December 2022: George Eliot's first novel, A.B.Yehoshua, and a great work from the 2022 Literature Nobelist, Annie Ernaux

 George Eliot’s first book of published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), a collection of 3 substantial stories each concerned with the relationships - monetary, familiar, amorous, and obviously religious - in small, rural English villages at about 1800 or so (I think). There’s not a bit of nostalgia here; the village life is full of gossip, contentious relationships, animosity, and inequity. We can see in these stories Eliot’s emerging style - acerbic, highly literary, with the occasional metaphor or point of observation that just pierces threader and demands a 2nd look. It’s not yet Middlemarch, Eliot’s master work, but we see the foreshadowing. What’s missing, what she developed in her later style was the ability incorporate and motivate a plot; the character in these 3 stories are far less vivid and complex than later Eliot characters: Each of a type, and the type doesn’t change much or evolve over the course of the work. All the stories including a significant death element; in the first w, that element is more of the pathetic sort - plus a story of love gone wrong and succumbing the family pressure, much like the romantic fiction that Eliot sought to avoid in her choice of a masculine nome guerre. The highlight by far is the final story in the trilogy, where Eliot boldly takes on themes alien to the highly masculine world, at that time at least, of literary fiction, notably drug addiction, alcoholism, and spousal abuse - more than a century ahead of her time. 

A.B. Yehoshua’s early novel A Late Divorce (1982) is a rarity in his work, one of the novels of his that in my view just ran out of gas and got away from him. The main reason to tackle this dense doesn’t work though his experiments with narrative bore fruit in his later work, notably Mr. Mani - maybe his best novel and known for its narrative construction in which the whole story is told from the point of view of a single speaker with his or her respondent must just be surmised from the surrounding - a dialog posing as a monolog. He does the same thing in Divorce none section, but the effect is to put a strain on the reader. This is a novel in 6 long (50+ pp) sections, each from a different POV but following a straight-along 3 (or so) days of plot line; in essence, a father/grandfather who some years back had left his wife (she had tried to stab him to death and is now in a psychiatric hospital) to seek her signature on a divorce decree - and story draws on his three children, their spouses/lover, his grandchildren, ex-wife, and several peripheral characters. This novel cannot support this abundance of characters and events and collapses under its own weight - esp. for American readers who will be puzzled by the many names and nicknames and abbreviated names and the frequent changes in locale - it’s much like the grand Russian novels in this, and a “cast of characters” at the outset would help. Obviously, ABY is indebted as well to Faulkner - the novel opens with an attributed quote from Faulkner - particularly in its use of multiple narrators or points of view esp in Sound/Fury. So in  short for ABY readers, such as me, this novel is worth a look, but it’s a big time absorber of mental space for readers new or indifferent to him 

I was blown away and deeply moved by the beauty and intelligence of Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008) - a book I took up w/ some trepidation but thought I’d like to check out the latest Lit Nobelist of whom I’d never heard - the Nobelists haven’t rung the bell pretty much since the Dylan surprise of ’16. But here this surprise work comes along, so smart, so insightful, so accessible. If one had to classify this work it could maybe be called a work of autofiction - Ernaux’s depiction in some 240 pp. of the span of her life, mostly spent in France, Paris esp in her adulthood, a full-time teacher in a lycée (high school) and later a prof in a college ed dept - but still she writes a slew of books, perhaps picking up the pace in her retirement. As the title suggests, this covers the span of her life -but it’s not exactly a memoir; in fact, it’s an autobio w/out using the word “I” - it’s the story of the evolution of the world in which she lives/we live or have lived, and full of such odd insights and observations that the only close counterpart might be Proust - but AE’s case without the stylistic flourishes. Anyone whose life span is remotely close to AE’s can recognize him/her/their self, or world, in which and of which she writes - entirely in short, clear sentences, each passage an essay in and of itself. Toward the end she discusses this writing project directly: “She would like to assemble these multiple images of her self, separate and discordant, thread then together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth…up until the present day.” She succeeds. Some readers may be a bit stumped by her observations on French politics; never mind that, skip past the Mitterands and the Le Pens et al and get what you can from the rest, including trenchant and timely passages on immigrants, on Sept 11th, popular culture, on hypermarkets and capitalism, on it goes - a remarkable work that pushes the boundaries of genre.