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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

To read about movies and TV shows I'm watching, visit my other blog: Elliot's Watching

Friday, November 3, 2023

As of this date I have ceased posting on my blogs, Elliotsreading and Elliotswatching. Thank you to those who have followed these blogs.

 As of this date I have ceased posting on my blogs, Elliotsreading and Elliotswatching.

Thank you to those who have followed these blogs.

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Elliot's Reading October 2023 - Wharton, Auster

Elliot’s Reading - October 2023


Edith Wharton’s early novel The Fruit of the Tree was published in 1907 and has largely been out of print and seldom read until a :K=Literary Classics” republication in 2004 and now I know why: The novel is 600+ pp and it feels like more. The roots and the backbone are there - Wharton is a great analyst and satirist of the ruling classes in America at the turn of the century and her heart was in the right place as she gets this novel going with a long section about a mill worker barely injured in an industrial accident and the “fruitless” attempt by a one of managers at the mill, who hopes through a lot of (wasted) anguish trying to get the mill to improve worker safety and, in the broader sense, improve their lives. Good start - but then the novel drifts away from this central and important theme. We’ve got a mixed potion here: one big part Dickens/Zola/Sinclair about worker exploitation, grim exposes; another part is pure Middlemarch, and nothing wrong with that but it feels almost like a copy  - young woman struggling bring better life top her community against a backdrop of marital mismatches, and that’s still good, but we also get a strong dose to top it off of Henry James, long passages hard to work out way through and most significant is that the narrative itself is agonizingly slow - and Wharton is not as good as James here, as we just want to kick the tires and get this vehicle on the move. I’ve read halfway through - 300 pp! - and it seems as if what I’ve read could well have been told a third of that or even less, and at last I’mleft with the feeling that there’s much to like in this novel but it really  had to be moving along faster, like most of EW’s work, and it needs more satire, more edge, more commitment as in the first (promising) section and, though I hate to say it, this novel needs more clarity: EW is particularly inept about cluing us in on who’s doing the speaking, who are these characters whom we’d met 200 pp back and no longer remember, what are so many of the names similar for God’s sake: At least let the main characters have names that don’t start w/ the same letter, is that too much to ask? Start reading if you dare, I’m sure I missed or misread some things, but good luck at finishing. 



I’ve liked some of Paul Auster’s work, especially his ability to capture the mood of upper Manhattan West Side in the 70s and 80s - this in part because I lived there for a short time and I, too, have tried to capture the era but with much less success. His 1993 novel, Leviathan, coves this same ground but in my view via a vast exploration of character - a contemporary of the the narrator (who is clearly autobiographical) with many nuances and quirks and obsessions. We learn in the first sentence that a young man died in a bomb explosion in Wisconsin and that the Auster-like narrator survives it’s his friend Sachs. (Some students died in a lab bomb explosion in Wisconsin in this era, which many have inspired this death.) I have to say, though, that after the initial sketching in of character the novel is a long, to me tedious account of this Sachs’s life and obsessions with many side trips that tell of the narrator’s sexual prowess and confidence (and his waning writing abilities and his break-up of marriage) - and I wish it could be more engaging but well than half-way through I was getting no enjoyment or enlightenment by further reading: it’s a novel of character, sure, but it’s also a novel devoid of plot: Why not further investigation, for ex., into the unsolved bombing death, and how could the narrator be the only one to know who built that bomb? Where’s the FBI in all this?  hate dictating what a novel should have or could have been but at least I expect to be entertained and engaged start to finish but with this one the engagement diminished rather than expanded or deepened and I have in at about the half-way point, sorry.  

