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.

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.  

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 

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. 

Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, a William Trevor novel, and an Annie Ernaux novel from 2001

Elliot's Reading April 2023 

Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, a William Trevor novel, Annie Ernaux

It’s amazing how much better Edith Wharton’s 2nd novel, The House of Mirth (1905) is compared with her meandering first novel, The Valley of Decision - an incredible transformation over 4 years. How? Why? I don’t know the timing of her good friend Henry James, but I suspect he might have had a much greater influence on Mirth, a searing and incisive portrayal of the social scene among the old (mostly) families of New York in the early 20th century. Wharton’s writing, like James, requires a lot of close attention to every passage - and the attention is worthwhile: Her writing here is insightful, surprising, and revealing about each of the characters and their mental (and social) status. At the heart of the novel is Lily Bart - beautiful, mannered, but not from a long line of patriarchs and industrialists, just hanging on to the fringes of the social scene and, unlike all the others in her “set,” troubled by debt. She’s truly one of the great tragic heroes of modern fiction, right up alongside of Anna K. For much of the novel, we want to right her off as frivolous and irresponsible - she runs up a huge debt playing bridge w/ a group who could afford to lose (which she can’t), gets a married man who’s coming on to her to “invest” on her behalf, runs into deeper debt, and he has sex with her in recompense - note that EW, as the custom of the age would require, is extremely circumspect about sex throughout and esp re Lily’s fate. In any event, we grow from despising her and her social set - a snobbish group of old $ and arrivistes who do nothing but party, travel, and entertain without a thought of making the world a better place for others, but as she’s forced to leave this scene Lily experiences life asinine of her so-called friends ever did, including a stint in a working-class job in the garment district; EW is by no means a progressive and it’s not clear what Lily actually learns - and there are a few unfortunate swipes particularly near the end - notably a saccharine passage about a young woman whom LB had helped at a difficult life stage (involving out-of-wedlock pregnancy) - but that said the ending is powerful and moving and our empathy for LB remains fast and profound; one unfortunate aspect of the novel, however, is the crude portrayal of the only Jewish character, Rosedale, who sounds like a thug and whom we’re meant to despise -  because he has made his own fortune w/out the graces of the social class to which he aspires - as if the old-money social set is in any way better than he; just give him time, he could end up laughing at all of them. 

It gives me no joy to note how disappointed I’ve been by the novels of William Trevor; in March I posted on two of his novels that I couldn’t finish and here’s a 3rd that did nothing for me force 150 pages and so good-bye: Fools of Fortune (1983), in what seems to be an auto-fiction or thinly disguised memoir about a young man in rural Ireland, a Protestant family, well-to-do, and the son dreads leaving for boarding school but then does uneventfully leave and experiences many of the high-jinx (drinking, pranks against teachers) familiar in the genre. What it lacks is any great beauty, struggle, or driving force, a fully developed life - esp notable in comparison with the giants of the genre such as Joyce and more recently Knausgaard and Melrose (Patrick), or even in a lighter vein Prep or in a mystery vein such as Tarrt’s Secret History, to name a few. This sour note stands in contrast to my unrelenting praise for Trevor’s short stories, which I have said and still say are among the best of the past hundred years, unquestionably. How do you figure? Two other novels of his that I read much closer to their published date - The Old Boys (a comic romp) and Felicia’s Journey - were much better than these I’ve read recently or tried to - F’sJ in fact was made into a good movie, or so I’ve heard. But with some these other novels, he’s just lost in a thicket of prose. 

A Brief note on Annie Ernaux’s early novel ∫(2001), which for me was miles (kilometers?) away from her more recent The Years, about which I raved in an earlier post, but all the strengths of The Years - notably AE’s acute observations about the world and social changes and family issues and cultural shifts and fads and trends, in other words all we look and hope for in first-person, diary-like fiction - whereas the recently reissued Getting Lost, though daring and revealing in its day, a milestone for women writing about their sexual drive in a confessional but aggressive manner, has all of the flaws of such fiction - self-centered, narcissistic, and dreadfully dull rather than exciting and revealing, in other words quite the opposite of The Years - I turned it aside after 50 pp or so. 

