working class/poor people, running a little shop in an unnamed part of New York City in the early 20th century (Mid town?)  Ann Eliza and Evelina are content more or less, living their quiet little lives until a clock, given as a birthday present from one to the other introduces Herman Ramy into their lives.   Ramy runs the shop where the clock was purchased.  He tells the sisters of his past "working for Tiffany's" in their clock and watch department until an illness forced him to lose his place.

  He wooes the eldest sister, Ann Eliza to be his wife but she turns him down for reasons that are somewhat obscure to the reader but have to do with "sacfrice" and "forebearance."  He then turns his attention to the younger sister, marries her and takes her off to St. Louis where he has found a position.  To tell more would function as a spoiler for the narrative, but suffice it to say there is a twist that is fairly unexpected for a short story written in the 19th century.

  The Bunner Sisters is a welcome change of pace within the Wharton bibliography, though I frankly question how the editors of 1001 Books can include a Wharton short story and NOT include a SINGLE short story by Anton Chekov.  What gives?

Published 3/27/14
The Growth of the Soil (1917)
by Knut Hamsun

  This actually is the second Hamsun novel on the 1001 Books list- the other is Hunger, his 1891 proto-existentialist work about a guy who is fucking starving to death in Oslo.  Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, and this book supposedly put him over the top, although I feel like when a Scandinavian wins the Nobel Prize for Literature you have to take into account that the voters are all Swedish.

 The Growth of the Soil is about the slow growth of a farming community in the foothills of Norway near the Swedish border.  The Growth of the Soil has a prosaic quality- simple people living simple lives, at least that's how it appears for a hundred or so pages before Hamsun drops a little infanticide into the mix and everything gets dark real quick.  As it turns out, infanticide is not such a big deal in Norway/Scandinavia, and the perpetrator gets out after a five year prison sentence, much the better for time behind bars (oh the Scandinavians and their social welfare ideas!)

 Gradually, Hamsun develops a second generation of character and then BOOM another infanticide.  Since I'm a fan of Icelandic author Haldor Laxness, The Growth of the Soil struck a responsive chord.  Specifically, it reminds me of Laxness' Independent People(1934-35.)  In fact, I think it's appropriate to say that Laxness must have read The Growth of the Soil and derived inspiration from it.

Published 4/3/14
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
by James Joyce


If you want to watch the coming of "Modernism" in a specific art form, the Novel is a good first or second choice (Painting being the other obvious choice.)  Modernism encompasses different techniques in different disciplines, but in the Novel Modernism largely took the form of the development of "stream of consciousness" narrative.  Joyce did not invent the technique- Henry James experimented with it as did Gertrude Stein- both writing before Joyce.   But Joyce, in Ulysses, provided the definitive modernist stream-of-consciousness work of art.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not Ulysses, but it's the second most well known novel by the man who wrote Ulysses and it is a good deal less experimental than Ulysses- breaking away from lengthy interior monologues in stream-of-consciousness form to depict a Dublin that has a recognizable third person narrative form.

  Aside from the proto-stream of consciousness form (by the master of the technique) there are themes that evoke the essence of early modernism: a frank questioning of religion and explicit (for the 19-teens) discussions of sexuality.  Joyces' "young man" confesses to masturbation and pre marital sex to the local priest, and the book is studded with graphic depictions of the horrors of hell.

  I'd like to say I got a lot out of this book- which I've read before mind you, but Joyce is hard to follow- even compared to Stein and James.  Also he is writing specifically of Ireland, making the language unusual and sometimes hard to pick up on during a casual reading.  Joyce stands at the beginning of the "difficult classic" a period where classic works of literature are thematically complicated and depart from conventional narrative.

Published 4/16/14
The Shadow Line (1915)
by Joseph Conrad

  Total fan of Joseph Conrad.  He's a repeat player in the 1001 Book project,  You've got the immortal Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1899), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907.)  There's also Victory (1915) which didn't make the 1001 Books list but is worth a spin regardless. The Shadow Line is late Conrad. Despite the fact I actually enjoy reading Conrad, the reviews haven't done well in terms of page views:  35, 79, 42, 38.

  So yeah... no hits for Jo Conrad.  The Shadow Line like Victory and Heart of Darkness is a novella more than a novel. Despite his reputation as a literary author today, many of his books were published in serial.  I haven't done the research, but I suspect that during his lifetime Conrad was often characterized as a writer of "adventures."  His favored settings in the tropics of the East Indies and other then exotic locales like Africa (Heart of Darkness) and Central America (Nostromo) reflect his life experience as a sailor, but the locales often serve to emphasize the social isolation of his characters.

  In many ways The Shadow Line, about an ill-fated voyage that ends with the death or near death of every man on board do an unnamed tropical fever, can stand in for all of his books.  His characters are lonely people, struggling against a cold, uncaring world. His world is the modern world in miniature and it is a dark place.

Natsume Soseki: Japanese novelist, author.

Published 5/5/14
Kokoro (1914)
by Natsume Soseki
Translated from the Japanese by Edwin McClellan

  I am 25 entries deep into the "Japanese Literature" tag on this blog but Kokoro is the first Japanese novel I've read...ever.  I'm no expert, but I've seen enough to not be shocked that the first Japanese novel on the 1001 Books To Read list involves three different suicides.  One of the suicides is a historical fact, that of General Nogi who waited until the death of the Meiji Emperor- 35 years after he "disgraced" himself by losing his banner during combat- to kill himself.  The delay between the disgrace and the resulting death is central to the Sensei character of Kokoro.


Published 5/7/14
Rosshalde (1914)
by Herman Hesse
Bantam Paperback Edition

  Reviewing Rosshalde as a book published in 1914, while factually accurate, is deceptive, because Hesse was essentially unknown in English until the mid 1960s, when his books were republished en masse and became a favorite of the 1960s counter culture and subsequent generations of high school/college aged readers.   The ark is easy to see if you look at Herman Hesses' English language Ngram- basically growing by six fold between 1960 and 1974, with a peak popularity in 1980, a mild decline through the 1990s and an uptick after 1993.

   Herman Hesse has four books on the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list.  In high school I read three of the four: Siddhartha (1922) , Stephenwolf (1927) and The Glass Bead Game (1943).  Hesse was hardly an unknown figure in world literature- he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.  But his mix of spiritualism- clearly influenced by German Romanticism, Freudianism and a veneer of Orientalism struck a resonant chord with the 1960s counter culture and its children.

  Hesse published many Novels that I've read that DIDN'T make it to the 1001 Books List- Narcissus and Goldmund, Journey to the East & Demian are three that I remember reading in the Bantam paperback version that mirrors this edition of Rosshalde. Rosshalde is the name of the estate/home of famous painter Johann Verguth and his loveless marriage.  He decides to leave to join a friend in India, and his youngest son (and light of his life) gets Meningitis and dies.  You can see where the self-obsessed culture of the West during the 1960s would find this level of self absorption, but its only tolerable if you take it as an anachronistically romantic Novel (which it in fact is.)

  Despite the historical quirk of Hesse being "discovered" by an English Audience almost twenty years after he published his last novel,  Hesse was not the only Novelist incorporating the new "science" of psychology/psychiatry. Hesse actually did undergo psychoanalysis with Jung.  His direct experience contrasts with that of D.H. Lawrence who actually denied early familiarity with Freud and his work on the mind.  The trend of incorporating new disciplines like psychology and other new social sciences: sociology, began in the late 19th century.  In 19th century literature this focus is often on using these new methods to describe "the lower classes" only in the 20th century did writers like Hesse and Lawrence (and Stein, and Joyce) start to apply that focus to the self.
    Sensei mentors the main character, a fallow Tokyo university student laboring to find direction in his studies and his life. The distinct portions of the novel move from the relationship between the student and the sense; to the relationship between the student and his parents after graduation, and ends with a long letter from Sensei to the student, culminating in the Sensei committing suicide because of the role he played in the death of a friend of his during his university studies.

   One of the central differences between the literature of the west vs. the literature is the move away from poetry/verse within Western literature in the 18th century, i.e. the "Rise of the Novel" in England, France, Russia and America, with a supporting role in Spain, Italy, Germany and Scandanavia in the 19th entury.  Non-western cultures certainly had their own literary cultures- but across the board, "high literature" meant poetry until the 20th century.  In some non-Western civilizations, the Novel has been introduced via Colonialism- the Indian example but also the Arab/Islamic example as well. Japan is different in that they actively went out, understood Western literature on its own terms, and then created their own Novels without reference to a Western audience.

  I believe that one of the growth industries of non-Western 20th century Novels is an abiding concern with the poetics of the language.  It makes sense that people writing Novels in cultures that were more directly committed to poetry and verse would write Novels that were more concerned with the flow of the language.  The spread of the popularity of the novel in non-Western cultures during the 20th century is, along with the techniques of Modernism, the signature events in 20th century literature.   So a big part of reading 20th century literature is reading non-Western Novels.   Or non-Western verse, I suppose. If you wanted a full grasp of the subject of 'World Literature' you would be including Arabic verse, Indian verse, Chinese verse, Japanese verse.  These traditions span thousand of years.  On the other hand, Novels from these same places are essentially limited to the 20th century.  It's a very finite amount of time both compared to the native verse literary traditions AND the larger history of the Novel in the west.

   FOOTNOTES

(1)  It is worth noting that I am coming to the end of the portion of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die that can be read for free.  There are perhaps 50 additional titles that can be acquired for free via Amazon.com, and for everything else it's at least ninety-nine cents as a generic Amazon ebook.  Even a one cent book costs four dollars purchased used on Amazon. Working from a scenario where I end up getting to 300 or so books between free books and books I've already read, that still leaves approximately 700 books that need to be bought for at least one dollar a piece, minimum.  Kokoro cost me 4 dollars, for example.  I've also paid seven dollars for a Bantam paperweight edition of Rosshalde by Herman Hesse. So let's say I can get half of the remaining 700 books for either 99 cents of four dollars.  That is an average price two fifty per title.  Then for the remaining half, it's a cost of somewhere between five and ten dollars.  So we're talking like four thousand bucks.

  Which is all to say, I think I need to step up my game.  And probably trade the books I own to bookstores in exchange for new titles in that higher price category.  I certainly have several thousand dollars worth of books...in trade...

 Meanwhile, I've already  been reduced to working through the Criterion Collection Hulu Plus titles in alphabetical order, which is a sure sign that I'm on the road to exhausting that source for "free" titles.  I have no belief that there will be any opening of the floodgates so that EVERY Hulu Plus title is placed on Hulu Plus.  There is also the additional concern of the 2-3 titles that Criterion Collection adds every month, plus box sets.  I think I will likely be reduced to reviewing films I've "previously seen" without making an additional viewing.   Then Amazon Instant Video for work around

Published 5/8/14
Death in Venice (1912)
 by Thomas Mann
in Death and Venice and Seven Other Stories
Vintage edition paperback 1989
Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter

  Thomas Mann was best known for his major novels: Buddenbrooks (1901) and The Magic Mountain (1924) but he also wrote a grip of Novellas and short stories.  At 71 pages, "they" call Death in Venice a Novella but I would say short-story.  It details the erotic obsession of an older man with a young boy, set against the onset of the Influenza crisis in Venice.

  It's an evocative setting, and Mann is more or less dealing in a forthright fashion with a highly taboo kind of sexual attraction.  There is nothing R-rated in here- it was published in 1914, but the mood anticipates the more frankly sexual (and more disturbing) work of Nabokov a half century later.  According to scholars, Death in Venice is based on an actual experience Mann had a Venetian hotel.  As it turns out, Mann was bisexual, as is readily apparent to anyone who reads this story (though not clear at all if you read Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain.

Published 5/14/14
The Return of the Solider (1918)
 by Rebecca West

  Sometimes I just want to cut and paste two or three paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry for the book I've just read and just say "hey- this pretty much sums it up, y'all."  Lately I'm preoccupied by the prospect that I'm getting close enough to the present for copyright protections to kick in.  Today I was sitting in federal court and actually thought "What about the library!"  Just trying to give some insight into my thought process.  Then I went onto my phone to look up Raymond Roussel- who has two VERY expensive books on the 1001 Books list- and they didn't have it in the catalog for the San Diego library.  And THEN going waaaaay back I was like, "WAIT- what about interlibrary loan."  So yeah, that's what I've got going on over here.

  The Return of the Solider was Rebecca West's first Novel (Novella?) and was the "only book about World War I written by a woman during World War I." (Thanks wikipedia!)  The story concerns an upper class gentleman who gets shell shock and ends up with amnesia- partial amnesia- specifically he can't remember the last 15 years of his life, including marrying his airhead upper class wife and their dead son.  Instead, he remembers being in love with a working class woman who has sine married.

  Many mid century critics were unkind to The Return of the Soldier because West engages in clumsy Freudian-ism but since we now know that Freudian-ism is a crock of shit across the board it is hard to hold that against her.  It's interesting to see Freud creep into the novel in the 1910-1920 period.  I'm assuming it will reach crescendo status in the 20s. EXCITED TO FIND OUT!

Published 5/26/14
Summer (novel)(1917)
by Edith Wharton

   Besides the main character taking a trip to an abortionist, there's not much in Summer to distinguish it from a novel from the late 19th century. Summer does sound out from Wharton's other novels, in that it is set in New England, among "the little people" instead of dealing with Wharton's preferred set of upper-crust New Yorkers.  Charity Royall is the 18 year old adopted daughter of a lawyer living in a small town in rural New England.  She was rescued, at birth, from a colony of white-trash types who live "up the mountain."

  When the novel begins, she is working in the library in her small town, bored and dreaming of a bigger life.  At the library she meets visiting architect Lucius Harney, in town to sketch various buildings of interest. At the same time, Royall's ward and adopted father, Lawyer Royall, clumsily announces his intention to wed her.  She rejects his (somewhat creepy and definitely  incestuous) advances, and begins a sexual affair with Harney, which ends in a) her finding out he's engaged to a different girl in town and b) her getting pregnant. It's hardly an unpredictable plot twist.

In fact, I distinctly remember clucking my tongue on the very first page of the Harney/Charity interaction.  There are just certain things you KNOW will happen in ANY novel where a young, naive, "country" girl hooks up with a sophisticated guy from the city.  She will be seduced, and she will be abandoned.  The pregnancy/abortion is a 20th century twist to be sure (even for novels written in the 20th century but set in the 19th century) but the underlying pattern remains the same.

 Charity reacts to her dilemma by visiting a folksy lady abortionist, and then retreating to her ancestral home, where she discovers that 'her people' are just as degraded and vile as everyone said they were.  Wharton is hardly going to win any 20th century points for her depiction of the impoverished, she is thoroughly bourgeois in her outlook and sympathies.

 Yet, Summer remain memorable among her work simply because, like Ethan Frome and The Bunner Sisters, of what it isn't: A novel about New York society bitches.

Published 6/5/14
Tarr (1918)
by Wyndham Lewis

  Portraits of bohemian life aren't particularly scarce in 19th century French literature aren't particularly uncommon:  Paris has been Parisian for a looooonggggg time.  However, analgous English language literature- either writers from the United Kingdom (and Ireland) and the United States are a distinctly 20th century phenomenon.

  In America it was the "lost generation" writers of the 20s.   In England and Ireland, writers like James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis combined experimental literary technique with a bohemian milieu to create  an enduring genre. Lewis, for some reason, used the "equals" = sign at the beginning of sentences in a kind of experimental punctuation, which I think is probably more popular in poetry than the novel.  Here is what wikipedia says about the move:

          The American first edition used a punctuation mark (resembling an equals sign: '=') between sentences (after full stops, exclamation marks or question marks). It has been claimed that these were an attempt by Lewis, an artist, to introduce 'painterly strokes' into literature. This has, however, been disputed by Dr. John Constable, who believes that they are nothing more than a German punctuation mark briefly adopted by Lewis. Lewis himself wrote to Ezra Pound about this when reconstructing missing parts of the manuscript for the U.S. edition: "Were those parallel lines = Quinn mentions kept going by the Egoist, or not? Could not they be disinterred, & used by Knopf?" (Lewis to Pound, October 1917). Evidently not all were disinterred, as large stretches of the book as published are without them. (Tarr Wikipedia)

   The other peculiar aspect of Tarr is the distinctly polyglot nature of the cast of characters- Kreissler, who figures prominently in the first 5/6ths of the novel, is a kind of 19th century German romantic who is out of place and out of time.  Tarr himself is a kind of peripheral figure and a stand in for the author.  Early 20th century Paris is another main character.  The combination of characters who are doing nothing with money and those who are doing nothing without is something that will be intimately familiar to fans of later generations of bohemian celebrating literature, i.e. the Beats.

 Published 6/20/14
Rashomon & Other Stories (1915)
 by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

  This group of short stories does, in fact, have the inspiration for the famous film, Rashomon (1950) by Akira Kurosawa, but confusingly that story is called In The Grove, and the story Rashomon in this book is something entirely different.  Akutagaw was an avowed modernist who killed himself at the age of 37- you wouldn't necessarily pick up on that from the settings of these stories- from the samurai/middle ages portion of Japanese history.