Monday, October 2, 2023

Anton Chekhov's short novels

 Elliot's Reading September 2023


You don’t or shouldn’t or maybe can’t read Anton Chekhov’s early first novel, The Steppe (tr. Pevear and Volokhonsky, Complete Short Novels) for its plot - there isn’t much of that - a business man dealing in wool fabrics traveling to make some trades and some $ takes with him his young nephew who is on his way to enroll in school, far from home, and is understandably anxious about the journey away from his family. The uncle is extremely unsympathetic, and pushes his nephew off onto a wagon caravan, no place for a timid young man leaving home for the first time. Many adventures, tales, and characters in the caravan ensued, all of them exciting, and in particular AC’s descriptions of the landscape, the sky, the feeling and misery of being drenched, boiled, traveling my night - all good, but all seem like sketches, though of the highest order. The plot such as it is begins to unfold in the  last 20 or so pages, as we see how cruel and selfish the so-called benefactor can be, and the short novel ends on a plaintive note such as we rarely see in modern literature - except maybe in Chekhov’s plays. So this work is a try out; and he makes the team. The there’s The Duel and Story of an Unknown Man. The Duel is apparently the longest work of fiction from AC, and it’s a good place for him to stop - this short novel consists largely of philosophical debate among the major characters - we don’t get to the duel itself until approx 100 pp and there’s not much drama to it, after all - but the value of this short novel is that it anticipates AC’s plays: as P&V notes, this short novel is notably polyphonic, that is, of many voices - and AC went too far with the polyphony here but good foretell that the technique would work better in drama form, with each of the voices establishing a distinct personality, or character. And yet, his much shorter short novel, The Story of an Unknown Man (1892) works particularly well as it’s a first-person narrative, somewhat unusual for AC : the narrator surprisingly is a house servant, who reports on the misdeeds and misdoing of his boss/owner; eventually the narrator spirits away with the master’s latest crush and sets up household in central Europe; the woman, however, is pregnant and upon delivery of the child she goes into post party depression (the term did not exist at that time) and ends her relationship with the narrator. A good guy at least in his re-telling he tries to ensure the well-being of the young girl, w/ the novel ending on a mysterious and ambivalent note, quite typical of the mood established in AC’s great dramas. Three Years, on the other hand, is more direct and accessible, the sad account of an unfashionable, awkward, and homely young man who marries a whom he know does not love him in return, and of course sad consequences ensue; it’s a good but not a great example of AC’s fiction - the story of an outsider - except for the fact that AC seems to have given up on the novel and ended not on a mysterious and resonant note but suddenly, abruptly. And the 6th and final of Chekhov’s short novels (P&V ed and tr - Everyman’s Library - and don’t you think they could change that to “Everyone’s”? - My Life (1896) does not appear at all to be auto fiction despite the title, it’s the life story first-person narrated about a young man from a family in the nobility who believes that the only honest work is with his hands - building, construction, roofing, etc. - to the horror and chagrin of his stubborn father; the narrator reflects on the abusive childhood he and his sister endured - and over the course of the short novel he marries another member of the nobility but the marriage falls apart and the narrator leaves his small-town home bound for nowhere. Was it a wasted life? From his father’s view, yes, but the narrator seems to feel otherwise - the only surprise is that he doesn’t seem politically active - it’s just a personal code that he follows. 


Sunday, September 3, 2023

Late-career novels from Graham Greene and Edith Wharton and a new one from Richard Russo

 Elliot’s Reading August 2023


Edith Wharton’s late novel The Children (1928) is far from her best known for some obvious reasons, the vapid title for one, but it deserves more attention and acclaim that has eluded it for many years. First, the problems: EW has set up a tough standard as the novel is about competing cliques of wealthy and idle New Englanders traveling at leisure in Europe with an entourage of Children from various bad and broken marriages; in the opening scenes, the protagonist, a civil engineer whose job takes him around the world passing for a brief vacation - his name is simply Boyne; he’s aboard a Mediterranean cruise boat and at first frets that he knows nobody aboard - of course that turns out to be false in the microscopic world of EW’s novels - and the entourage that he knows includes a group of 7 ?) children loosely related at best - the Wheatons, they’re called - and Boyne finds himself ever deeply involved in their lives - in fact, he becomes their unofficial guardian given the task of ensuring that nothing breaks up this group of 7 - which of course it will and does. The downside: the characters are so privileged and unaware of their privileges and small-mindedness and most of all parental neglect that we hate most of the characters, inevitably - as in many EW novels in fact. What saves this one and makes reading worthwhile is the intellectual and emotional journey that Boyne takes on, willingly and foolishly, and how this burden that he assumes gradually wastes away his life - and the novel ends with some stunning and beautiful passages. 