March 2023: Greene's The Power and the Glory and The Third Man, Trevor's and Wharton's early novels, Silas Marner

Elliot's Reading

March 2023

Elliot’s Reading

March 2023

Not much doubt that The Power and the Glory (1940) was Graham Greene’s best novel - drawing on all of his skills up to that point in his career: tense and exciting narrative, clearly delineated characters, use of exotic settings and qualities without condescension, occasional sharp-edged humor, interest in moral and even religious ideas and conflicts and all never burdening the plot with sanctimonious hectic or authorial interference. This great novels follows the course of the last few weeks in the life of an (unnamed?) Catholic priest in one of the Mexican states under complete control of the “red shirts” ( i.e., socialist/communist forces) who have banished all religious exercises and issued a death warrant over the lives of any priests remaining in the region. The protagonist leads us through a series of events and crises, constantly in need of shelter, food, clothing, and especially alcohol, as he’s what he himself dubs as a “whisky priest” (possibly endemic to the profession). He’s ineffectual as a leader and as a narrative hero, but he is a monument to suffering (physical and mental) and well aware of his violations of church law and etiquette (e.g., he has a young daughter from a brief relationship with a parishioner). Yet he is fully aware of and devoted to his responsibilities - risking his life to administer confessional for a dying robber/murderer, in one of the great scenes). Other great scenes abound as well: the trek trailed by the annoying “mestizo” who hopes to gain a reward for turning in this wanted man (or so it seems), the night in the foul, crowded prison cell, et al. The final chapter is a little weird as it breaks the 4th wall and we seem to be reading a published account of the priest’s execution at a time when it hasn’t yet taken place - confusing, a bit, but strangely evocative. I’m pretty sure this novel has been made into a film, and pretty sure it couldn’t capture the full set of emotions and ideas brought forth in the novel. 

The book jacket on the kind of old library edition claims that Alexandros Papadiamantis (whew) is the “greatest of modern Greek prose fiction writers.” Maybe so - I don’t know whom he’d be up against aside from Kazantzakas, which in itself is a surprise - why has Greek fiction fallen off the map? Translation difficulties (as his translator Peter Levi has implied)? In any event, AP’s novel The Murderess (1903) presents AP’s case. Is it a great novel? Well, not really - though it’s a peculiarly troubling novel that will draw readers along to its ghastly conclusion as it clocks in at about 120 pages. Itself a novel of crime and punishment: The protagonist, who goes by several names (is that typical of Greek writing/culture, or a peculiarity of this translation?) is being pursued by the police, wanted for several killings. t’s a tense and tight narrative and would probably translate well to cinema; Levi posits that the protagonist is an innocent victim, killing young women of all-female sibling families because the girls would only be a burden on the impoverished families because of laws requiring large dowries. Does that make sense? Few readers would come to - or sympathize with - that conclusion. In any event, contrary all expectation, we see quite early in this narrative that the woman - Hadoula, the simplest of her several name, is in fact guilty of several horrifying murders - of children no less! - so whatever her motives we have zero sympathy with/for her. It’s kind of a test for the reader, in a sense: Is it possible for a novelist to write about a serial killer of children and hold our interest (yes, in this case) and sympathy (a resounding no): Read at your own risk. 