  This is in contrast to Kokoro (1914) by Natsume Soseki, a real Japanese novel that takes place in the present in a modernizing Japan.  Akutagawa had a sly wit and wry sense of humor- something utterly lost in the translation between Japanese and English.  His language has a spartan/economic quality that might either be a real characteritistic of Japanese literature OR just something I'm projecting onto my idea of Japanese literature.  I'm still waiting to read my first verbose Japanese book or watch a single expansive Japanese film.  Only 120 pages, you can read Rashomon & Other Stories in a sitting- a good entry point to modern Japanese fiction alongside Kokoro, which is a must.
  

Published 6/27/14
The Charwoman's Daughter (1912)
by James Stephens
Gill & MacMillan Press, 1972 edition
w/ Introduction  by Augustine Martin

    The Charwoman's Daughter is one of the few "to-read" books between 1900-1920 I have left on the 1001 Books list.  I ended up purchasing a copy on Amazon, but the book I got is a half century old paperback edition.  the introduction, by Augustine Martin, is a strong plus to reading this edition, but I had no idea that it was included based on the Amazon.com purchase link.

 James Stephens was a legitimately working class Irish writer.  He habitually claimed a kind of spiritual kinship with James Joyce (he claimed to have the same birthday) and that's not a fair comparison, but The Charwoman's Daughter is worthy of its status as a minor classic.  As the introduction points out, the tale of Mary Makebelieve is, properly speaking, a fairy tale, replete with a "story-book" fairy tale ending where Mary and her poor Mother receive an enormous bequest from a never-appearing American relative.

 Up to that point, The Charwoman's Daughter is notable for the working class world it sympathetically, and realistically depicts. The deeper question of whether The Charwoman's Daughter is supposed to mock the idea of such an elevataion, or whether it simply reflects "what the Audience wants" (which they did, in 1912) or whether it's some combination of the two,  is less important than Stephens "outsider" status as an Author.  The Novel, as an art-form has ALWAYS been about outsider looking in.

  The best example of this is the role of Scottish writers in the development of the novel as an Art Form- particularly the roll of Sir Walter Scott and his "Waverely Novels."  Specifically, you've got Rob Roy, published in 1817, and Ivanhoe, published in 1820.  I think you can argue that Sir Walter Scott is the writer who made the novel "fashionable" as an art form, with prior exponents being deeply unfashionable types like Daniel Defoe.

  Even before Scott, Jonathan Swift played a huge role in the pre-history of the Novel, A Modest Proposal was published in 1729, Gulliver's Travels in 1726.  And Maria Edgworth, publishing in 1800.  Henry MacKenzie- still in the 18th century, then the addition of Anglo-Irish writers in the 19th century: Charles Maturin, Somervile and Ross, all culminating in Joyce.  You can also include American literature in this discussion, though I won't.

  The point is that the outsider looking inward is an excellent place for works of art which purport to demonstrate the workings of society and a good place to make formal innovations in the art form itself. The fact that Stephens does none of these things, places him and The Charwoman's Daughter more with a hithero non-existent genre called "working class literature"- cutting across national boundaries and almost wholly absent prior to the 20th century.

  It's all in that fairy-tale ending- no "serious" Novelist of the 1910-1920 period would slap an ending like that onto a frank depiction of working class life from the narrative perspective of another working class individual.

The Albigenses: This is what they did to heretics in the Middle Ages.  Notice the mountains as a key scenic backdgrop for this story- near the border of the then kingdom of Aragon, which was an Albigenses/Cathar refuge.

The Albigenses (1824)
 by Charles Maturin
Four Volumes
Volume one: SDSU library copy 5/29/14
Volume two:
Volume three:
Volume four:
Arno Press edition 1974

 The Albigenses is BY FAR the toughest get yet encountered among the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.  The 1001 Books summary doesn't hide the ball either, stating, "Never re-printed after 1824, The Albigenses is only in a few research libraries world wide."  So how the hell does a book that is essentially impossible to find one of the 1001 Books I need to read before I expire?   I would argue that its very unavailability makes it NOT one of the 1001 books I need to read before I die.

  I finally tracked down a copy using the San Diego Public Libraries "San Diego Circuit" inter-library request form.  When I went to pick it up, I got only volume one of what is by all accounts a four volume set, which means I believe I may need to request each volume separately, and frankly, I'm in no particular hurry to complete The Albigenses having already gone 420 pages in.  Does that mean it's 1600 pages total?  YIKES.  No wonder it hasn't been reprinted.

  To me, putting The Albigenses on any "must read" list is a cruel trick. Bear in mind, there is no Ebook version- free or otherwise, whatsoever.  Buying a reprint copy will cost you 20 dollars a volume.  Annnnddd most importantly it is not that great a book- I can tell that one volume in.  It's not bad- the 12th century historical setting among the Crusaders persecuting the Cathar heresy, is one of the more intriguing historical/romance/gothic settings out there.

   But between it being essentially unavailable, expensive to purchase when it is available, and 1600 pages long, it is frankly hard to imagine what the editor of 1001 Books was thinking when he "Oked" this recommendation.  I mean, you'd have to be mad.

  I will say that the foreward by James Gray and the introduction by Dale Kramer- both penned for this Arno Press 1974 edition- are worth reading independent of the book itself.  Being as The Albigenses is a book that is simply unread, accurate, insightful commentary is difficult/impossible to find.  One important fact I gleaned from the introduction is that The Albigenses is one of the first novels to use a werewolf- unfortunately he didn't appear in volume one.  Maybe volume two. I WILL UPDATE THIS REVIEW AS I READ ADDITIONAL VOLUMES, but I'm not promising anything.  It took me three years just to get volume one- volume two could plausibly be another three years away.

Published 6/24/14
The Red Room (1879)
by August Strindberg
Translation by Peter Graves (2009)
published by Norvik Press

  This satire of Bohemian Swedish society is often called "the first modern Swedish novel."  It differs from many of the other classic early Scandinavian novels: Gosta Berling's Saga, The Growth of the Soil, in that it eschews a depiction of the slow, rural life in favor of a scene that wouldn't be out of place in London or Paris of the same time.  "The Red Room" of the title is a cafe/salon where Arvid Falk, an ex-civil servant and main character of the book, and his group of semi-successful bohemian artists, gather and mostly talk about ways to make money.

 Despite the bohemian milieu, much of the plot has to do with various schemes to raise money and here Strindberg is acerbic in a manner very reminiscent of other critiques of mid 19th century capitalist practices (See The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope.)

  Although amusing and sarcastic, the lack of a sympathetic central character and/or any female characters of note make The Red Room a bit of a false start in terms of the central themes in Scandinavian literature.  The overwhelming theme of the rural Scandinavian life, absent here, dominates Swedish literature well into the 20th century, making The Red Room an early outlier.
 

Published 7/2/14
The Good Soldier (1915)
 by Ford Madox Ford

  I would say I've learned more about the varieties of human suffering that stem from marriage in the last two-three years of reading classic Novels than I had learned in the prior 36 or so years of my life.  That includes what I learned from my own divorce.  One of the reasons it's should a good idea to familiarize yourself with the world of serious art is that it takes the sting off the idea that your particular brand of emotional pain might in any way be unique or unusual.  I'm talking about pain related to failed love here, nothing more.

  "The depiction of an unhappy marriage" is almost a definition for the novel as an art-form, and The Good Soldier is yet another step in a growing narrative sophistication for tales (unhappy marriage novels) of this sort.  Here, we have two unhappy couples, an "unreliable" (cuckold) narrator, and trips backwards and forward in time.  Couple one is John Dowell (narrator) and Florence- Americans- he a wealthy dilletante, and she a sweet young thing with a "heart condition" that requires her to be isolated from her husband at night, from 10 at night till 10 the next day.

A poweful look from August Strindberg

Published 7/6/14
The People of Hemsö (1887)
by August Strindberg
Norvik Press 2013
Translation by Peter Graves

  Here is another tough book to track down. Twenty dollars for the just published translation by Peter Graves, and not held by San Diego Public Library- had to get it sent from the UCSD library. I think I was musing on this subject earlier- which is that faking that you have read all 1001 Books to Read Before You Die would be pretty easy with an internet connection, so I feel compelled to offer the details surrounding by acquisition and intake of each volume, lest a question be raised about whether I actually completed the task. Unlike Strindberg's first novel, The Red Room, the roman a clef about Stockholm bohemian life, The People of Hemsö is a "proper" novel, about the wholly fictional lives of a group of rural Swedes living on a combination farm/fishery on an isolated fjord.

 A main difference between Strindberg and other early Scandanvian novels like Gösta Berling’s Saga  by Selma Lagerlöf (1890) and The Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun is that Strindberg's third person perspective is less straight forward, less "mythic" than the voice adopted by Lagerlof and Hamsun. Strindberg holds himself back from fully embracing the characters or their concerns, putting The People of Hemso between satire and realism.

Black Bess: popular penny dreadful.

Published 7/17/14
The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s
by Winifred Hughes
Princeton University Press 1981

  I have a list of a few hundred books on my Amazon wish list, all books that were too expensive to acquire when I was interested.  Thought I might use my new library card to address that situation.  The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s has been on the list for half a decade- it is out of print and will run you at least 30 bucks on Amazon.  The hardcover edition I checked out from the San Diego Public Library will run you one hundred and twenty.  Hard to believe it has gone out of print like that- but the Amazon.com says that there is a new paperback edition coming out next month.

  In the 1001 Books project, the Sensation Novels of the 1860s are represented by two titles, both by Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone and The Woman in White.   According to Hughes, The Woman in White is the quintessential Sensation Novel, and The Moonstone is the main link between the sensation novel and it's successors: the detective novel and the thriller.   The Sensation novel is significant because it happened at a time when the over-all Audience for novels expanded greatly as a result of increases in the literacy rate.  The Sensation Novel was preceded by the Penny Dreadful, shorter descriptions of horrific "real life" events in fictionalized form.

   In addition Hughes runs through some of the lesser remembered exponents of the genre with separate chapters on Charles Reade and a shared chapter on M.E. Braddon (female author) and Mrs. Henry Wood.  To Hughes, the primary characteristic of the Sensation Novels of the 1860s is the melding of "Romantic fantasy" with "realism."   The Sensation Novel was also notable in how it evoked a tremendously serious (and negative) response, largely because they were so popular with Audiences.  This critical dynamic of "highbrow" critics looking down on "lowbrow" popular arts would hold for two generations, virtually unopposed until after the first World War. 

Published 8/29/14
Night and Day (1919)
by Virginia Woolf

  I've been reading Night and Day on my Microsoft Windows Phone Kindle App, and it has been a brutal slog.  Night and Day is 450 pages long in a paperback edition, which makes it 1,000 Kindle sized pages on my phone screen.  It has probably taken me more than two months to complete it this way, so long that I'm almost finishing up with the 1920s section of the 1001 Books Project, and Night and Day was published in 1919.

  Night and Day is early-ish Woolf, before he really integrated the influence of James Joyce and Marcel Proust in her work during the mid to late 1920s and beyond. Night and Day is still recognizable as a work by Virginia Woolf, but it isn't as formally innovative as Mrs. Dalloway or To The Lighthouse.  The story is a standard two couples set up, with a backing cast of ancillary family and friend.  Katharine Hilbery is the daughter of a literary family two generations  removed from greatness.  She is friends with Mary Datchet, a suffragette from  a less successful but still respectable family, who works on her own in a political action group focused on women's issues.  Hilbery is unhappily engaged to William Rodney and she falls for penniless academic Will Denham.  Of course, Rodney is wealthy and the approved match.

  What unfolds over 450 pages is a combination of something like the plot of a Shakespearean comedy combined with the cynicism of D.H. Lawrence.  It's not high modernism exactly but it is on that road. Woolf was insightful enough that the characters will resonate with a contemporary reader. Unlike her more experimental materials from later in her career, Night and Day is an essentially readable, if long, conventionally plotted and narrated early 20th century marriage plot.

Published 10/20/14
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
 by Arthur Conan Doyle
AUDIO BOOK AVAILABLE ON SPOTIFY

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Sherlock Holmes in the recent BBC series, which has drawn fans in America

     This was the first audio book I've ever listened to, period.  I found it in Spotify, where you could play it as two five and half hour "songs."  I listened to it mostly when running, and otherwise while driving between San Diego and Los Angeles.  So it is an eleven hour time commitment, and it seems like it would be much faster to simply read the 12 short stories that comprise this volume.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the classic single volume compilation of Conan Doyle's short stories, though they do not represent all of them- there were contemporary stories that were not selected for the book and there were the "return" stories, like The Hound of the Baskervilles.

   I would say that Sherlock Holmes is maybe the first biggest literary character to emerge out of English Literature in the 19th century: Frankenstein and Dracula would be the top two. Like those other two, Sherlock Holmes has long since become unmoored from the source material.  It's important to emphasis which 12 stories actually constitute the book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

"A Scandal in Bohemia"; Client: The King of Bohemia
"The Adventure of the Red-Headed League"; Client: Jabez Wilson
"A Case of Identity"; Client: Mary Sutherland
"The Boscombe Valley Mystery"; Client: Alice Turner
"The Five Orange Pips"; Client: John Openshaw
"The Man with the Twisted Lip"; Client: Mrs. St. Clair
"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"; No client.
"The Adventure of the Speckled Band"; Client: Miss Helen Stoner
"The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"; Client: Victor Hatherley
"The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"; Client: Lord Robert St. Simon
"The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"; Client: Alexander Holder
"The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"; Client: Violet Hunter

   There are other, unincluded short stories from the same time period, but they were not selected for this volume. Some themes do emerge: the theft of precious stones (The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle and the Beryl Coronet); noble clients (Noble Bachelor, A Scandal in Bohemia), and women in distress (Copper Beeches, Speckled Band, Twisted Lip, A Case of Identity.)  Although the enduring legacy has made Holmes a timeless figure, the original mysteries are interesting in terms of Holmes being simultaneously a "modern" figure, obsessed with the scientific method and the mysteries being quintessentially Victorian.  It is fair to observe that Holmes is a Victorian Hero, even though Conan Doyle was writing at the end or even beyond the end of that period, most of the mysteries are actually set several years in the past, with Watson being a veteran of the second Anglo Afghan war (ended 1870) and mentioning cases happening back in the 1880s. 

   Many of the edgier aspects Holmes character, his Cocaine usage, for example, are only mentioned in passing, his sex life not at all. 

    John Dowell is not the first "unreliable narrator"- the approach was not unknown during the sensation novels of the mid 19th century, but Dowell is the first unreliable narrator in the genre of the marriage novel.  He's not the first Author to use "impressionist"/stream of consciousness narrative technique, but the lack of knowledge and the way the knowledge (of her wife's affair with their bosom companion Edward Ashburnham) changes his perspective is the central technical concern of this book.

   Ashburnham is a bluff Englishman with a penchant for leisure and cheating on his wife, Lenora. Dowell revels in his ignorance, throughout the first hundred pages it is very much as if he doesn't want to reveal the truth: the affair, his wife committing suicide, the fact that Lenora knew about the affair.  He also learns that his wife had a prior affair, prior to their marriage, with a "low class" boy named Jimmy.

  Florence commits suicide after hearing Ashburnham, in the garden, with his young ward, Nancy- just released from a convent education.  The Nancy/Ashburnham's/John Dowell love rectangle also ends in blood and tears: Edward Ashburnham commits suicide, Nancy goes mad, and Dowell ends the story up caring for her.  Only Florence, who takes a dramatic turn towards villainess status in the third act, ends up happy-ish.

  It is an undeniably dark vision, pre-World War I in place and plot, but with a layer of dark, dark cynicism that guarantees it's relevance a hundred years later.

  

Published 11/17/14
The Great Tradition
 by F.R. Leavis
published 1948

   What is the proper attitude of a lay person reading classic literature towards literary criticism? Unlike great works of literature, great works of literary criticism are not particularly interesting.  The fraction of readers who read literary criticism of a title vs. those who only read the book is a tiny one.  But, if you're interested in the relationship between Authors and their Audiences, literary criticism is a great place to start because the corpus of texts is so very vast.

  The 20th century growth of university Literature departments in English speaking countries produced a surfeit of discussion about which authors were "worth" reading, and it is this discussion which has percolated out to impact discussion of all art forms by all critics.  Within this tradition (20th century English language literary criticism.) F.R. Leavis occupies a primary slot in both discussions of the novel and poetry.

  He generally stands for a text based approach that emphasizes the good (or bad) technique of the writer.  Gone are plodding generalizations based on biographical detail.  In The Great Tradition, his discussion of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Charles Dickens is heavy on textual analysis to the point where excerpts from the works in question often occupy entire pages in a book that is only 250 pages long.

  By "The Great Tradition," F.R. Leavis is talking about the great tradition of the English novel, referring both to the country and the language- best explained in the introduction to his chapter on Henry James (who was, of course, American.)  I must confess that I felt rather overwhelmed, both by the level of textual analysis, and Leavis' penchant for using minor works (which I haven't read) to make big points about one of his great authors.