Graham Greene’s late-career novel Travels with my Aunt (1969) is clearly one the funniest of his many publications, a bildungsroman/travelog novel in which the narrator is a self-described bland and obscure personality, retired after long and dull career as a banker in a small branch office, never married never even in love (possibly virginal? repressed homosexual?), his one passion being the dahlias in his garden - who at his beloved mother’s funeral he meets for the first time his eponymous aunt who reveals to him several family secrets (his mother was really his stepmother, e.g.) and sweeps him up into her eccentric and adventuresome social life, which includes friendships and romances (she’s 7+) with several characters, often disreputable, and brings him along on some impulsive, poorly planned trips (e.g. ride the Orient Express to Turkey and then turn around quick and come home to London) that change his once-sheltered life. The novel builds toward a new world for narrator Henry in of all places Paraguay, rich with gunfights and criminals (much like in an earlier GG tropical novel), drawing into a Paraguay prison and tied to a smuggling scheme that he barely comprehends though his experience as a banker provides useful if dubious info. Watching Henry fall apart and be won over to the dark side is part of the hilarity here, and though on a literal level the novel makes no sense and is extraordinarily improbable it’s total fun to read - even, for ex., just GGs description of morning life in a tropical city. 


The kindest thing to say about Richard Russo’s novel Chances Are… (2019) is that it doesn’t stand up well against his previous and much more engaging works from Mohawk. Empire Falls, et al. Briefly, it’s a story of 4 men in their 60s, college buddies, who go on a weekend retreat to Martha’s Vineyard where they pine for the woman, Jacy, with whom they’d all had a crush back in college days. How this all plays out make for a novel both improbable (why for example did J. fall off the map - a missing-person case that has dropped from all attention for some40 years!) and dissatisfying (it’s all told through recollection about this past love and what became of her - rather than in scenes that deepen the mystery and hold our attention). In short, he’s a fine novelist, but I would’t start an interested reader with this one. 

Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Disappointing novel from G. Eliot but some good short stories, a strong late novel from G.Greene, and another disappointment from Trevor

 July 23


George Eliot’s Romola (1863), couldn’t finish it, and her story duet - The Lifted Veil (1859) and Brother Jacob (1864), the best of this group, a strange and dramatic story about a young man who steals from hths mother to a leave home and advance is career but who is undone by his affectionate and naive brother with disabilities. 


The Human Factor (1978) should be considered among Graham Greene’s strongest works of fiction, alongside The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, et al., but I supposed it’s downgraded by readers and connoisseurs because in structure at least just a story about uncovering a leak in the British MI5, in other words, an entertainment, whereas it’s also, primarily, a love story about an agent in Africa who falls in love with a Black woman, whom he brings home with him to the London, along with her child whom he adopts as their son - yet pressures build as we learn and surmise more about the security leak and the role this agent has played (and why). I would say GG makes the going a little tough for all readers, unfortunately, by his strange affectation of having many characters use names that start w/ the same initial (C and W in this case), whereas all readers know it’s easier to address a novel or play if characters’ names don’t coincide. Not an easy book, but a moving and powerful look inside the workings of the bureau of spies (reminded me a little of Shirley Hazard’s take down of the UN bureaucracy).


Despite hating it when forceed to read it (abridged) in grade, people still read George Eliot’s Silas Marner and find it actually quite good, and people still read and enjoy Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, and others - all leading up to the classic, Middlemarch and the dark and mysterious Daniel DeRonda - but there’s that middle period immediately before Middlemarch when Eliot wrote the dismal Romola and the equally unreadable Felix Holt: The Radical (1866) - who could predict that something as grand as Middlemarch would follow? She must have been struggling with the 2 duds for a reason, perhaps perfecting her capacity for writing long and ostentatiously intelligent sentences, but we don’t read novels for sentences, and in these two he takes forever to get any semblance of a plot in motion and her characters are windy and largely interchangeable. It’s with good reason that Eliot’s middle-period novels are today largely unknown, unread, and out of print; they’re lousy books, but much good was to follow. The pathways of writers can be like a maze, circular and enwrapped in dead ends - with sometimes a breakthrough. 