I’ve many times counted William Trevor as one of the 3 greatest English-language story writers of the century (along w/ Alice Munro and John Updike); Trevor is known primarily for his Chekhovian depictions of life in Ireland, particularly in the smaller towns and villages. Among his most famous, for those looking to start reading his stories, count among his best as the Piano Tuner, Hill Bachelors, and Sacred Statues, about a would-be sculptor who has to give up his art and work as a road-crew laborer. Trevor also wrote more than a dozen novels, and these are not as well known nor, to be honest, well regarded. I’ve read only one, I think (Lucy Gault? Felicia’s Journey?), and that was a long time ago; I liked it, but it wasn’t Trevor at his best. Anyway, I’ve decided to take a closer look at his novels, and started w/ one of his earliest, Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), and I found the novel, which I didn’t finish even though I got about 75% through, to be no better than its title. It’s Trevor, so it has some great moments, in fact the first chapter, in which the eponymous Eckdorf talks to death her assigned seat-mate on a flight to Dublin - an encounter that’s as good as some of the best Monte Python sketches. That said, the novel becomes a tangled and laborious mess: Mrs. E arrives in Dublin, checks into a rather seedy and ill-kept hotel, decides she wants to buy the place, and has strange encounters with the owner, her family, and the many denizens of Dublin who cross her path or who enter the abode - and no one can understand her interest of motive. The hotel is a comic setting as well, with some very insalubrious characters who pass through its doorway. All this is potentially of interest, but the story-telling is so convoluted, packed with characters that we meet intermittently, of incidents that are drawn out and reverted to time and again apparently to give us various perspectives - but - this is not Dubliners or Portrait or Ulysses, despite it’s ambitious format. I just found it was demanding too much of me, just to keep up: such an antithesis to Trevor’s usual precision, economy of style, insight, and sympathetic portrayal of thuds with ill fortune. 

I’ll give some unusual advice regarding literature and film: As for Graham Greene’s 1949 novel, The Third Man, see the movie first (and if it’s one or the other, see the movie, dir. Carol Greed, 1949). Not that GG wasn’t aware of this impulse. The novel is quite short and densely packed with plot, and w/ good reason, as it was written almost as a screenplay to guide Reed et al. through the narrative. Sometimes it’s hard to follow - in part because GG chose to have story narrated in first person by one of the characters (Holley, or Rollo, Martins), in part because there’s so much plot to hold in mind, in part because some of the greatest scenes are far less vividl and memorable than the scenes on film (the chase through Vienna sewers; the Ferris wheel and the Welles cameo, the closing shot at the funeral), and in part because these guys knew what they were doing and the film comes alive whereas sometimes the short novel bumps along. No great surprise here: in the preface to the novel GG explains some of this, how the novel was written with film in mind, and in fact he suggests that “it was never meant to be read” but only to be seen: Reader, pass by. 

I remember reading George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) in 8th grade and hating it (though not as much as I hated the 9th-grade novel, Ivanhoe), and looking back I wonder how they could have made the novel itself feel and seem so bad: they certainly couldn’t let us read about the death of an opium addict. They couldn’t have expected us to parse prose passages that confound me to this day. We couldn’t have seen this as a story of moral redemption, of the evils of the judicial and caste system inlace in the 19th C. Would we even have sensed that it was also a novel about social ostracism and bullying and shaming, topics that might have interested us. No, none of the above  - and coming back to this novel in late life I can easily see why it’s a classing - not GE’s greatest work (Middlemarch will wear that crown) but perhaps her most accessible (and teachable, if my jr. high English teachers had a dram of intelligence) - really focused closely on one set of social relations - most notably Silas’s love for his adopted daughter, Eppie - and to a lesser extent the marriage of Godfrey and Nancy Cass. Eliot keeps the focus tight, unlike her more grand and ambitious works, and as a result it’s more emotionally powerful: Who, aside from an 8th-grader pressed into service, can fail to choke up when Silas speaks trust to power and his daughter, within a world of avarice and status-seeking, rejects an offer to educate her to become one of the “betters”? 

Edith Wharton is without question one of America’s greatest 20th-century writer of fiction, though it took her some time to gain the recognition she deserved. Her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902) was hardly her first work of fiction - from what I’ve read she published numerous stories in Scribner’s, a great literary journal in its day, plus at least one story collection and one poetry collection; yes, she was extremely well-connected, but that can get you only so far once you’re in the door. Most of all, VofD (it’s 2 volumes, each of about 135 pp, and I read about 25% through, no more), is a so-called “bildungsroman,” a novel about the “education” of a young person, generally following a course leading from troubled, impoverished childhood to fame, wealth, or recognition later in life - the pattern followed today most often by confessional memoirs and in the 19th and 20th centuries by great novels such as Buddenbrooks, Young Werther, Great Expectations., and the list could go on. The problem for Wharton is that, though she had an excellent eye for period decor and a clear and controlled literary style, she never develops any action of significant conflict in her debut novel - that she learned quickly is obvious in that her 2nd novel, I believe, House of Mirth. VofD for 100 or so pp follows a young man named Ono from a deprived boyhood and, via some poorly explained change in his life circumstances, to a city to further his education - and he seems to be destined for a career in the church, maybe to become a Bishop - all well and good but there’s no particular crisis of conflict that engages us and makes feel for Odo: He’s a vehicle for Wharton’s many fine descriptive passages but the novel - 2 volumes! - just plugs along without character development, plot, or conflict. It’s no wonder VlofD is seldom read or discussed today -the wonder is how Wharton advanced so far and so fast in her literary career. 