  I'm not sure that it is so important to understand Leavis' specific arguments as much as it's important to understand who he included and who he excluded.  The two major exclusions are Charles Dickens- who he would later change his mind about, and Thomas Hardy, who he would never change his mind about.

  His awkward about face on the inclusion of Charles Dickens in his Great Tradition is noted in the 1963 New York University Press edition that I read by the inclusion of what I presume to be a later written celebration of Hard Times.  This portion isn't attached to the rest of the text, but seems rather tacked on.  The fact that Leavis could be wrong about such a major author is understandable, and is yet another example of how malleable ideas about canonical authors can prove to be over time, even for the most sophisticated academics and critics.

Gwyneth Paltrow, nude in the movie version of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens for some odd reason.

Published 11/20/14

Great Expectations (1861)
 by Charles Dickens
Audio Book

   I listened to Great Expectations on audio book because I just couldn't deal with the print version, and because I've read that Charles Dickens made a great deal of money reading his books out loud on speaking tours, and that such speaking tours were an almost equal basis for his fame and literary reputation.  Great Expectations is also the most popular Dickens narrative in recent history in terms of film and television adaptations.  There have been film versions in 1989, 1998 and 2012, and TV versions in  1999 and 2011.  There has been at least one television or filmed version in every decade since the invention of film.

Ethan Hawke as Pip in the film version that also starred Gwyneth Paltrow.

      First of all, it took me forever to finish the audio book edition of Great Expectations.  59 chapters, and each chapter averaged about 20 minutes of listening time, so 1200 minute, so about 20 hours of listening time, entirely when I was driving or taking the train between San Diego and Los Angeles or San Diego and El Centro.  Basically a month of driving, listening to Great Expectations in the car.

  As you would expect if you have a back ground in Charles Dickens biography, Great Expectations really works as an Audio book, since the characters are meant, in effect, to be read out loud.  Dickens, of course, did not read entire books on his tours, he would just do scenes, and much of Great Expectations best moments simply stand alone in terms of it being a physical description of a location in London or some portion of extraneous dialogue.  Listening to Great Expectations made me very conscious of how wordy Dickens is in the manner of having character using extraneous words and the employment of numerous character who circumlocute.

 In fact, you could argue that circumlocution is a major theme in Dickens and his dialogue, to the point where Moderns may think that it actually characterized Victorian speech rather than being a narrative technique developed by a specific writer due to the dictates of the marketplace and it's hunger for content.

  Excess time commitment aside, I quite enjoyed LISTENING to Dickens instead of reading him, since many of the annoying traits on the page come off as charming when spoken.  A reader needing to read several Dickens novel in a fixed time period might well contemplate a free version of one of his major novels as an alternative to reading the text.  Dickens himself would certainly approve.

John Polidori wrote the first Vampire story.

Published 1/13/15
The Poet and the Vampyr
by Andrew McConnell Stott
Pegasus Press
Published September 15th, 2014
(BUY IT)

The story behind the writing of Frankenstein by Mary Shelly is that she, her husband Percy Shelly, Lord Byron and two lesser known character: John Polidori and Shelly's younger sister, holed up in a mansion in Switzerland, had a contest to each write a ghost story overnight, and the result was Frankenstein (written by Shelly) and the first vampire story, which was credited to Byron but actually written by Polidori.

 So a reader generally familiar with the origin story of Frankenstein and Byron's role in the creation might be interested in learning more about that fabled weekend.  Presumably, that is the target demographic of The Poet and the Vampyr.  That demographic is likely to be disappointed.  Much of The Poet and the Vampyr reads like an excerpt from a recent Byron biography combined with excerpts from a Shelly biography and a biography of the Godwin/Mary Shelly family. 

Published 3/3/15
War & Peace (1869)
 by Leo Tolstoy

    I listened to a free audio book version of War & Peace using the app for the free e book site LibriVox (app and website both called LibriVox) and if you are looking to fuck with audiobooks but don't want to pay ridiculous prices for public domain titles, start with LibriVox.  War & Peace is of course a notoriously long book.  The audiobook I listened to was divided into 18 separate "Books" each with between 15 and 25 chapters, each chapter between five and twenty minutes long.  The first sixteen books are the body of the work, followed by two Epilogues, the first recounting the "Happily Ever After" scenario for the main characters, and the second being a lengthy summary of the "philosophical parts" of the book itself. 

  While War & Peace may not satisfy the modern tenets of academic history, there is no doubt that Tolstoy intended War & Peace to serve as a novel, a history and a work of philosophy.  His main philosophical point is that fate and chance operate strongly on the lives of individual humans but less so on the lives of groups of humans.   The characters of War & Peace are varied and numerous, ranging from Czar Alexander and Napoleon Bonaparte, to nameless peasants and children.  However, the major characters are the younger heirs of the upper aristocracy of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars.

   The two men at the heart of War & Peace are Count Pyotr "Pierre" Kiriliovich Bezukhov and Prince Andrey Bolkonsky.  Tolstoy switches between the perspective of multiple characters besides those two and also employs a third person narrative to handle sweeping historical and philosophical passages which could not possibly be narrated by actual characters from the novel.  The major plot of the Napoleonic wars is deftly intertwined the personal and romantic histories of the major players and their families, who are intertwined through marriage and the dictates of "society." 

  The majestic and aloof historical and philosophical chapters are counterpointed by the various romantic subplots in which Countess Natasha Rostova plays a prominent part.  The romantic/family portions of War & Peace are familiar to anyone versed in mid 19th century fiction but they work as welcome respites from the high drama of the battles and diplomatic maneuvering that dominate the rest of War & Peace.

  However you decide to consumer War & Peace, be prepared for a massive time investment.  It literally took me months to make it to the end.  At the same time, it isn't completely unapproachable for a normal type reader in the way of lengthy modernist classics like James Joyce's Ulysses.  That book experiments with narrative technique, vocabulary and subject matter in a way that is purposefully off-putting to a casual reader.   War & Peace, on the other hand, is simply a very long, ambitious but largely conventional epic novel.  The most challenging part of War & Peace is the length, after that it is smooth sailing (as long you dig other 19th century fiction like Dickens, Trollope, Austen, etc.)

    The time commitment is not to be discounted- it is hard to imagine my friends with children and jobs reading or listening to War & Peace.  Students are unlikely to want to spare the time.  I'm left wondering who, exactly, is reading War & Peace in 2015.  Non working spouses without children?  The long term unemployed?   How can you recommend to someone that they take fifty to a hundred hours out of their entire life simply to read War & Peace.   Unlike Ulysses, or other challenging modernist works of literature, War & Peace is unlikely to change your entire perspective about the universe.

 If anything, War & Peace seems like it would make a great television series for the on demand Netflix era, with the mash up of genres and extreme length.  Perhaps the best recommendation I can make about whether to read War & Peace at all is that the history of Napoleon's ill fated invasion of Russia is enthralling, and sure to be something that the reader will be able to bring up in casual small talk at some point as an example of utter failure. 

Published 5/4/15
The Brothers Karamazov(1880)
by Fyodor Dostoyesvsky
LibriVox Free Version- Constance Garnett translation


  There are so many thing that can be said about The Brothers Karamazov but the major categories are probably:

 1. The relationship of The Brothers Karamazov to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's other works, with particular attention paid to Crime & Punishment.
 2.  The relationship of The Brothers Karamazov to other great works of Russian literature, with particular attention paid to Gogol and Tolstoy.
 3.  The relationship of The Brothers Karamazov to 19th century literature in terms of influences on and as influencer, with particular emphasis on mid 19th century English novelists like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

 There is a fourth question, what is the relationship of The Brothers Karamazov to the modern Audience.  That question at least, is so easy to answer that it requires no analysis.  The Brothers Karamazov is a quintessential "bucket list" book, often regarded as something one is supposed to read and something one will read eventually.  It maintains this rank alongside other Russian novels like the author's own Crime & Punishment and Tolstoy's War & Peace, and non Russian modernist works like Ulysses by James Joyce.  I've listened to all four of these titles as free Librivox audio books, and if I could give one practical piece of advice it is for those in that "bucket list" category of readers or would-be readers to take advantage of the Librivox resource.  It is true that the quality of the readers...is variable.  But overall, you can't beat free, and the Android/IPhone app interface is quality.  I think more people would intake The Brothers Karamazov and those other bucket list type titles if they knew they could listen to them for free on their mobile phone.

    The Brothers Karamazov is typically considered as Dostoyesvsky's masterpiece, a reputation assisted by the proximity of the Author's death to the publication date, it's length and the strength of the work itself, a philosophical novel that is also a murder mystery, courtroom drama and novel of sensation in the mid 19th century sense of that phrase.  I think it is fair to opine that anyone who actually makes it to the end of The Brothers Karamazov has an investment in saying that their time and energy weren't wasted.  The Brothers Karamazov is one of those 19th century works of fiction that is so long that it contains both stories within stories, lengthy digressions from the main narrative and OF COURSE enormous philosophical speeches.    The enormous philosophical speeches are so synonymous with Russian literature that the genre of the "19th century philosophical novel" is tantamount to saying "19th century Russian literature." 

  However, I would argue that the lengthy philosophical speeches is Dostoyevsky's version of the lengthy digressions that authors like Charles Dickens used, often in the form of characters who speak around the subject and narrators who include scenic descriptions.  These scenic descriptions were very much a part of Crime & Punishment, but by The Brothers Karamazov, the locations of the events has faded into the background, replaced by incredibly lengthy dialogues between characters.  These dialogues are preset in all his works, but it is only The Brothers Karamazov that the dialogues and monologues alternate.  

   Personally, I prefer to Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky.  The intense mental claustrophobia of Dostoyevesky's protagonists make The Brothers Karamazov emotionally draining.  At times, the experience of listening to this book felt like drowning in the deep end of a swimming pool.  Tolstoy's expansive scenarios are like the polar opposite of Dostoyevsky's claustrophobia.  Linking them together because of their shared penchant for philosophical discourse is almost unfair. 

  By the end of The Brothers Karamazov, I began to perceive the influence of the sensation novels of the mid 19th century- Wilkie Collins is the most well known author from this period.  These novels combined supernatural twists with criminal procedure.  Here, the explicitly supernatural is absent, but there are more than enough freaks and geeks to keep the proceedings "sensational."  It's hard not to finish The Brothers Karamazov and not feel that he was writing for the same kind of Audience he would imagine would read Dickens or Collins.  I don't even know if Collins was translated into Russian, so that is just a guess on my part. 

The Francis Ford Coppola film, Apocalypse Now, is largely based on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and the success of the film has done much to secure the status of Heart of Darkness as a canonical book. 

Published 4/15/18
Heart of Darkness (1899)
by Joseph Conrad

  I listened to Heart of Darkness as an audiobook narrated by Peter "Robocop" Weller.  Don't forget he also played William Burroughs in the movie version of Naked Lunch.  I've noticed that the older the underlying text, the more difficult the audiobook.  On the other hand, Heart of Darkness is a novella, not a full length novel, so that the audiobook version clocks in at under five hours.  Length, I've come to learn, is much more significant for an audiobook than it is for text, at least for me, because I read faster than the audiobooks run.

   Despite having five book in the 100 Books list, only one has appeared on this blog because I'd read all of them before this project had crystallized: Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Lord Jim.   There is no question in my mind that Joseph Conrad is one of those authors who has been done dirty by recent trends in North American academia.   As I've written on many occasions, I'm not adverse to the diversification of the canon- indeed, I think expansion and revision is the main point of a 21st century canon, but Conrad should be seen as an avatar of that process, rather than a last gasp of the "old white males" of the 19th century.

 Conrad took an audience that had been habituated to see the developing world as an "other" and made it possible for audiences to imagine them as real places, where morality should apply.   To get the point of decolonization, there needed to be an understanding of the reality of those places, both in terms of factual reporting and in the life of the Western mind.  There's no question that Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness as a cutting critique of Western Imperialism.  The fact that even his sympathetic characters have attitudes that squarely qualify as "racist" today were liberal in the context of Conrad's time. 

  And of course, one should not attribute the statements of Conrad's characters to the author himself. The horror that Kurtz envisions as he expires on the riverboat back to "civilization" is the intersection of the western thirst for ivory with the eagerness of locals to abet in their own destruction.  Ivory camps in the Congolese jungle was the earliest stage of the colonial exploitation of Africa.  The early days vibe of Heart of Darkness is also established by secondary images: The early description of a French warship literally firing into the African jungle, apropos of nothing, hitting nothing, accomplishing nothing, is just as evocative as the later meat of the story.

Published 5/19/18
Crime and Punishment (1867)
by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  This was my third time through Crime and Punishment, and I feel like my second time listening to the audio book edition.  At 25 or so hours it isn't as long as you would think it would be, given the fearsome reputation and repeated use as a punchline for confessions about otherwise literate people and what classics they haven't bothered to read.   Crime and Punishment is a forbidding task beyond the length, featuring the pay-by-the-word style that is a part of any work written originally as a serial; with the complexity of Russian character names and a surpassing fondness for the declamatory style of various characters making long winded speeches, spelled by the narrator making even more long winded speeches.

 Today, Crime and Punishment gets credit for being an originator of the "true crime" genre- not entirely deserved given the gap between the original Russian publication and the widely known English translation in 1914.   I think this half century gap between publication in Russian and dissemination in English is often overlooked when Dostoevsky is lumped in with other 19th century English and French language authors.  The fact is, no one, or hardly anyone, in the west had read Dostoevsky before 1900, and real acknowledgment of his status as a master didn't come until 20 years into the twentieth century.  

  The tale of Raskolnikov, the existentialist student, and his senseless murder of a pawn broker and her assistant, take place almost at the beginning of Crime and Punishment.  The rest is more about "Punishment," and what punishment means, and how it is inflicted.  There is, at the heart of Crime and Punishment, something that could be described as a detective story, as investigator Petrovich compensates for the lack of evidence and weakness of the Russian judicial system to torment Raskolnikov into confession and imprisonment.    However, in true nineteenth century fashion we are also treated to hundred page subplots involving not only Raskolnikov's immediate family, notably his sister, but also the plight of a totally unrelated family, and their teen aged daughter, who is the love interest for Raskolnikov.

  Despite the panoply of characters, Crime and Punishment has a claustrophobic air, with characters closeted together in a fashion that strongly suggests the conventions of the stage.  There are some notable out of door scenes, particularly the trampling of Marmeldov in the winter snow by a passing team of horses, but most of the activity takes place in the rooms of the poor and not-so-poor of St. Petersburg. 
  

Published 6/4/18
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
 by Leo Tolstoy

  If you want to limit canonical authors to a maximum of three titles using early/middle/late as the three categories, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, written after Tolstoy's religious conversion, would be the "late" representative from canon mainstay Count Leo Tolstoy.  In addition to being a good example of his post-conversion work, it is also a novella, and clocks in at several hundred pages less than Crime and Punishment or Anna Karenina.

  Almost unrelentingly grim, particularly when you listen to the Audiobook while you are running, The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of the eponymous Ilyich, a provincial court judge in Russia, who spends the entire story dying in his bed, wracked by guilt and tormented by the meaninglessness of life.  His wife is unsympathetic, his Doctor isn't helping him, and for most of the story Ilyich is wracked by indescribable pain and torment.   As I said: it's grim.  Psychologically acute, but grim. Grim, grim, grim. 

Published 5/17/15
Howards End (1910)
 by E.M. Forster

  Please note, there is no apostrophe in the title- that is a COMMON misconception.  I've been making my way through Howards End for months due to the fact that I've been reading it on my Kindle, and I actually lost my Kindle soon after I started, and I hardly use my Kindle anymore because I have run out of Public Domain books I can download for free on my Kindle  (most books published after 1915 are still under copyright, and therefore, not free.)

  Howards End continues to be a  "top 100 novels of all time" list perennial and I suppose this reflects both its continued popularity with the reading public, a plot that straddles the Victorian and Modern period, and a writing style that is unobtrusively sophisticated.  It says something about Forster as an author that his books can be read as "light" or subjected to the most searching analysis.  I think reading Forster in after reading late Victorian authors like Trollope or early Modernists like Henry James is a mistake, Forster is best enjoyed in isolation from his peers, as a kind of literary iceberg.

  This isn't because he is so different, quite the opposite.  Reading any of Forster's books can not but help to evoke his literary contemporaries, and some of the subtle pleasures of his work can be lost amidst the natural human instinct to compare like works of art.  If there is some aspect of Howards End (or any of Forster's hits) that is incredibly path breaking, I straight up missed it.  Finishing Howards End months after I'd finished the other books from this time period left me feeling nostalgic for simpler, pre-modernist literature, where men were rich, women were poor, and books were about marriage, property and families.

 In the 20th century, the literature of these types of concerns would expand to encompass the entire globe, but when Forster was writing, the intent focus on the concerns of the upper and upper middle classes of England and American was almost claustrophobic, and in this way Forster would be the last of the Anglo-American author to tread the grounds of his late-Victorian peers.  I'm reminded of William Faulkner's quote about Henry James, "Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I've ever met."   Forster, a gay man who was not, in any sense of the word, "out."  Did not right about the physical passion that would obsess contemporaries like D.H. Lawrence.  His is the sexless world of the pre World War I Victorian aristocracy.   In Howards End, the half-German Schlegel sisters are his stand ins for the Bloomsbury group, and their sexuality is between unconvincing and non-existent.