William Trevor’s novel Nights at the Alexandra (1987) has one thing going for it: It’s short (ca 90 pp). I continue to wonder why Trevor, clearly one of the top two or three writers of short stories in the late 20th/early 21st century could be such a disaster as a novelist - not that his novels are all that bad but they just cannot measure up to the standard the he himself established. Nights is a good example of that: Yes, it has the components of several novels: domineering father issuing commands and dicta, rivalries between Irish Catholics and Protestants, harsh boarding school, and a young man’s yearning for and fascination with a glamours older woman in town - and yet none of this feels sharp or original, just like wired over plot elements. For ex. the eponymous Alexandra is a movie theater that one of the characters (the forlorn husband of glamorous woman; living in social oscillation as a German who escaped to Ireland during the war) dreams of building the first cinema in the small town - he sees a business opportunity - and in fact he accomplishes his goal and the theater is a big hit … and so?? - well the narrator spends some time working as an usher or ticket taker but this says nothing about the culture of the town, the effect of the theater on the town, on the young man - anything! Couldn’t there be some plot development regarding the German living in town and how he’s received, or not? Not a disaster but a total disappointment of missed opportunities here - at least it was short. 








Tuesday, July 4, 2023

June 2023: Graham Greene's The Comedians

 June 2023: Graham Greene's The Comedians

Elliot’s Reading June 2023: Graham Greene’s The Comedians 


Maybe it was me, but out seems to me that Graham Greene’s mid-career novel, The Comedians (1966) - don’t expect a stand0up routine at the Copa  gets off to a good start, with the comedy 3 men taking a boat trip, who knows why? This isn’t 1886 — across the gulf to Haiti, which at the time was ruled by the Tyrannical “Doc” Duvalier and his thugs in the Tontons Macoutes - not a place where most would go for a business venture. The narrator, one of the passengers, owns a nearly worthless hotel in Port au Prince and he’s headed to Haiti to possibly sell the place. The 3 travelers amusingly are named Smith, Jones, and Brown (the narrator0, which seems to anticipate a group of secret agents perhaps each planning a coup or a heist? Smith is the most innocent, a former uS presidential candidate for a fringe party whose single issue is vegetarianism (he lost - and is completely lost in Haiti. But when the plot begins to thicken, GG thins the broth with a long and boring romance between narrator Brown and the wife of an ambassador, and the novel from that point become a drag despite a few real bright spots from GG who is always a pro stylist - notably the escape at night in a rain-drench city to try to make it safely to the border of the DR where, allegedly, the US has better relationships - which is to say more control. The title is puzzling, at least to me, but GG is I think known for dashing off titles - and in fact sometimes for dashing off books. This one, originally, was classified as an “entertainment” rather than as a novel (I think so anyway), and that’s about right: despite opportunities to really examine colonialism and tyranny - Naipaul, e.g. - this steers the easier course toward light entertainment - nothing wrote with a writer’s working for his/her living, but let’s not overrate the middling work that stands up poorly against the more powerful (Power and Glory, End of Affair, et al.). Ton Macuse 


Thursday, June 1, 2023

Elliot's Reading May 2023: Wharton's the Reef, Stories by Nancy Hale, and George Eliot's Romola