   An illicit affair and illegitimate birth happens entirely off set.  Forster uses the birth to animate the end game of his inter generational story of marriage and property, but there is no physical passion on offer.  And clearly, this is something readers want and continue to want.

Published 6/13/18
Notes from Underground (1864)
 by Fyodor Dostoevsky

    I got through the existentialists in high school. Adolescence is a good time to read Russian authors like Dostoevsky and the French existentialist philosopher-novelists of the 20th century:  Like a typical adolescent, existentialists see the world as both a) meaningless and b) very serious.  My only observations about existentialism as a 40 year old is that if life is meaningless then one might as well have fun.  Dostoevsky was not fun.  He is the opposite of fun.   None of this books, whatever their other merits can be called fun, or even funny. At all. Ever.

  The one advantage that Notes from Underground holds compared to Dostoevsky's other major works:  Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamozov and Demons; is length.  Specifically, Notes from Underground is short, and almost everything else by Dostoevsky is long. Super long. Super long, and super serious.   Having read all of his books in used book store paperback the first time around- and all of them outside a school setting- I've been working my way through them for the 1001 Books project in Audiobook format.  Audiobook is the hot thing in fiction rn, make no mistake about it.  Spotify for Audiobooks- someone will figure that out, and when they do I've got my 10 bucks a month or whatever. 

Published 6/27/18
The Nose (1836)
 by Nikolai Gogol

   What is crazy about The Nose, a short story by Russian author Nikolai Gogol, is that it was written in 1836, almost a century before ideas like dadaism and surrealism began to break down the borders of so-called "reality" in a way we now find intimate to our day-to-day existence.   Certainly 18th century literature has some wild moments, but those are broad about more usually by authorial eccentricity than any ideological attempt to subvert reality.  Whatever could Nikolai Gogol, writing in the early to mid 19th century, been thinking, or doing.  Was he high? Mad? Mentally ill?   There is some comparison to a fairy tale, greek myth or even the conventions of gothic fiction in the 18th century, but the satiric tone differentiates The Nose from those other categories of prose.  Even the more familiar trope of social satire was not hugely popular in the early to mid 19th century.  You wouldn't call Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Turgenev "funny" by any stretch of the imagination.

  Unfortunately as to the circumstance which animated Gogol to write The Nose: The introduction by the Czar of "Tables of Rank" which allowed civilians to become aristocrats via service to the crown, even the most well equipped modern reader is likely to miss the significance without an advanced introduction to the back story. 

Published 7/14/18
Hunger (1890)
by Knut Hamsun

  The creation  Nobel Prize in Literature  in 1901 was a stroke of genius on behalf of the non-English languages of world literature.  The Swedes managed to create the world's foremost literary prize independent of the English speaking world, and that decision has played no small part in attempts to avoid the utter domination of world literature by English speaking and writing authors.  It also means that there are dozens of Nobel Prize in Literature winners who are almost unknown at the time they win the award, with English language translations that may be under distributed or non-existent.

  Today, a Nobel Prize in Literature by a non-English language author is a sure signal that those books that either haven't been translated or well distributed in English will now be so, and that an Audience for those books will be waiting.   I'm bringing this up because Knut Hamsun is one of the non-English language early winners who have avoided neglect.  Although it was his epic, Growth of the Soil that was seen as the key event prior to him winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, modern English language audiences inevitably have only read Hunger, which is his most well known and book and one that places in squarely in the proto-Existentialist literary world alongside Dostoyevsky and J.K Huysmens.

  In fact, Hamsun's self-abusing protagonist bears many similarities to Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of Crime and Punishment.  Crime and Punishment was published nearly thirty years prior to Hunger, and I found myself wondering whether Hamsun was familiar.  Hunger is a must for the would-be existentialists, short and to the point, it avoids many of the excesses of 19th century literature, and it isn't hard to imagine Hunger being published today, or at least in the 20th century.

Published 7/24/18
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
 by Oscar Wilde

  It is unclear how I missed The Picture of Dorian Gray during my sweep through the late 19th century.  It's a particularly unchallenging portion of the canon, biding time between the peak of the 19th century realist saga and the upset caused by the emergence of literary modernism.  Unlike many of the representative works of that period, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not a dour, five hundred page morality tale about life for farmer workers in the English countryside.  It's not, formally speaking, a modernist work, but Wilde's ideas about the nature of notoriety and morality foreshadow the invention of mass-median drive celebrity culture of the 20th century.  Wilde was writing before movies and television, but I would hardly be the the first writer to observe the parallel between the character of Dorian Gray and a modern-day Kardashian or Warhol Factory Superstar.

 Like many genre-surpassing science fiction authors, it is the strength of the idea, rather than the strength of his prose that likely led to the inclusion of The Picture of Dorian Gray as Wilde's sole representative work on the 1001 Books list.  This sole representative also likely reflects that Wilde himself was more of a celebrity than a literary giant.   Certainly, his reliance on epigrams is at time ingenious and also maddening. The depiction of Gray's descent into decadence is an almost inexplicable set of chapters about tapestries and objects d arte that reads like something written in the 18th century- as far away from literary modernism as is possible.

  Wilde's sin absorbing portrait has its contemporary analogue in the photo editing app people have on their smart phones, or the waste bins at the offices of Beverly Hills area plastic surgeons.

  The major advance in comprehension that I derive from the Audiobook version when it comes to Dostoevsky is the near constant hysteria of the narrator.   Notes from Underground I mostly listened to while running, alongside the Los Angeles River.   Dostoevsky's unnamed narrator, the Underground Man, so to speak, addresses an imaginary audience for the entire book- literally a man sitting in his below street level garret, talking to an invisible audience as if they were in the room with him.

  Conceptually speaking, it's a mind fuck if you stop and think about it. The reader is, after all, part of a real audience.  That the narrator spends so much of the book decrying alack of an audience is ironical- irony not being a particular strong suit in 19th century literature, this narrative stance begins to flush out what it means to be an "existentialist novel."


  It's also worth noting how unlike a novel Notes from Underground is- it's closer to a 18th century style philosophical diatribe coupled with an early example of the short-story.   To call Notes from Underground an "existentialist novel" is misleading on both counts, while still grasping the essence of the enduring appeal to an international audience of modern readers.

Published 8/2/18
Elective Affinities  (1809)
 by Goethe

  Elective Affinities was the first novel (indeed, book) to describe human relationships in terms of "chemistry."  Any references to the chemistry between two people in a book, film, song or in real life, traces its way back to this book, about an aristocratic couple and their affairs with a winsome young niece and a strapping captain, respectively.

  I would broadly describe my decision to read Elective Affinities in the form of an Ebook on my Kindle App on my Galaxy phone as a mistake.  Further, I would argue that reading anything written in the 18th century or before in anything BUT a physical hard copy book is a mistake.  It is one thing to tune out the incessant distractions of a smart phone while trying to read a genuinely engaging book, but it is quite another thing to tune out those same distractions while trying to just follow the plot of a book written in the early 19th century, in Germany.

  Elective Affinities is one of the final remaining titles among the 19th century selections in the 1001 Book list.  That brings the total number of 19th century titles within the list to 153.   Basically, 15 percent of the 1001 Books list are from the 19th century. Only 50 or so books from the 18th century and maybe 20 for the all the time prior to the 18th century.  Maybe another 30 for the time between 2000 and the publication date of 2006.  That means about 80 percent of the 1001 Books list is from the 20th century. It's a division that makes sense, but you could argue that the 19th century, which really is the peak of the novel-as-novel, vs. all the experimental paths the novel took in the 20th century. 

  On the other hand, almost every work out of the 19th century is a chore to read- like something from school.  Even the "fun" 19th century authors- Dickens- for example, run long, a consequence of the fondness for serial publication in that period.   Although Elective Affinities was published in the 19th century, it reads like something written in the 18th century.  It is recognizable as a novel and I think it's the first German language book on the 1001 Books list, but still, it's a chore.  It took me almost a month to finish it up even though I had it on my phone and so could have read it at any time.

Published 8/20/18
The Idiot (1869)
by Fyodor Dostoevsky


   The trilogy of major Dostoevsky books: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, are central to my argument that Audiobooks are not just an intellectual short cut, but a legitimate medium in and of themselves, and further, that the importance of Audiobooks is on the cusp of skyrocketing, as the digital/mp3 phenomenon that engulfed popular music belatedly makes it into the less freewheeling world of book publishing.

   Not every book works as an Audiobook- I've noticed that books from before the 19th century aren't very listenable.  Genre level books that can be digested quickly in print form take longer to listen to, even if the playback is sped up.  A crime fiction book that runs 200 pages in print still takes 7 hours in Audiobook format.  Experimental fiction isn't really susceptible to Audibook formatting, especially if the writer plays with the conventions of written speech or the format of the book itself.   But The Idiot, and really all of Dostoevsky's major works are particularly GOOD as Audiobooks because of his style, which features monologues that are often dozens of pages in length, and often made by characters in succession.  This declamatory style READS like a play, and hearing the Audiobook, it sounds like a play.  Hearing The Idiot made me think about, what if any, was the connection between Dostoevsky and the stage.

   Hearing Dostoevsky animated the oft febrile atmosphere of his work- while reading one of the 600 page books invites the reader to slumber through hundreds of pages without considering what, exactly, is being said and why.  I'm sure if I had read The Idiot I would have missed major themes and sub plots, but listening helped me focus on the actual events and avoid cursing my fate.

Boris Karloff's 1931 film portrayal of Frankenstein's monster has become synonymous with the book.

Published 8/24/18
Frankenstein or Prometheus Unbound (1818)
 by Mary Shelley

   There aren't many books more succesful over time than Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley between the ages of 18 and 20, and published in 1818.  Overtime, cultural memory has given priority to the imagery from the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff, which has also confused the memory of the original narrative via its powerful imagery.  Frankenstein the movie monster does not speak, the monster of the book can speak and is, indeed, literate and even educated.  The primal scene of Dr. Frankenstein giving life to the monster in the film via a jolt of lightning is moderately anachronistic, in the book Dr. Frankenstein is more clearly inspired by the "science" of alchemy.   An even more jarring contrast between book and film is the final denouement of the film, where the monster is pursued by the quintessential mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks.   This is absent from the film, which, aside from the flashbacks conveyed from one character to another, takes place entirely on a boat near the arctic circle.

  The book continues to be read heavily in school today- personally I was taught different takes on Frankenstein in both high school and college, where I had a literature professor who saw it as "the" novel. The combination of an early publication date, a female author, and the prescient theme of "man's" relationship with technology and his creations continues to be potent. I think the 1989 paperback edition I've had on my shelf for two decades dates from high school.   Having read that copy at least twice, I listened to an Audiobook edition, which I found disappointing, likely because of the epistolary character of the narrative.  The epistolary novel is obviously an important part of the history of the novel, particularly in the 18th century, where it constitutes a significant swath of the novels published, but by the mid 19th century it was virtually abandoned, and in the 20th century I can't even think of an epistolary novel, let alone the 21st.   Thus, it is an awkward listen, and perhaps the early 19th century, like the entire 18th century, doesn't work very well in Audiobook format.

Published 9/5/18
Fathers and Sons (1862)
 by Ivan Turgenev

  Turgenev is the famous third man of 19th century literature, not Tolstoy, and not Dostoyevsky, but honestly just as good really and none of his books approach the length of a single Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky book.  Fathers and Sons, for example, is a scant 226 pages, about as long as an average length work of literary fiction today.  Fathers and Sons was also written prior to the other canonical texts of 19th century Russian literature.  Notes from Underground was published in 1864, Crime and Punishment in 1866, War and Peace 1869, Anna Karenina 1877.

  Turgenev is credited with coining the term "nihilism" in Fathers and Sons, to describe the attitude of Bazarov, the anti-hero and predecessor of Raskolnikov and all the other ennui afflicted anti-heros of Russian literature.   What were to become the common themes of the mid to late 19th century Russian novel: an educated but directionless younger aristocracy, and the older generation of aristocrats who are puzzled by the ideology of the young are on full display in Fathers and Sons.  Again, like many other Russian novels from this period, much of the "action" consists of characters declaiming to one another across the sitting rooms of great houses in cities or rural parts of Russia.

  And compare the attitude of Turgenev to that of Dostoevsky.   A reader is likely to get the impression that Turgenev considers himself more of a "father" than a "son;" whereas with Dostoevsky it is clear that he is a "son" of the first order.  A generational shift, in other words, is what distinguishes the earlier work of Turgenev from the later work of Dostoevsky. 

  Like other works of 19th century Russian literature I've listened to on Audiobook- The Idiot, by Dostoevsky recently, but also War and Peace and Crime and Punishment in the not to distant past, Fathers and Sons is easier to listen to than it is to read, probably because of the frequency in all these books of the characters making lengthy speeches to one another without interruption.  Is such a book better to read than to listen to? I would argue not.

 Another issue with 19th century Russian literature which remains unaddressed here is the role of Constance Garnett.  She translated essentially every Russian 19th century literary classic into English in the early 20th century, and so almost every Russian novel read in English is via her translation.    Over a hundred years later, I would guess that an updating would have a considerably different feel.

Signet classics paperback edition of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Posted 9/13/18
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
by George Eliot

  The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (T/N Mary Ann Evans) was the first book I was assigned to read at my admittedly strange high school.   I was, of course, a precocious reader, but certainly not familiar with much literature beyond what could be found in the science fiction section of my local public library.  I was not impressed, fair to say.  Found it tedious. I remember staring at the cover of  the Signet Classics paperback edition I was reading and wondering how I was going to survive high school.

   Reading The Mill on the Floss certainly did not inspire a life-long love affair with literature.  Besides a brief flirtation with creative writing in college, I didn't read much fiction until after I had attended law school, graduated, passed the bar and got my legal career going.  Revisiting it as an Audiobook as I try to wrap up the last 50 or so titles from the first edition of the 1001 Books list, I wasn't struck my any recollections of the book itself, just the circumstances of reading it as the first book assigned in high school English.

 The Mill on the Floss is another Audiobook sweet spot in 19th century fiction, long enough to be more convenient in audio than written form, modern enough in prose style to be comprehensible to a modern ear,  but old enough that the voices lend some understanding to the words of the characters.  For example, the (female) narrator uses what I am guessing are Midlands accents for all of the characters, and also varies them according to levels of class and education, less educated characters sound rougher.  It's unlikely that any American reader would catch that distinction or even know what exactly a Midlands accent sounds like.

  It was around 19 hours in length- 612 pages in paperback- so on the long side, with a first act- recounting the destruction of the Tulliver family through the impudence of their mill-owning patriarch, Mr. Tulliver (no first name).  The rest of the book deals exclusively with the young adulthood of his children, Tom and Maggie.   Truly it was the voice characterization that made listening to the Audiobook of The Mill on the Floss a breeze compared to reading the 600 page book.   It has almost a soothing quality.  Of course, Eliot's writing, while not funny is certainly clever, and she can't be accused of currying favor with her prospective audience. None of her major characters come off particularly well, the character of Maggie being one of the great frustrating protagonists of 19th century literature. 

Posted 10/15/18
A Lear of the Steppes (1870)
by Ivan Turgenev

  Variously known as King Lear of the the Steppes in the UK and as A Lear of the Steppes in the United States, this 1870 novella/short story has to be one of the top 10 most obscure "core" titles on the 1001 Books list.   The inclusion is even more puzzling when one considers that Shakespeare himself was not included in the 1001 Books list.  Like the title says, A Lear of the Steppes is a retelling of the Shakespeare play about a man who gives his estate to his two daughters before his death with the sole provision that they look after him.   As we all know, that is a terrible idea, and like the underlying play, no good comes to Turgenev's Lear, one Martin Petrovich Harlov. 

  Other than the obscurity: there is no readily available stand alone edition in the US (that I could find) the translation I read was also dated, using "thou" and "thee" for forms of address, and generally lacking the kind of flair you see in other English language translations of Turgenev.

  This review means that The Brothers Karamazov is the final title from the 19th century portion of the original 1001 Books list.   Beginning in 2008, the 19th century is squeezed from both ends, with books being added to the pre 18th century portion and the 20th century portion in the revised list.  This portion of the list was heavily dominated by English authors and you could argue that to the extent that the 1001 Books list is devoted specifically to the novel and novel-like books, the 19th century is underrepresented.  At the same time- the books from this period are the least fashionable and diverse.  It is hard, in 2018, to make the case that what we need more of is books by writers like Anthony Trollope because they represent the apogee of the novel as a dominant art form.

   In terms of the 19th century titles, the Russian authors are the diversity.   Only Russian and women authors can make plausible claim to being diversity candidates in the roster of the 19th century canon. I suppose you could add English language writers from outside England, but that includes a lot of white men from Scotland, Ireland and the United States.

Posted 2/4/19
Obabakoak : A Novel (1993)
by Bernardo Atxaga

Replaces: The Infomration by Martin Amis


    A major theme that emerges from the 1001 Books project is that it a Noah's Ark of literature with at least one representative for as any distinct literary viewpoints and techniques as can be agreed upon by editors.  So it shouldn't be a surprise that Basque author Bernardo Atxaga made it in to the first revision as a representative of the Basque region, whose language is the second most well known  (Korean) language isolate (i.e. a language unrelated to other languages) in the world. 

  Obabakoak is putatively about the inhabitants of a small Basque village, but it winds and wends it's way through a variety of sources, and stories within stories.  The overall impact places Atxaga in the tradition of Borges and many of his stories evoke the pan-European tradition of post-war fiction about members of dispossessed minority group.  It's a trope that doesn't quite ring true for the Basque, who despite the presence of a long-running separatist movement, where never forcibly removed from their homeland, and who continued to maintain a huge majority of population in their traditional homeland.

  In fact, you could say that the Basque are the most succesful indigenous people in Western Europe- perhaps them and the Welsh.  Atxaga replaces The Information by Marin Amis in the 2008 revision of the 1001 Books list- I like Amis, but it's hard to argue his over-representation in the first edition.  I mean one book for Martin Amis, right?  London Fields? I think that's enough.

Early The Time Machine  by H.G. Wells paperback.

Published 1/10/20
The Time Machine (1895)
by H.G. Wells


 I'm going back and looking at my old posts, deleting old ones with under 100 page views and doing a new write up based on the Audiobook or a re-reading.  A classic is a classic, and it was always part of the plan here to revisit the texts.   As a canonical pick for H.G. Wells, The Time Machine has much to offer.  First, it is short- a novella- four hours as an Audiobook.  Second, it is his first published work.  Wells has a half dozen canon level books:  The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds(1898)  and Tono-Bungay (1909). Wells kept publishing- prolifically until 1960 (and he died in 1946) but nothing past Tono-Bungay is in widespread circulation.  Third, Wells essentially INVENTED the IDEA of a time machine, and time travel, in The Time Machine and it has proved to be an enduring fascination

  That said, The Time Machine is a pretty thin story, and the writing isn't what you call great literature.  Listening to the Audiobook this time, I was once again underwhelmed.  I was also made uncomfortable by the relationship between The Time Traveller and the Eloi Weena who is described as a child like female.  And of course there are the uncomfortable racial overtones of the Morlocks, although Wells was more shooting for a class distinction.


Book Review from 2012:
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells
p. 1896
Guternberg Project Ebook #35(!)
Read on Ipad/Ebook

  I suppose a useful specialty in 19th century British literature would be adapting Victorian source material to modern taste. Then a movie studio could call you up and be like, "Hey we're having trouble making this Charlotte Bronte novel into a movie, can you help us punch up the script?" And you would be like, "Hell yeah!!!"

 The Time Machine was a break-out hit for Wells- published first in serial form then as a book.  It has become an enduring text that has spawned numerous sequels and re-makes in the form of both books and movies.   The division it introduces between "Eloi" and "Morlocks"- one living above the ground- one living below- is a themes that resonates outside Wells specific milieu of early sci-fi. For example, you can see that same theme in many Zombie movies.

  It is, I think also uncomfortably close to Racist theories of evolution that mar late 19th and early 20th century thought.  I don't think you can really call Wells a Racist- he seems like a pretty progressive dude, but The Time Machine can't help but adopt a social Darwinist tinge.
  

English 19th century author Elizabeth Gaskell

Published 1/21/20
Cranford (1853)
by Elizabeth Gaskell

   Elizabeth Gaskell is a good example of a "forgotten" author being re-valuated and elevated from non-canonical to canonical status.  19th century English literature has seen some of the biggest come-ups, and really 19th century English literature dominates this particular category of the canon.  Gaskell, I think, comes in third on that list, after Jane Austen- number one critical reappraisal of all times and Charles Dickens, who finally gained critical respect in the early 20th century.  For Gaskell, this re-appraisal came in the 1950's as critics interested in social-realism and depictions of early industrial society (Raymond Williams) trumpeted Gaskell as a pioneer of this area.

      Cranford has some advantages from the perspective of a canon evaluator:  First, it is under 150 pages in print, which is welcome in an era where the prevalence of initial  publication in serial format meant book lengths of 400 and 500 pages.   Second, it's witty and funny.  Third, it is a good example of Gaskell's skill at illustrating a particular slice of English society: that of wealthy and semi-wealthy widows living in the small town of Cranford.

Dame Judi Dench played Matty Jenkens in the 2009 BBC version of Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

   Gaskell packs an amazing number of speaking parts into her 135 pages.  I counted 20.  You can see the influence of serial publication in the episodic nature of the chapters, but she does develop things to a major crisis.   Remarkable for a book written in the 19th century, there are no major male characters, and there are no young female characters, making this one of the first books populated my middle aged and elderly women.


Cranford (1853)
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Dover Thrift Edition
Originally Published: July 13th, 2011

  You know a book is a tough sell when the jacket copy says, "the novel remains a favorite with students and aficionados of nineteenth-century literature.  Both students AND aficionados of nineteenth-century literature, you don't say!!!

  Another sign that this is a lesser classic is it's appearance in a Dover Thrift Edition.  Here is an idea for Dover Press: Rename the line Dover Classics, Dover Thrift makes it sound like a book  you buy at a Goodwill for a quarter- have some class, some pride- after all you are publishing classics.

    Gaskell was a well known literary figure in her day- she wrote non-fiction as well as fiction, including a biography of her homie Charlotte Bronte.  Even though this is a book putatively about small town genteel widows and matrons, the timely references to characters being enthralled by Dickens Pickwick Papers (one of the few men in the novel is hit by a train because he is standing on the platform, so enthralled by the latest installment of Pickwick that he is slow too alert a child stuck on the tracks.)

   Elizabeth Gaskell in fact chose to be known as "Mrs. Gaskell" to the point that contemporary editions of Cranford read "by Mrs. Gaskell."  Although Cranford is not exactly what you call "action intense," it is well observed, and at 130 pages you can read through it in a couple hours.  Gaskell's country matrons don't sparkle with the life of those of Stendahl's The Red and the Black, but she does an equal job of portraying a specific time and place (the 1830s) from a vantage point twenty years in the the future (published 1852.)

   In the end Gaskell's genteel spinsters come together to save the day in the manner of a book like "the Little Women," it's a bit TOO pat of an ending but hey it's just a minor classic, nowhatimean?

Josian Bounderby of Coketown, as a risible a Dickens villain as one can find.

Published 9/13/18
Hard Times (1854)
 by Charles Dickens

   Charles Dickens was a major casualty of the first revision of the 1001 Books list.  Between 2006 and 2008 he lost six of his ten titles, including Hard Times.  I don't agree with their choices, specifically the decision to drop both Hard Times and A Christmas Carol, his two most accessible books, and the only two out of his ten original selections that clock in at under 500 pages.  The mere fact that Hard Times clocks in at 240 pages is sufficient to recommend it as a canon worthy title.   The reader receives the same reading/listening experience in a third of the time it takes to tackle one of the major works- and they are pretty much all major works.   It isn't as if Dickens was a great literary craftsman-  where we hang on his every word.

    Hard Times is also notable because of the direct critique of mid-Victorian period utilitarianism in the character of Josiah Bounderby, who might be the first character in the history of literature to conceal a normal upbringing in favor of presenting himself as someone raised in the gutter, while his mother sneaks in once a year to watch him from afar. 

  Like most of the 19th century canon, Hard Times makes for an ideal Audiobook.  Dickens himself was obsessed with reading his books aloud to an audience, and spent an incredible amount of his time both preparing and executing this approach on a series of reading tours.   I'm sure, were Dickens alive today, he would read his own titles himself on the Audiobook edition.   Along with Coetzee, Dickens is the only author to have 10 books on the original list.   His presence on the core list with four titles is second only to Coetzee's five.

  It's always worth noting that while Dickens was always a popular success, his critical appreciation lagged for half a century- it was decades and decades before he was firmly elevated and ensconced in the canon, and it wasn't until after World War II that he became the 19th century novelist- him and Jane Austen, appreciated in a way that almost escaped him entirely during his own life.

Published 11/5/13
The Golden Bowl (1904)
by Henry James

    Hooooo boy.  The Golden Bowl is the beginning of the end for modern literature.  I'm just speaking as someone who has basically read every major novel BEFORE The Golden Bowl, including those by Henry James, and The Golden Bowl is by far the most difficult novel to read including every novel written before The Golden Bowl.

  The difficulty stems from James' choice to use a quadruple first person narration that switches between perspectives with no central narrator.  James used a similar technique in The Ambassadors, published the year before, but there the only narrator is the central character.  Here, each member of the two couples at the heart of the book, each take turns making page long narrative statements that rarely reference outside events.

  By the end of The Golden Bowl I had gone online several times to read the Wikipedia plot summary but still couldn't follow the narrative.  I don't like to simply summarize plot but I feel its appropriate here because even having read the book I wouldn't be able to summarize the plot myself without spending another five hours plus reading it AGAIN. (1)

  The Golden Bowl revolves around a father/daughter relationship and their respective spouses: the older husband of the daughter and the younger wife of the father.  The intensity of the father daughter relationship "causes" an adulterous affair between the other spouses.  Saying that makes the plot sound simple but the reality is that you can read the entire book, as I did, with only having a vague idea about what is going on besides "father/daughter" "adultery" and "London and America."

 I'm telling you, I am no pansy when it comes to difficult Novels, but The Golden Bowl really is a bridge too far.  If there is a "slippery slope" toward the narrative incoherence epitomized by James Joyce, Henry James is the point where the slope starts pulling the rock irresistibly downwards.  I can see how literary academics would positively revel in The Golden Bowl, but I'm at loss to say how anyone could enjoy it.


NOTES

(1)  From the Wikipedia entry for The Golden Bowl by Henry James:

Prince Amerigo, an impoverished but charismatic Italian nobleman, is in London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, only child of the widower Adam Verver, the fabulously wealthy American financier and art collector. While there, he re-encounters Charlotte Stant, another young American and a former mistress from his days in Rome; they met in Mrs. Assingham's drawing room. Charlotte is not wealthy, which is one reason they did not marry. Maggie and Charlotte have been dear friends since childhood, although Maggie doesn't know of Charlotte and Amerigo's past relationship. Charlotte and Amerigo go shopping together for a wedding present for Maggie. They find a curiosity shop where the shopkeeper offers them an antique gilded crystal bowl. The Prince declines to purchase it, as he suspects it contains a hidden flaw.

After Maggie's marriage, she is afraid that her father has become lonely, as they had been close for years. She persuades him to propose to Charlotte, who accepts Adam's proposal. Soon after their wedding, Charlotte and Amerigo are thrown together because their respective spouses seem more interested in their father-daughter relationship than in their marriages. Amerigo and Charlotte finally consummate an adulterous affair.

Maggie begins to suspect the pair. She happens to go to the same shop and buys the golden bowl they had rejected. Regretting the high price he charged her, the shopkeeper visits Maggie and confesses to overcharging. At her home, he sees photographs of Amerigo and Charlotte. He tells Maggie of the pair's shopping trip on the eve of her marriage and their intimate conversation in his shop. (They had spoken Italian, but he understands the language.)

Maggie confronts Amerigo. She begins a secret campaign to separate him and Charlotte while never revealing their affair to her father. Also concealing her knowledge from Charlotte and denying any change to their friendship, she gradually persuades her father to return to America with his wife. After previously regarding Maggie as a naïve, immature American, the Prince seems impressed by his wife's delicate diplomacy. The novel ends with Adam and Charlotte Verver about to depart for the United States. Amerigo says he can "see nothing but" Maggie and embraces her.

Published 1/28/20
Lord Jim (1899)
by Joseph Conrad

 The first time I read Lord Jim, I didn't notice that Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness(and two other Conrad novels)  have the same "narrator" - not the true narrator but the man who tells the story- in both stories, the narrator is a man describing Marlow telling the story- a framing narrative on top of a framing narrative.  Marlow doesn't make his appearance until what would have been the second episode under the periodical/installment format- Lord Jim was originally published in serial format.   The first episode is a straight forward recounting of the fact-based tale of Jim abandoning the passengers of a steamer carrying Muslim pilgrims, using an unidentified third-party narrator.  I suppose it could be Marlow, but it is hard to see Marlow as anything other than a character introduced to extend the narrative, telling tales of Jim.  The Author says as much in his preface, which makes the comparison to sailors staying up all night telling each other stories.

   Conrad adds a third layer of narrative by introducing a letter, written by Marlow, concerning his lengthy interview with a dying Captain Brown, which conveys the denouement of the story of Lord Jim.   Written today, you'd call that post-modern, but Lord Jim was written in the 19th century, basically before literary modernism itself, with all its narrative tricks and twists, even existed.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, 1899, cover of first UK edition

Originally published December 2011:
Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
with a general introduction by Albert J. Guerard
p. 1899
This Edition:  The Laurel Conrad (DELL 5032) p. 1971

  The end of the year brings so many lists, and Lord Jim has made its share.   It's been touted by Modern Library and Le Monde for being in the "TOP 100" novels of the century.  Reading Lord Jim for the first time, I was struck by how pulpy the experience was.

  First, the book itself, a vintage early 1970s paperback that is of the size and weight to be sold in racks at a drug store magazine aisle in Topeka, Kansas.  The cover shows a fierce looking guy glowering, and next to that is a drawing of men cast adrift at sea- perched precariously acrest a wave.

  No doubt Lord Jim's classic status is over ascribed to the obvious psychological sophistication and under ascribed to the sheer mass market appeal of Conrad's exotic locations and multiple levels of accessibility.  Conrad is like a children's tv show that puts in stuff for grown-ups on the sly.

  Note that Lord Jim was originally published as a magazine serial, a mode of publication that requires popular audience interest.  When you are talking about the reaction of an audience to a specific cultural product, it is best to use the term "reception" to take into the account that there is a critical and popular response to every cultural product which is published.

  Lord Jim was published in serial the same year Heart of Darkness was published in book form: quite a one-two punch.  If you look at Conrad's Bibliography, it's very much the familiar pattern of an Artist achieving critical success early and popular success late.  Certainly, Conrad's catalog is not as well established as a Charles Dickens.  I would actually say that Heart of Darkness is really, really the only true, lasting hit, but obviously it's a "novella" so in some sense it must not "count."

    Heart of Darkness relates to Lord Jim exactly the same way an early 7" or EP relates to an LP relates for a musician: The first record demonstrates market potential to the audience, the second record fulfills that potential in the market place. Repeat. 

Published 2/12/20
Almayer's Folly (1895)
by Joseph Conrad

  Almayer's Folly was Joseph Conrad's first novel and I believe it was also his first published work.  Many of Conrad's novels were published first in serial format- a sign of prestige at that point.  Almayer's Folly isn't typically read these days.  It covers the same general thematic territory as Heart of Darkness(1899), his universal number one hit but also Lord Jim (1900) which itself has a strong claim to being "the best" early Joseph Conrad novel. On top of that you've got to take at least one of his admittedly spotty list of books published after 1900.   Many people think Nostromo is Conrad's best (1904) while The Secret Agent (1907) has had a great run over the past several decades.

    Even so, Almayer's Folly is Conrad's FIRST novel, and if you are going to give a writer four or five canon level picks, the first novel is a good pick to round out the group.  Even this group leaves out about 15 other novels, some of which could make their own claim on a top five list.   I don't even recognize a dozen books of that longer list.   Conrad had a pretty uneven reputation during his own lifetime and my take is that he is also has been a loser in terms of the expansion of the canon to include more diverse perspectives. 

  On the other hand there is no denying that Conrad was writing about the developing world seriously at a time when it was mostly used as an off-page plot point.  It's easy to take issue with his depiction as native people as "less" than his white characters, but his white characters, whether English, Dutch or "half-caste" are plenty nasty in their own right.  At least Conrad has non-white characters in his books, and they take place someplace besides London, Paris or New York. 

  I went back and read the reviews that came out when the book was published- there are a good dozen or so available inside Google Books-  The Spectator of London seemed to get the vibe, but the publishers tacked on a (since abandoned?) subtitle "The Story of an Eastern River" and it looks like it was marketed as an adventure saga. 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Published 2/26/20
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll  &  Mr. Hyde (1886)
 by Robert Louis Stevenson

   The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, generally gets the credit for "inventing" the idea of a split personality into literature, but it owes a very heavy debt to a book published anonymously in 1824, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner- written by James Hogg, also a Scot.  Justified Sinner wasn't a hit at the time, but Stevenson copped to having read it, and admitted that it influenced Jekyll and Hyde.   Published as the 1886 equivalent of an exploitation paperback, Jekyll & Hyde sold upwards of 50,000 copies after a positive review in The Times was published in February.  After that it became an early example of a what is now called a pop culture phenomenon, with Jekyll and Hyde eventually becoming a synonym for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Isabell Huppert played Madame Hyde in a 2017 remake of the novella, one of literally dozens of movie versions. 