 Elliot's Reading - May 2023

Edith Wharton's The Reef, stories by Nancy Hale, and George Eliot's Romola


Edith Wharton’s follow-up to the much better known House of Mirth was The Reef (1912) and it’s surprising how seldom this one is read or discussed in its day and now - perhaps partly due to the title whose meaning and euphony still puzzle me. I found this narrative much more intense, personal, and comprehensible than in her previous work, largely I think because it’s a much narrow field of action - essentially only 4 or 5 characters and two locales. But also: It’s highly dramatic and sort of a rom-com cliffhanger as we are left at numerous reading points wondering what can he/she possbly say to respond to that or wriggle out off that situation. The plot, in brief: a dapper and too-slick and self-involved 30ish man (Owen) on his way to from England to France to meet prenuptial to his wife to be, a widowed woman (Anna) of his age and class; en route he receives a cryptic message from Anna to delay his arrival by at least a week (I don’t even remember why she sent this telegram); his voyage delayed, Owen meets in the station a much younger (and lower “caste”) woman (Sophie) and has with her a brief but intense affair. On arrival finally at Anna’s, he is shocked to see that Anna has hired Sophie as the au pair for her young daughter - and complications ensue. One way to judge this novel in context is to recognize how it was both ahead of its time (scandalous, even!) in depicting an obvious adulterer and philanderer as a somewhat sympathetic character as well as a slam at the social/sexual attitudes that seemed to protect the infelicity of his (andWharton’s) social class. That said, it’s also revealing how indirect Whart had to be in presenting this scandalous plot; the seduction scene occurs behind locked doors, and throughout the long and torturous courtship of Owen and Anna they seem to never had sex - they abide in the same household/estate but with complete sanctimony; how different life (and literature) is today.



The Library of America edition of Where the Light Falls, Selected stories of Nancy Hale, brings to the reading public, small though that may be, the work of a long-forgotten short-story writer, Nancy Hale, presenting a selection of her stories from 1934 to 1966, with many of her early stories published in so-called “women’s magazines” and later stories almost exclusively in the New Yorker. Her work has been left aside for a # of reasons: bias against female authors and themes, lack of a single unifying style, and, most of all, not in particular innovative or even emulated: She never really cared for, it seems, the one-ended “new” short fiction of Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and, in a later iteration, in which the New Yorker reigned supreme, of Cheever and Updike. Her stories tend to end with a sense of finality, not of further possibility; they’re truly short stories and not scenes from a novel-to-be. She’s generally limited in scope as well - the New England well-to-do - so that was another strike. But all that said, her stories are universally accessible, insightful, and emotional: stories of social prejudice, of misfits and outcasts albeit from a world of social privilege, and a vivid portrayal of the intricacies of class and taste. Her middle stories, I would say, are her best; later in life she focused on Americans in Europe, and there she doesn’t hold up well against her predecessor (James) or her contemporary (the also nearly forgotten Mavis Gallant). I’d recommend for starters maybe To the North (about racial and social discrimination in a New England coastal town), That Woman (about social pressure and ostracism, Those Are Brothers (war refugees), and Who Lived and Died Believing (love and fate, a young nurse), and then just keep reading. 


George Eliot’s (aka MaryAnn Evans’s) 4th novel, Romola (1863) is for me anyway largely unreadable, and I had to turn it aside after + 100 pp w/ + another 800 to go. Not going. Unlike her previous works, including such greats as Adam Bede and Silas Marner, this one gets off to a rugged and jumpy start, as we follow the pathways of a shipwrecked sole survivor washed ashore in or near Florence/Firenzi ca 1492 (auspicious date of when not much is made). This wayward protagonist has several odd encounters over a span of a few days that provide us w/ a good deal of Florentine gossip about which I cared not at all; at some point the young man, who’d set out from Greece and knows a good deal about the Renaissance thinkers and artists, is led to the lair of an unsuccessful philosopher, now blind and unable to work, and whose daughter, the eponymous Romola, is his main aide. Obviously, something will develop between the two - but damn so little has happened up to this point, and it’s so difficult to follow all the strands and systems of the various thinkers who appear here (would they have been more distinct and notable in Eliot’s day?) that I throw up my hands, as I suspect many readers would as well. Think of the powerful opening chapters of SM; think of the dramatic conclusion to Mill on the Floss. And you will wonder as did I what happened to her narrative skill? One aspect stands out for me, however, in trying to make sense of how Eliot would have come to write this novel: Romola is obviously a first run at a character like Dorothea in GE’s masterpiece, Middlemarch: An attractive young woman enslaved to a father/father figure as she tries to help the hapless old man complete his life’s work, for which she will get no credit. Eliot’s 2nd passing at this theme is much more profound, as the philosopher is not the woman’s father, about which she’d have no choice, but is her husband, which brings up all the failure not only of him but of her - a moral, financial, and sexual failure that ruins their marriage and nearly ruins D’s life.