  Jekyll and Hyde works just as well as an early example of junkie lit- Stevenson was never a healthy guy, and rumors have long persisted that he was variously under the influence of cocaine or ergot (hallucinogenic yeast mold) when he wrote the whole novella over the course of two days and nights.   Certainly, the multiple narratives eventually reveal that drugs are indeed the reason for the transformation from healthy Dr Jekyll to monstrous Mr Hyde.

  Characteristic of many canon level titles from the mid to late 19th century, before literary modernism made everyone self conscious about writing "serious" literature, Jekyll and Hyde isn't particularly well written, there isn't much of a plot to speak of, and if it hadn't been such a hit, it is doubtful that critics would have embraced it.   It helps the canonical status that Stevenson has a half dozen books that could be considered canon level-  Treasure Island (1883)is his forever number one, and then you've got good arguments for Kidnapped (also 1886) and The Master of Ballantrae (1888) in addition to another half dozen books that no one reads anymore.

Original review from 2012:
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
originally published 1886
this edition Barnes & Noble Classics
2003 w/ Introduction and Notes by Jenny Davidson


  Is it fair to Robert Louis Stevenson to say that he's over-represented in the original edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die?  He's got four books on the original list: Treasure Island- his break-out hit- published in 1883.  Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde- both published in 1886- and The Master of Ballantrae- 1889.

  Having now read all four novels- I feel like the answer is yes, he is over-represented with four titles in the original edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.  There is no way to deny Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde- but considering the sheer number of possible contenders, it's rather harder to make a case for Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae- even though they both possess the outstanding quality of being action packed, brief and easy to read.

   Stevenson is an Author who was as popular as he could be for a while- and then had that favor rescinded in a way that is familiar to students of other artistic genres- his success created a back lash, mostly by inspiring his followers to make him into some kind of bohemian hero saint.  ANNOYING!

  Still, there's no denying the enduring appeal of the Stevenson canon- Treasure Island- pretty much directly responsible for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise- and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde having entered the popular consciousness as a synonym for a schizophrenic personality.  Quite an achievement evening leaving out Kidnapped and Master of Ballantrae.

  Stevenson was hardly original in his subject matter- but his treatment of familiar themes was bracing and engaging.   Stevensons prose style was effortless- a forerunner to the airport novel style of the best seller list- and he's probably contributed as much to popular fiction as any other Author.

  Shame he's not taken more seriously today- I think his work could teach would-be Artists of many different genres how to maintain Artistic integrity while pleasing a broad Audience.

Russian author Ivan Goncharov

Published 3/9/20
Oblomov (1859)
by Ivan Goncharov

   Oblomov is a proto-existentialist satire of Russian intelligentsia circa the mid 19th century.  I checked out an Audiobook version of the C.J. Hogarth translation- which is clunky- there have been a half dozen translations since and if I'd thought about it I would have tried to get a more recent translation.  The Audiobook itself is one of the most amateurish versions I've heard since I abandoned the public domain Librivox app (which is worth checking out for the sheer variety of public domain books they have available), and the combination of the Hogarth translation and the ham-handed narration made for an unenjoyable listening experience.

  It also was the origin of the term, "Oblomovism" which means an inability to act, and serves as a near synonym for the later French term ennui.


Published September 2012
Oblomovka
by Ivan Goncharov
p. 1859

  This is kind of like a Russian version of the Herman Melville novella,  Bartleby, The Scrivener(published in 1853.)  Melville's short story concerns the exploits of one Bartleby, a scrivener working in the financial canyons of early 19th century New York who would "prefer not to" do the work that he is being paid to do.

 I frankly would have never read Oblomovka were it not for the placement it obtained in the 2006 edition of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die- and during a very competitive decade for break-out proto-modernist texts like Moby Dick, Adam Bede, and "classic" Victorian texts like David Copperfield and Bleak House.

  An interesting question about Oblomovka is not the reception it was accorded by the Russian language audience (hit) and it was soon after translated into English (or maybe not until 1915.)  Oblomovka has obviously survived because of the existentialist overtones of the main character: A Russian land owner who has the kind of malaise we associate with rock stars or people who use the phrase "post-modern" in conversations about Art. Oblomovka is a quick read, easily available on an Amazon Kindle or such reader and it def. gives some breadth to the World literature of the 1850s category.

 Goncharov kind of represents a transitional figure between the early rumblings of Nicolai Gogol- Dead Souls was published in 1842 and the beginning of the late 19th century Russian literary hey-day with Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky emerging to wide, international acclaim in the 1860s.

Russian author Alexander Pushkin

Published 3/17/20
The Captain's Daughter (1836)
by Alexander Pushkin

   I thought there would be more Pushkin in the original 1001 Books list- he only got one title, Eugene Onegin (1833)- which is a prose-poem-novel, complete with a rhyming scheme.  The Captain's Daughter, on the other hand, is a "real novel" about a Russian military officer involved in the 18th century pacification of the Cossacks and other malcontents in the "wild south" of the Russian Empire.   Only 140 pages long, The Captain's Daughter packs plenty of action into the plot and gory details even by 21st century standards.  For example, the Czar's armies were in the habit of mutilating rebels by cutting off their ears and nose and then letting them go.    The reader also gets descriptions of places like glamorous Orenburg.  Pushkin does a good job of conveying the vibe of 18th century Russia.  I guess, if there is a criticism/observation to be made it is that The Captain's Daughter is quite obviously derivative of Sir Walter Scott- it's a well established connection.

  Generally speaking I don't think Walter Scott gets enough attention as the first generally popular novelist in the way we tend to think of modern celebrity. In a way, his career invented the idea of "succesful novelist."   The entire choice to read The Captain's Daughter was guided by a perusal of the Library available Ebook offerings from the New York Review of Books- I love to see their editions, inevitably of obscure books and authors that I STILL don't know, but I never buy their books for the same reason, so I'm excited to get into the Ebook editions of these titles

Published 3/26/20
Little Dorrit (1857) 

by Charles Dickens

    I'm trying to fill in the holes in the Dickens bibliography left by the picks of the 1001 Books project.  Dickens is an overwhelming presence in the 19th century section of the original list, with 10 titles, reduced to four in the 2008 revision.  Little Dorrit didn't make the cut, but it ranks as one of his classics, and occupies a critical place in the central part of Dickens publication history.  It was preceded by David Copperfield, Bleak House and Hard Times and followed by A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, all selections from the first edition of the 1001 Books list.
  

 I gave the Audiobook version a listen- something like 30 hours long and a negative as far as choosing an Audiobook goes.  At least, if I'm checking an Audiobook out from the library for 21 days and the book is longer than 20 hours it is tough to make it through in a single check-out period.  It is no secret that Dickens is famously verbose, since he was literally paid by the word for his serial publications.  Translated into Audiobook format, it can make listening to Dickens a tedious experience, as he fills page after page with overly elaborate dialogue and lengthy digressions.  In print, provided I'm in the mood, it's entertaining, but somehow that didn't translate for Little Dorrit. 

Published 4/20/20
A Hero of Our Time (1840)
by Mikhail Lermontov

Replaces: Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell


   Mikhail Lermontov is one of those 19th century Russian writers who is only for the real heads. So much so that the introduction to the Modern Library Classics editions I read is written by Gary Shteyngart, a contemporary American writer who is himself also for the real heads.  Shteyngart situates Lermontov's place in the 19th century Russian canon in his introduction:

When most American readers think of nineteenth-century Russian literature, three figures loom over the horizon: the bearded giants Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, whose heavy tomes enabled the modern novel, and by their side the diminutive Chekhov, patron saint of the modern short story. Somewhere behind them, lost in melancholy, is Gogol, the bard of the absurd so perfect for our age. Then curly-headed Pushkin comes striding into view, his poetic genius chiefly recognized only by the Russians themselves, but familiar to foreigners from the Tchaikovsky operas of “The Queen of Spades” and Eugene Onegin. After Pushkin, Turgenev, a gentle Russian Flaubert, comes bounding up the steppe. And finally, behind Turgenev, a wide-shouldered, bow-legged young man appears, with a sneer on his face and a Caucasian dagger by his side. “Who’s that?” the American reading public asks. “Why, Lermontov, of course,” a Russian answers.

    A terrific summary of Lermontov's status in English translation.  Most of Lermontov's bibliography is poetry, and A Hero of Our Time is his main work in prose.   A Hero of Our Time features a classic Russian romantic anti-hero, Grigory Pecherin, The narrator is Pecherin's army comrade, Maxim Maximytch, and the adventure takes place in the Russian Caucasuses- which are a fair stand in for the "Wild West" of 19th century America, with Muslim tribesmen instead of Native Americans.

  It isn't totally clear in the narrative, but everything happens out of order- the last story chronologically is the first story in the book.   A Hero of Our Time is a great substitution for Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell- a good but not amazing book from an over-represented time in English literature.

 The thing about Dickens that doesn't bother me as much as it bothers other contemporary readers is the syrupy sentimentality- that is what Dickens DOES, and while it makes for some jarringly incongruous behavior, you can't deny that he represented the mentality of his readers, and that his books tell us as much about the mid 19th century reading public as any history book.
 

Author Tomcat Murr

Published  4/27/20
The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819)
by ETA Hoffmann

Replaces: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens


    The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr is another 19th century diversity pick from the 2008 revised edition of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.    It is a good pick.  First, German romanticism is sorely underrepresented in the first edition of the 1001 Books list.  Like early Spanish novels, the German romantics provided a model for 19th century writers in the English language.  Second, ETA Hoffmann is a good representative for the German Romantic movement:

 It was also in large measure via Hoffmann that early German Romanticism’s aesthetic discoveries, notably the ideas of the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck and Wackenroder, as well as popularized versions of Romantic philosophy, based on Fichte and Schelling, reached a wider European audience. As Thomas Mann observed, writing in 1940, Hoffmann was the only nineteenth-century German writer to achieve European status.

  According to the preface of the Penguin Classics edition I read.  Finally, The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr is an interesting text, along the lines of other early proto-modernists who played with the conventions of the form of the novel before the novel was even a thing.   The central idea of Tomcat Murr is that the cat is writing his autobiography by using the pages of a second autobiography by a German musician, Johannes Kreisler.  Again, from the preface, by Jeremy Adler:

Murr’s wilful destruction of Kreisler’s book, by which his work becomes a palimpsest, signals the novel’s fascination with reflections and plagiarism. This is also evident in the innumerable quotations from Goethe, Shakespeare, Mozart and many others. Literature arises through a dialogue with earlier art, being both imitation and aesthetic cannibalism. While Murr’s pompous name-dropping satirizes cultural pretensions, at a deeper level the literary cannibalism affirms how art depends on earlier art to survive. Names like ‘Hector’ and ‘Achilles’ indicate that art after Homer consists in rearranging shards – like shaking coloured glass in a kaleidoscope.

  These good arguments aside, The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr is likely to be a struggle for any modern reader, since early 19th century German rendered into English is about as awkward as 18th century English is to read.

19th century print of Jans Kohlhaas, the Saxon merchant whose feud with a local noble inspired the plot of Michael Kohlhaas (1808) by Heinrich von Kleist

Published 4/28/20
Michael Kohlhaas (1808)
 by Heinrich von Kleist

 Replaces:  The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens


  Michael Kohlhaas is an early German novella, based on the real-life story of Hans Kohlhase, a merchant who lived in Saxony (now Germany) in the 16th century.  His grievance against a local nobleman resulted in a small-scale civil conflict which ended in his execution.   Michael Kohlhaas has long been considered a classic in the original German- Franz Kafka swore by it- one of the two public appearances he made in his life was to read from Michael Kohlhaas.

  The novella follows the "based on" story closely.  The prose- and this is something I noticed in Tomcat Murr by E.T.A. Hofmann- the translated German reads like English from the 18th, not 19th century.  Which is to say that Michael Kohlhaas isn't a fun read, but at least it is short (94 pages.) Compare the length of Michael Kohlhaas to the book it replaces in the 1001 Books project, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, in addition to not being one of Dickens top 5 books is almost 700 pages long.

Map of Sicily.  The 19th century Sicilian literary scene was based out of Catania.

Published 4/28/20
The Viceroys (1894)
 by Frederico De Roberto

Replaces; Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

  The Viceroy's is a late 19th century, naturalist style, "great family" novel, about a family of Spanish descended nobility who live in Sicily during the 19th century.   They are called the Viceroy's because at one point they represented the Spanish monarchy when Spain controlled Sicily.  The book sees the family pass out of the last remnants of feudalism into the world of parliamentary democracy.   The Viceroy's didn't make into English for decades- the 2016 re-print edition I read indicated the first english translation was after 1960.

   I hate to always be mentioning the length of books, but at a dense 640 pages, The Viceroys can be a slog, particularly an early, important section of the book that has to do with inheritance after the death of the head of the family (who is a woman):

  ‘The institution of an entail may be requested by those whose names are found inscribed either in the Golden Book or in other registers of nobility, by all those in the legitimate possession of titles granted at some time in the past, and finally by those persons who belong to families of known NOBI-LI-TY in the kingdom of the two Sicilies …’ ‘I believe the Giulente are noble,’ said Lucrezia, before her aunt had finished, and without raising her eyes. ‘I on the other hand believe they’re ignoble,’ rebutted Donna Ferdaninda dryly. ‘If they possessed documents to prove it they’d have obtained the royal consent.’

  Anyone up for a discussion of the role of entail in feudal Sicily?  Events pick up as the youngest scion becomes involved in electoral politics.  Almost every character is unlikable.  The family, as a whole, is unlikable, but there is no denying the status of The Viceroys as a "lost classic" of Italian literature.

Published 4/29/20
 The Crime of Father Amaro (1875)
by  Jose Maria Eca de Queiros

Replaces: The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne


  The Crime of Father Amaro is a straight-forward hit piece on the Portuguese clergy.  Father Amaro, a young man and a bit of a dandy, is pushed into the priest hood by aristocratic patrons.  After freezing his ass off in a remote parish, he engineers a transfer to a wealthy province in central Portugal, Leiria.  There he falls in with a posse of decadent clergymen who spend their days hanging out with wealthy widows, eating, drinking and yes, fucking.   Amaro quickly falls for Amelia, the daughter of the mistress of one of his superiors, and an illegitimate pregnancy ensues.  Meanwhile, Jaoo Eduardo, a local clerk and free-thinker, becomes jealous of Amaro and Amelia- his goal being marriage to Amelia- and his attempts to thwart the pair end up with him exiled on a boat to Brazil.

Published 5/5/20
Dom Casmurro (1899)
 by Machado de Assis

Replaces:  Fortunata y Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós

    Brazil gets into the 19th century chapter of the revised version of 1001 Books with Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis, replacing another Iberian book by Benito Perez Galados, a rare latin-for-latin swap in the second edition, where most of the traffic has been in favor of Spanish and German language titles replacing English language books by over-represented English and American authors.

   The elevator pitch for Dom Casmurro is "jealous husband is betrayed(?) by unfaithful wife with best friend." Bento Santiago is the narrator, an unreliable one at that, who eschews a life as a Priest in favor of becoming a lawyer and marrying his childhood sweetheart.  Much like the protagonist of He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope (published in 1869), Santiago becomes obssessed with the idea that his wife was unfaithful to him, even in the absence of any evidence.  Unlike Trollope, Assis does not take 1000 pages to get there.   Brazilian language critics swear by Machado de Assis, but I didn't find much to love in Dom Casmurro.

Spanish author (and woman) Emilia Pardo Bazan

Published 5/20/20
The House of Ulloa (1886)
by Emilia Pardo Bazan

Replaces; The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert

  The House of Ulloa is a good example of the "lost/rediscovered classic," originally published in Spain in 1886, it didn't receive an English translation until Penguin took the plunge in 1990.  Emilia Pardo Bazan is the first Spanish speaking woman to appear on the 1001 Books list, and I think she is the only female writer from Spain (as supposed to Latin America) to make it onto any edition
of the list. 

   In terms of the book itself,  Bazan shows clear influence from Zola and the school of French Naturalism:

   Inspired by the Naturalism of contemporary French writers (in particular the Goncourt brothers and Émile Zola), she set out to portray the world in her fiction as accurately and truthfully as possible. This can be seen in The House of Ulloa, for example, in her endeavour to capture every detail of the wild Galician landscape, including its abrupt and dramatic changes of light and mood; in her pursuit of the psychological, physiological, genetic and social factors behind character and motive; in her brave exposure of moral decadence in the world of politics and the nobility; in her frank portrayal of violence and poverty; in her attempts at dialectal verisimilitude in the dialogue of her lower-class characters. (from the introduction)

   Like other books from this period and place (southern Europe) the book bridges the gap between the late end of Feudalism and the rise of representative democracy, albeit in a most cynical, corrupt form.

   

  Weighing in at around 500 pages, The Crime of Father Amaro isn't a walk in the park, but the naturalistic style of de Queiros makes for easy reading- reminiscent of Zola.  I'd never heard of the author before this book, but he sounds like a big deal:

EÇA DE QUEIRÓS (1845–1900) is considered to be Portugal’s greatest novelist. Born in the small town of Povoa de Varzim in northern Portugal, José Maria Eça de Queirós was the son and grandson of magistrates and the product of a secret love affair—his parents married four years after his birth. After studying law at Coimbra, he came of age intellectually as part of the Generation of ’70, a group of writers, artists, and thinkers concerned with breaking socio-cultural traditions and connecting Portugal to the modern movements in the rest of Europe. For six months he worked in Leira as a municipal administrator which provided him the rich setting for The Crime of Father Amaro, the first Portuguese “realist” novel ever written. Much of his life was spent abroad as a diplomat, though he wrote prodigiously—novels, essays, letters, journalistic chronicles, and short stories.

  That is his biography from the New Directions edition Ebook that I read.

Published 5/21/20
Henry Von Ofterdingen (1803)
by Novalis

Replaces: The Albigenses by Charles Robert Maturin

  Henry Von Ofterdingen is a classic of German Romanticism, but it has little appeal in English translation unless you are interested in the influence German Romanticism had on writers in the rest of the world (England and France).   Romanticism has been incredibly succesful as an ideology espoused by artists (and would be artists).   During my time around the music industry it has been fascinating to see artists fully in bed with major multi-national corporations and worth millions of dollars talk about themselves the same way the protagonist of this early 19th century novel talks about himself.

  It replaces The Albigenses by Charles Robert Maturin, a six(!) volume pseudo-medieval romance that is basically impossible to acquire AND is also Maturin's second best book, behind the very accessible and entertaining Melmoth the Wanderer.

Published 6/5/20

As a Man Grows Older (1898) 

by Italo Svevo

Replaces: The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

    It is pretty incredible that As a Man Grows Older was published in 1898- it reads like a book from the middle of the 20th century.    Emilio, the protagonist is a clerk living in northern Italy.  He has literary pretensions but he's a failed writer.  He falls in love with Angiolina, an "earthy" woman who is almost ruthlessly unfaithful to him.   The rest of the book follows Emilio as Angiolina ruins his life by refusing to treat him as her one and only.  Svevo captures the theme of romantic/sexual obsession very well.    

Stylites- pillar sitting Saints of early Christianity (and as appears in Thais by Anatole France.)

Published 6/8/20

Thais (1890) 

by Anatole France

Replaces: Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

    I'm not sure I would call Anatole France a surprise omission from the first edition of the 1001 Books list, but I did raise an eyebrow when I realized he'd been left out- dude won a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his "brilliant literary achievements."  Today, he's all but forgotten, at least in the English speaking world.  If you look at an Amazon author search of his name, you'll see that two of his top four sellers are in Spanish- which is- incredible- for a writer of that stature.   

    He seems more like an author that would have been included in the first edition and removed from the second.   Thais is about Saint Thais a "legendary" convert to Christianity who lived in the Middle East during the 4th century.  She was a famous actress and courtesan before she was converted by Paphnuce, an ascetic hermit.  Paphnuce succeeds in converting Thais, deposits her in a nunnery, and  then spends the rest of his life obsessing over her, including spells sitting on top of a Greek column (they call them stylites!)  I had to read this on the native Libby app on my Samsung Galaxy- my least favorite way to read a book, but some library books don't allow you to read a Kindle edition.  That is fucked up.

                                                             Bulgaria in 1878 after it's initial independence.

Published 6/13/20

Under the Yoke (1888)

by Ivan Vazov

Replaces:  The Hand of Ethelberta by Thomas Hardy

   Bulgarian literature might be where you draw the line for diversity picks.  Under the Yoke is about the unsuccessful rebellion of Bulgarian nationalists against the Turks during the 19th century- Bulgaria didn't gain full independence until 1908 and partial independence under the Ottomans in 1878.   Under the Yoke occurs before either of those events, during the unsuccessful rebellion of 1876- a rebellion that inspired the subsequent Russo-Turkish war that led to independence.

  The protagonist is Boycho Ognyanov, a educated man who returns to his small Bulgarian village to foment revolution.  After some initial success waylaying a couple of local Turkish officials, his merry band of colorful Bulgarian-Christian rebels heads to the hills to organize.  Despite their initial enthusiasm, they are crushed by the disciplined Ottoman army. 

     

Published 6/15/20

Typhoon (1903)

 by Joseph Conrad

   Typhoon is a novella- a classic ripping yarn about a steamer that runs through a typhoon in the Pacific ocean on the way to China. carrying a hold full of merchandise and Chinese nationals, or "coolies" or "celestials" as they are called by the sailors.

   The obvious comparison is between Typhoon and  Lord Jim.  Typhoon is like a single song and Lord Jim is a full length album.   Basically, the recipe for an important swath of 19th century and 20th century "early modernism" is to take a normal 19th century adventure narrative and to graft layers of moral sophistication (and narrative technique) on top, and then braid them together.   That is Conrad's best work in a nut shell:  Heart of Darkness(1899), Nostromo(1904) and The Secret Agent(1907), all written between  1899 and 1907.

   Outside of that period there are his pre-Heart of Darkness output, three novels and one collection of short stories, and the period between 1913 and 1928, where there was a high demand for Conrad's work, but what emerged was of lesser quality.  Clearly, if you've read the hits in the bibliography, the next place to go is the pre Heart of Darkness period.    The irony of Conrad's career is that his financial/critical success didn't even start until Chance was published in 1913- six years after his last great book was published. 

    I listened to an Audiobook edition- which was terrible.  Tantor Audio and narrator Scott Brick: Bad job!  Joseph Conrad deserves better! 

Cover of the Penguin Classics edition of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

Published 6/23/20

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) 

by  Rainer Maria Rilke 

Replaces: The Golden Bowl by Henry James

    The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel, feels like a charity inclusion in the second edition of the 1001 Books list. Rilke is, of course, mostly known as a poet, but for whatever reasons the 1001 Books editors decided to exclude all works of poetry- inexplicable in a project as wide-ranging as 1001 Books, but that is what they did.   Thus, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge stands in for all of Rilke's work.

   The introduction, written by the translator, Michael Hulse, puts Brigge in context:

But let us now turn to the roots of the Notebooks, which lie in his move to Paris in 1902, his experience of the city, and his adoption of a new approach to his work. His response to it, as transmuted into the Notebooks, takes its place in a fictional lineage that passes from Poe and Charles Dickens through Knut Hamsun and Andrei Bely to James Joyce and Alfred Döblin, writers who all sought to make sense, in very different ways, of the metropolitan onslaught on the self. 

As cities sprawled, and the crowds inhabiting them became larger, and the technology (first railways and tramcars, then automobiles) became louder and more unavoidable, it could seem that human values and human contact were being stifled. The narrator of Hamsun's Hunger (1890), who spends the duration of the novel wandering the streets of Christiania (Oslo), admittedly bears a family resemblance to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment, 1866), but what is more striking is the frantic, pressured, often panic-stricken nature of his responses to the people with whom he comes into contact. 

This man exhibits, in every nervous recoil, in every frenetic surge of hope, the sense of dislocation and alienation that was coming to be widely recognized as a characteristic response to the experience of anonymity in the crowded modern city. In its exploration of this traumatic state, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is very much a novel of its time – of the Age of the Masses. In his self-consciously exquisite taste and rarefied reading, Rilke's Dane of course shares traits with fictional heroes of the fin-de-siècle decadence, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans's des Esseintes (Against Nature, 1884). Here too we are in the presence of a literary craft carefully deliberated and wrought, and Malte's passing remarks on a Charles Baudelaire or Gustave Flaubert only serve to remind us that Rilke was steadily thinking through the fundamentals of his vocation.

   I guess so, though the format of the book- 70 separate essays- left me grasping for the over-all plot.  Toward the middle and end I did begin to pick up on the development of the idea of a literature about books, a self-enclosed, hermetic space where the book folds in upon itself:

     Before books, the world was intact, and afterwards it might be restored to wholeness once again. But how was I, who could not read, to take up the challenge laid down by all of them? There they stood, even in that modest study, in their hopelessly outnumbering ranks, shoulder to shoulder. In defiant desperation I pressed on from book to book, fighting my way through the pages like one called upon to perform a labour beyond his capacity. At that time, I read Schiller and Baggesen, Oehlen-schläger and Schack-Staffeldt,41 and all there was of Walter Scott and Calderón. Some things came into my hands that I ought to have read already, as it were, while for other things it was far too early; next to nothing was suitable for the age I was then. And nonetheless I read.

     Rilke replaces The Golden Bowl by Henry James- hard to argue with that switch.  Does anyone really enjoy reading Henry James?

The first edition (Spanish language) of Platero and I by Nobel Prize winning poet-author Juan Ramon Jimenez

Published 7/10/20

Platero and I (1917) 

by Juan Ramon Jimenez 

Replaces: Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster

    Spanish poet and author Juan Ramon Ramirez won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1956, and promptly died in 1958, which is not how the Nobel Prize in Literature is supposed to work, being generally reserved for active artists, and not a "career achievement" medal, as many assume.   A side effect of reading through the 1001 Books list is the realization of how many Nobel Prize in Literature winners have little or no audience in English.   Many of the prize winners with little English language audience are poets writing in non-English languages.  The rest are winners from the earlier half of the 20th century- if you look at a list of winners- there are dozens of mostly central and Nordic European winners who are essentially out of print in English.

   Jimenez is in that category- his win was sandwiched in between Albert Camus- still a canon staple, and Halldor Laxness- who is still very much in print.  Jimenez, on the other hand, has an Amazon page that looks like the discard bin at a charity used book- his top title is an edition of this book that dates from the 1980's.  I had to buy a copy of Platero and I- which is a book of prose about a man and his donkey.  Each page has a different little story about the narrator and his donkey, living in a small Andalusian village.   

   Truly a baffling inclusion on the 2008 revised 1001 Books list, I didn't get a thing out of reading Platero and I.

   

This is the actual cover of the most recent translation of Life of a Good-for-Nothing by Joseph Von Eichendorff

Published 7/15/20

Life Of A Good-For-Nothing 

by Joseph Von Eichendorff 

 translated by J.G. Nichols 

Replaces: Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

  The German Romantics were plainly underrepresented in the original edition of 1001 Books, so including Life Of A Good-For-Nothing, which is almost like a companion to The Sorrows of Young Werther- since the narrator in this book reads Werther in this book- along with many other books- making it a kind of meta guide to German Romanticism circa the 1830s.  Von Eichendorff's unnamed narrator is an ancestor of both Bartleby and Holden Caulfield and Von Eichendorff is closer to crafting a "modern" story than Young Werther

Published 7/23/20

None but the Brave (1901) 

by Arthur Schnitzler

Replaces: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  

  I am a big fan of Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914 by historian Peter Gay.   Although Gay does not mention him, it was impossible not to recall Karl Ove Knausgaard's discussion of Hitler in the sixth book of My Struggle, where he opposes Schnitzler's Vienna to Hitler's Linz.  You could call it Hitler's Century, just as easily- I suppose that probably wouldn't have sold very well.   I'd never actually read anything by Schnitzler until I got to None but the Brave, his "first in Europe" example of a stream-of-consciousness novella.   While I was reading None but the Brave (also known as Lieutenant Gustl in the US), it occurred to me that James Joyce, who lived in Trieste and read German, must have been inspired by None but the Brave in this own books, which introduced stream-of-consciousness technique to English literature- but not until much later, years after None But the Brave/Lt. Gustl was published.

   Only 60 pages long, it consists entirely of the interior monologue of Lieutenant Gustl at the opera, where he is "humiliated" by a baker and contemplates revenge and suicide.   The copy i checked out from the library was the original United States edition- looked like it hadn't been checked out in decades!

Published 8/18/20

Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism(1845)

by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Replaces: Shirley by Charlotte Bronte

 

     Another 19th century snooze-fest from the revised 1001 Books list, this time from Argentina.  Facundo is a work of "creative non-fiction," blending geographical, economic and sociological "facts" about Argentina with history and a narrative about the life of Juan Facondo Qurioga, one of the prototypes of the South American "Caudillo"- a nineteenth century strong-man, typically a military man, who is an important predecessor of the 20th century totalitarian dictator and a vital concept in terms of South American history- continuing to the present day.

    One point that did come through across the centuries is that there has always been an intersection between Dictators and economics- one of Qurioga's primary innovations is insisting that he control the cattle trade in regions where he wins victories.  The caudillo is a kind of military impresario, taking clear inspiration from the conquistadors proper.

     But there is no disguising that Sarmiento is at best an ok writer, and unless you are specifically interested in 19th century Argentina there is little of interest.

Published 10/1/20
The Posthumous Memoirs Bras Cubas (1881)
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Replaces: On the Eve by Ivan Tugenev

  Bras Cubas is a "lost classic" of Brazilian literature which has benefited from the rejiggering of the canon to include more voices from the developing world. I've pointed out on several occasions that many of these books- particularly those from before World War II, read like an extension of European influences from the prior century.  The very idea of a posthumous memoir will inevitably bring to mind Tristam Shandy, and it is no coincidence that Bras Cubas is often compared to it.  Bras Cubas, the narrator, is a bit of a dandy, and the narrative, about being a sensitive rich guy in Brazil during the mid 19th century, isn't going to expand your horizons as a reader.

   Earlier this year Penguin Classics published a new translation- complete with an introduction by Dave Eggers.   His essay wasn't particularly interesting, but Flora Thompson-Devaux does an excellent job of situating the book for unfamiliar readers (i.e. everyone):

The average non-Brazilian reader might be forgiven for not expecting anything whatsoever. After all, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas was Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s first novel published in English, seventy years after its release and nearly a half-century after its author’s death. “The name of Machado de Assis will probably be unknown to nine out of ten people who pick up this book,” hazarded one of the early reviews of William Grossman’s pioneering 1952 translation. One would be hard-pressed to alter that figure today, even after Brás Cubas has won over such illustrious writers as Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, John Barth, and Philip Roth.

    I'd never heard of him until I saw the listing in the second edition of 1001 Books.  Here is a good quip on the nature of his peculiar appeal:

What was it that made Brás Cubas so strange? Writing in the 1990s, the Brazilian critic Wilson Martins commented that in nineteenth-century Brazil, Machado was seen as an eighteenth-century writer; that in twentieth-century Brazil, he was seen as a nineteenth-century writer; and that outside Brazil, by the twentieth century he was starting to be seen as a twenty-first-century writer.

Published 3/20/18
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
 by Arthur Conan Doyle

   No one would argue that the Sherlock Holmes mysteries written by Arthur Conan Doyle were Literature, capital L, but it would be equally hard to argue that Doyle created the most memorable fictional character in 20th century fiction.  Any canonical status for a selection from the original Sherlock Holmes mysteries is surely based on the enduring popularity of the fictional character, rather than a fondness for the writing of Arthur Conan Doyle.

  I've read The Hound of the Baskervilles at least two or three times, and I've seen a movie/tv version at least once, so I thought I would try the re-read on Audio book, my new, most favorite way to take in a book.  I sense, from the limited discussions I've had with peers about that the format, that it is frowned upon by serious readers, but I think, in many cases, it provides a better experience for the reader/listener, particularly when the text is familiar to the reader.  Unless the writing is particularly challenging, little is lost from not having the written text available.  When listening to an audio book, there is ample time to consider the mechanical elements of the plotting and the relationship between character and story.

  Out of the original Sherlock Holmes mysteries, The Hound of the Baskervilles was likely selected because it is widely considered to  be the "best" original story about Holmes.  It was the first story wrote after apparently consigning Holmes to death in The Final Solution, written sometime after the first group of stories brought the stories to the attention of the reading public.  The gap between that first group and Baskervilles was approximately 8 years, long enough to give Doyle ample time to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of his character.  

Dorothy Richardson, whose Pointed Roofs was the first "stream of consciousness" novel- beating Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by a year. 

Published 6/25/18(Book 1/13 Pilgrimage series)
Pointed Roofs (1915)
by Dorothy Richardson

  Pointed Roofs is book one in her thirteen book Pilgrimage series, basically a life long roman a clef covering the experience of Miriam Henderson- in Pointed Roofs, Henderson moves to Germany to work as an English teacher/chaperon in a girls school.   Richardson's claim to fame is that the first usage of the term "stream of consciousness" as applied to a novel was a description of this book, making Pointed Roofs the first stream of consciousness novel, by definition.  In case you were wondering, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce was published in 1916.

  Status as literary trailblazer aside, Pointed Roofs most resembles something written by D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, down to the reference points- the sending of an English girl abroad to Germany in the time before World War I is a very common plot point/characteristic in the English literature of this time period.  Miriam Henderson, the Richardson stand in, is that spectacular in that regard.  Compare her, for example, to the Lady Chatterly of Lady Chatterley's Lover, who boasts of being deflowered at a German summer camp.  Hendersons' adventures are plain to the point of banal, which I suppose is on purpose, but it doesn't make for scinelatting reading in 2018- the library copy I checked out was the original American edition from the mid 1920's- sure sign that there is a total lack of audience in this country.  Call her a forgotten trailblazer. 

Published 6/27/18
Red Clocks (2018)
by Leni Zumas


  I would call it a fair argument that the commercial and critical success of the Hulu version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale has spawned a tidal wave of novels which combine dystopian genre conventions with feminist concerns to produce work which appeal both to a popular and critical audience. For proof, look no further than The Handmaid's Tale itself, but also The Hunger Games for an example on the more popular side of the spectrum.  Or, there are a half dozen works of literary fiction published in the last year that maybe haven't obtained a huge popular audience, but succeeded in drawing a combination of writing talent and publishing savvy.

  Red Clocks arrived- in a well produced Audiobook format- as a best-seller from earlier this year.  Reviews have downplayed the genre-dystopian influence- a widely circulated quote by the author mentions that the events that precede the action of Red Clocks: A constitutional "right to life" amendment that bans abortion as well as in-vitro fertilization, could take place, "tomorrow."   I'm not normally someone who picks apart science fiction books for lacking "realism," but I would beg to differ that the events in Red Clocks are potentially around the corner.

   Again with the caveat that I am not usually someone who questions the plausibility of a fictional work, as a criminal defense lawyer who works in federal court, I take issue with one of the central elements of the book: A prosecution, at the state level, by a district attorney, of a local (rural Oregon) witchy woman who is accused of trying to induce an abortion at the behest of the wife of the local High School Principal.   Assuming the accuracy of the statement that a Constitutional Amendment was passed outlawing Abortion, a prosecution for a violation of this amendment (and any resulting law) would be in Federal and not state court.

   Perhaps the author's defense is that she was trying to simplify the plot for a best-seller level of popular audience, and I would accept that, but if the Federal Government got it together to outlaw abortion totally and start prosecuting people, those prosecutors would be working for the federal government, and they wouldn't be state court District Attorney's, as portrayed throughout Red Clocks.   An easy, and accurate analogy is the situation under Prohibition.   Bootleggers were prosecuted under Federal law, in Federal court.  I guess...Oregon could pass a law saying that attempted abortion is attempted murder under state law, but that is not how Zumas writes it- all the legal talk involves the federal laws involved.

  I wouldn't even point it out but for the fact that Red Clocks made it to a best-seller list, so people are obviously taking the ideas seriously- and they should- because the central dilemma of the rural high school student who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy is already true in many parts of the country where abortions are dramatically restricted at the state level.   A major strand of plot concerns the attempts by a teacher of the high school student and her attempts with artificial insemination.  Zumas is on shakier ground from an audience empathy point of view with the teacher, something the character herself struggles with on almost every page.

  The paths of the major characters: student, teacher, mid wife/healer and wife intersect in surprising and unexpected ways, blending the concerns of plot with the larger explorations of the attitudes towards child bearing and child rearing.   Zumas differentiates the perspectives of the different characters by using the title of the character, "Student," "Wife," "Healer." etc.  I may not be using the exact right terms, not having the book in front of me.  A necessary component of almost all dystopian fiction is that the societal changes happen off stage and in the past.  Any in depth discussion wouldn't make it past the pen of editor looking for the human dimension.  At the same time, the societal changes can't be so far back in the past that the characters don't understand the difference- again- characters that have no framework towards the "before" time are likely to alienate any substantial audience, one that lacks the patience to decipher a new language or guess at character motivations.

  In this way, the very near present of Red Clocks pushes the boundaries right to the point of departing from genre convention entirely, making it a straight forward work of domestic fiction with a avowedly feminist perspective , the like of which have now been winning awards for decades.   It's hard not to visualize an HBO level version of Red Clocks as a television show.  With four major perspectives there are plenty of roles to go around, and length to be drawn out.  I'd be surprised if the visual rights haven't already been sold.  

Published 6/29/18
The Maze at Windemere (2018)
 by Gregory Blake Smith

  Gregory Blake Smith is no stranger to the literary fiction scene.  He has four novels under his belt, a couple collections of short stories and a handful of literary prizes.  Unlike his other books, The Maze at Windermere has a major publisher behind it (Viking) and it also has a mixture of high concept flair and careful character development that make it a potential major literary prize winner.

  What he doesn't have is a major best seller.  The Maze at Windermere is an ambitious attempt to bridge the gap between literary and popular fiction, cutting across four centuries of the lives of the denizens of Newport, Rhode Island.   Smith uses a handful of narrators: A young woman living in the late 17th century, left orphaned when her father fails to return from a trip to the west indies;  and English military officer who falls in love with a local Jewess, a gay man about town from the 19th century, seeking the hand of wealthy heiress; the young Henry James, who falls in love(?) with the daughter of a local factory owner and a present-day tennis pro, who is the lead narrator- who falls in love with Alice DuPont, the (fictional) heiress to the plastics fortune, who suffers both from cerebal palsy and bi-polar disorder.

 Each of the plots deals with a different aspect of love and it's difficulties.  The different stories are unified by the character of Newport itself, which gets its own narrator via the excitable ramblings of present day Alice DuPont.   The other narrative threads are more or less effective- the Henry James thread often reminded me of The Master by Colm Toibin.   The other major characters are thoughtfully drawn, Smith has both a clear grasp of period convention and the expectations of modern audiences, and he manages to satisfy both.

  Six months after release, it doesn't appear that The Maze at Winderwere is a major commercial hit- leaving Viking hoping for a Pulitzer or National Book Award Nomination. I'm not sure I see that coming, but I am wrong all the time.

Two-time National Book Award Nominee Rachel Kushner, will the third time be the charm?

Published 6/29/18
The Mars Room (2018)
by Rachel Kushner

     Rachel Kushner is a two-time National Book Award finalist, increasing the likelihood that The Mars Room, here new book about life inside the lifers unit at a California Woman's Prison, will actually win said National Book Award.  It could win other major prizes as well, or at least make it to the nomination stage.   There has been a reasonable amount of corresponding commercial success, with the Amazon page carrying a "New York Times Bestseller" notice.  Given the diversity of voices that Kushner deploys around the central character, a young-ish white woman from the unfashionable Sunset District in San Francisco.   Romy Hall grows up with an absent/non-existent father and a mother who seems depressed and uninterested in here.  She drifts into life as a stripper, working at The Mars Room of the title.

  What is clear from page one is that Hall is in prison, serving two consecutive life sentences for murdering a stalker. (Never made clear is how one gets two consecutive life sentences for a single murder- I'm saying that as a practicing criminal defense attorney from the state of California.)   Kusner introduces different voices- a Latina gangster from Southern California who becomes Romy's friend, Doc, the ex-cop who helped a female death row inmate kill a hitman who had killed her husband.  Eventually we even get around to the dead stalker himself, who as it turns out, isn't that bad a dude.

  Kushner shies away from treacly maudlin prison narrative story lines, laudatory quotes from Stephen King might have a potential reader thinking otherwise- but Kushner has a strong grasp of the realities of the criminal justice system in California, and she doesn't go overboard making Hall into some kind of saint-like victim.   The Audiobook version I listened to, narrated by the author herself, was exceptional, and I would recommend it.  I would say that The Mars Room has a decent chance at winning the National Book Award this year, certainly a shortlist nomination.

Scene from the Glasgow Underworld, location of The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter by Malcolm Mackay, book one of his Glasgow Trilogy

Published 7/12/18
The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter(Glasgow Trilogy Book 1) (2013)
by Malcolm Mackay

   Like science fiction/fantasy, crime fiction is another genre where I'm on the look out for books which cross the divide between genre and literature.   This escape from a genre pigeonhole into the wider and more prestigious world of literature is a cardinal development of the 20th century cultural-industrial complex, where interested professionals (critics, professors, graduate students of literature) comb non-literary territory to "elevate" and with it, their own prestige by virtue of "discovering" hitherto overlooked talent. 

  The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter was published in the UK in 2013, winning genre crime-fiction type awards.  In 2015 it crossed the sea to the United States, where a well designed US copy has joined its brethren in the Glasgow Trilogy has garnered similar positive attention.  Calum MacLean, the hit man-narrator who has been hired to kill Lewis Winter, behaves like a character in a Japanese samurai/ronin film:  He has a code of ethics, professional aspirations and a business-like attitude towards murder.   Mackay elevates the proceedings above typical genre territory with insightful writing about the victim, Lewis Winter, a small-time Glaswegian drug dealer with a pushy, younger girlfriend and aspirations towards intruding on the drug selling territory of MacLean's employer.

  Glasgow is, of course, a major character.  Anyone familiar with Scottish literature of the 1980's and 1990's will know about the lower classes of Glasgow, but the depiction of the Scottish underworld was novel.

Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson- he died young- in 1894- only 44.

Published 6/17/20

The Master of Ballantrae (1889) 

by Robert Louis Stevenson

   The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson was included in the original edition of the 1001 Books list and then dropped in the 2008 revision.  It is impossible to argue with the decision.  First of all, Stevenson is NOT a three book author.  His claim for two books is strong: Treasure Island (1883) is both his first novel AND his biggest hit, and immortal classic that is still read today.   His strong second selection is The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), true it's only a novella, but it is still read and there have been numerous film versions.   Stevenson's hypothetical third pick would be either this book or Kidnapped (1886), but neither is often read these days, and Stevenson registers close to zero on the diversity meter. 

   Revisiting Ballantrae as an Audiobook, I enjoyed it less then I enjoyed the hard copy.  The similarity to Sir Walter Scott is impossible to ignore, and I had trouble following the convoluted plot.

Original Review from 2012:

BOOK REVIEW
The Master of Ballantrae
by Robert Louis Stevenson
originally published 1889
this edition Dover Thrift Editions p. 2003

  Oh man do I hate the Dover Thrift Edition- you know it's a minor classic when you are reading a Dover Thrift Edition of a classic novel.    Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae,  like Kidnapped, is a novel written about mid 18th century Scotland, written in the late 19th century.   Truly, the Scotland of the mid 18th century, with it's themes of Jacobite rebellion and civil war, was THE romantic setting of the novel from Sir Walter Scott's novels of the 18th century all the way through to Stevensons work a century later.

 Despite the constancy of Scotland in the mid 18th century as a stalwart locale for novelistic machinations, the novel itself underwent a notable transformation between the time of Walter Scotts work and Stevenson.    First of all, the novel established itself as a the dominant form of literature.

   Second of all, the form of the novel became both more self-conscious and more self-consciously stylistic.  18th century novels are anything but stylish- they all read like they were written by someone getting paid by the word and working without an editor- and those are the classics that are still read.

  Third- in between the 18th and 19th century the audience for the novel expanded along with the growth of literacy and the decline in costs associated with book publishing.

 Thus, in 1889 we get Stevensons The Master of Ballantrae- a theoretically "historical" novel which is actually both thematically complex, adventurous and entertaining in the manner that a contemporary reader expects a novel to be.  Only 160 page- The Master of Ballantrae moves between time and place: Scotland, pirates on the Atlantic Ocean, India and New York, with alacrity- the pacing is perfect, and the story is gripping.

 Like Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, The Master of Ballantrae deals with the familiar literary theme of doubling- a theme I am happy to revisit in whatever form it takes within a classic novel.  Truly Stevenson, was a master of the form.

Cover of the 2000 New York Review of Books Classics edition of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber

Published 5/18/20
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903)
by Daniel Paul Schreber

Replaces: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells


  I bought a copy of the New York Review of Books Classics edition- from twenty years ago, because the library is closed and there is no Ebook version available.  It was a waste...of money, and obvious historical significance aside I'm unclear on how this made it into the second edition of the 1001 Books list, replacing The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells itself!

    Schreber was a succesful German judge when he went stark and irretrievably mad.  He spent the rest of his life in an asylum, and his Memoirs was written as an address to the authorities to obtain his release from confinement.   It did not work, and if you read Memoirs you will instantly understand why, since Schreber is floridly insane.

    I'm speaking a position of some understanding, as a criminal defense lawyer who has represented indigent defendants, I've handled my share of the insane, and even more of the arguably insane.   Schreber was obviously exceptionally well educated, and his conditions of confinement were not punitive.  His historical significance lies in the value of his Memoirs as a written account of a "classic" case of insanity at a time when physicians and philosophers were thinking a great deal about madness and what it means.

  Over the course of over 400 pages, Screber tries, in vain, to make the reader understand the "logic" of his delusions, and of course, there is no logic, only the strict absence of any argument that makes any sense whatsoever.    This brings me to the question of why this, of all non-fiction books, is a selection.  Is it because Schreber's insanity has such an intense literary quality?  There are just so many other works of non-fiction that could be considered.   The fact that is a German language book from the early 20th century makes it a decent diversity pick, but early 20th century German literature isn't exactly underrepresented in the first edition.  Buddenbrooks, the massive (750 page) German multi-generational family narrative was published two years before Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.  There's also Professor Unrat by Thomas Mann's older brother, Heinrich. 

Published 6/1/20

The Way of All Flesh (1903) 

by Samuel Butler

Replaces:  The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

  Samuel Butler wasn't a stranger to the original edition of the 1001 Books, Erewhon, his anonymously published utopian fantasia from 1872 was in the first edition, but the editors added The Way of All Flesh, his posthumously published, semi-autobiographical bildungsroman to the first revised 2008 edition.   In addition to making the revised 1001 Books list, The Way of All Flesh was also one of Modern Library's 100 Top Novels of the 20th century, a list which includes dozens of American books that were excluded from all editions of the UK edited 1001 Books list. 

    And while The Way of All Flesh isn't exactly a fun read, after the first fifty pages or so it at least settles into something interesting, reminiscent of George Orwell's early books about being poor and educated.   The publication date is misleading, Butler's writing style is closer to Trollope than any writer from the 20th century, but Butler at least maintains the advantage of writing honestly about sex and other aspects of human nature that are often absent from 19th century literature, particularly that written by the English.

Cover of the English translation of The Tigers of Mompracem

Published 6/29/20

The Tigers of Mompracem (1900) 

by Emilio Salgari

Replaces: Born in Exile by George Gissing

   This famous Italian adventure novel by Emilio Salgari wasn't translated into English until 2008- just in time for inclusion onto the first revision of the 1001 Books list.  Set in Malaysia in 1849, the tigers of the title are a band of pirates led by Sandokan, an erstwhile local noble who was deposed by the collusion between his local enemies and European allies.   Sandokan falls in love with Lady Marianna Guillonk, the niece of the local representative of the British empire, and moves heaven and earth in his quest to retrieve her from the clutches of her uncle.

    It makes sense to include the tigers as a diversity pick under the theory that Italian literature is underrepresented, but it's hard to make the case strictly on literary grounds- there is nothing "modernist" about the tigers except for the fact that the hero is a local, not a white, European.

    

Published 10/13/20

The Shadow Line (1917)

by Joseph Conrad

    I could make the case that a major reason so few people read Conrad today- late Conrad, in particular is mostly because people don't read fiction about the sea the same way they did in the past.  There were entire centuries when "the sea" was a primary theater for adventure narrative with a huge, popular audience.   If you go back and look at the original publication of Conrad's bibliography, there are many serials in adventure dominated periodicals, and the explicit marketing of his books was in the "master of adventure" line.  It is not entirely clear to me that Conrad was fully appreciated in his time, and today he has been a passive victim of the re-ordering of the literary canon along more diverse lines.  Heart of Darkness is a contested book in high schools and university and The Secret Agent has diminished in importance in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War.   Only Nostromo, with its Latin American setting, has seen a rise in relevance, but not enough to offset the exclusion of Heart of Darkness.

  Published in 1917, The Shadow Line is the last of his books that is commonly read.  After The Shadow Line you've got The Arrow of Gold, The Rescue and The Rover, three books I've never seen in print, or read about.   The Shadow Line is like a refinement of his earlier themes in Almayer's Folly and Lord Jim.  The events of The Shadow Line involve a young captain/narrator who remains nameless. he starts out in Singapore, ventures out to retrieve a boat which has lost its captain, and along the way back become becalmed and suffers the loss of his crew from a mysterious illness. 

  Critics over the years have pointed out that The Shadow Line, told conventionally back to front in time, lacks the modernist touches of his earlier, canonical books, but what struck me was the absence of incident.  Literally nothing happens.  That is modernist AF even if you aren't catapulting back and forth in time. 

Published 11/9/20

The Home and The World (1916)

by Rabindranath Tagore

Replaces: Martin Eden by Jack London

   I think you could make an argument that when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the idea of "world literature" was invented. Tagore is one of only a handful of literature Nobel winners who weren't born in Europe- you have to go until 1945, when Gabriela Mistral a South American poet, became the second non-European to win.  

   If you look at the way that South Asia has been introduced to the west in literature, Bengal- the seat of the British East India Company and later the British Government, occupies a central role it lacks within the history of India.  Within India, Bengal was essentially a wealthy internal colony of a succession of Muslim conquerors who were based out of Delhi to the northwest.  Eventually, this peripheral position vis a vis the Mughal Empire gave local elites a concrete motivation to ally with the British East India Company and later Britain herself. 

  The upshot is this is that the literate Bengali elite, who had a history of running an economic powerhouse that generated excess revenue for whichever master, were able to maintain themselves.  Tagore, and his international success, represent an initial flowering of this elite Bengali culture on the world stage.  International profile as it may be, The Home and The World is a deeply Indian novel, about the Swadeshi movement- an early manifestation of the Indian independence spirit.