It’s amazing how a truly and inarguable a genius of the short-story genre could be so mediocre at best at writing a novel; I’m thinking here of William Trevor, one of the great story writers of our era, and two of his early- to mid-career novels, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Niell’s Hotel (see previous post) and Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971), which I found to be trivial, sometimes preposterous, and just really hard to make sense of as we follow, sort of, the eponymous Gomez as she has a religious awakening in her homeland (Jamaica) and travels to England where she takes demeaning and ill-paying jobs and tries to spout her religious doctrine to a # of uninterested and sometimes dangerous people and, you know what?, I’ve made the novel sound better than it actually is, go figure: I had trouble following it or caring about any of the willfully eccentric characters and felt no desire to study the weavings of the plot in and as we learn, kinda, of the various characters who live with our near Mrs. G on a London street designated for abandonment and reconstruction. I just didn’t care, and didn’t finish, and hope to someday go back to Trevor’s stories so that I can remember and honor him when at his best. 

February 2023: Yehoshuah, George Eliot, 2022 Booker-Prize winner

 A.B. Yehoshua, George Eliot, and a Booker winner I couldn’t finish 

Just a quick note on two novels w/ excellent pedigree that I sadly couldn’t finish reading, first, A.B. Yehoshuah’s A Journey to the End of the Millennium (1997) - an author I revere and a book that some consider his greatest, set in the year 999 - obviously on the cusp of a new millennium just as the word was at the time of this novel’s publication, ABY is conveys here the sense of a world on the brink as exploratory missions of merchants and traders for the first time ever travel greater distances and observe and become part of or antagonistic to various cultures - mostly, we follow some Hebrew merchants based in Portugal and Spain, traveling or exploring along the coast of France and, they hope, into the legendary (to them) city of Paris. Sounds good, right, but ABY crowds so many characters - many of whom have similar names - and such a panoply of event into the first 75 pp or so, I for one couldn’t find, much less follow, the narrative strand of the novel. Maybe it’s me, because I’ve also tried to read the winner of the 2022 (most recent) Booker Prize The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2002), set in Sri Lanka and, loosely, following the events in the life of a Lankan freelance news photographer during a time of multiple revolutions and insurrections in Sri Lanka, which, as above, is richly promising material and there are some powerful if unpleasant accounts of terrorism, torture, and oppression - though I wished that there was some attempt at coherence: Who is the main character? Why are we constantly shifting scene and locale and events, and how can you expect an international readership with comprehend the scope of the internecine struggles and conflicts without more clear guidelines. It would be like asking a termite to comprehend All the President’s Men - or like asking an intelligent reader too make sense of Finnegans Wake without guidelines. Sink or swim, but I swam. 

George Eliot’s 2nd novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860, is do some degree an indictment of finance, investment banking, debt, early industrial capitalism, and most of all social class - a pre-Marxist indictment of the Industrial Revolution (though set somewhat earlier). The basic plot - Maggie, an attractive young woman who’s father had owned the eponymous mill until it was seized from him to pay off his indebtedness to a neighboring family (Wakem) , which led to the a generation of irrational animosity and, most relevant to the plot, to the impossible love between Maggie and at the son of the W. family, Philip, who has a severe physical disability that isolates him from most of his peers, including Maggie’s beloved brother. Despite all this background info., the novel is mostly a rom-com drama of its day, with Philip being an object for sorrow and pity, and Maggie, forced to break off her relationship with Philip (a Romeo and Juliet story, if Juliet had said go away I can’t be seen with you, family over personal), after that forced estrangement finds herself the object to a suitor, Stephen, who’d been engaged to her cousin. Ugh. The novel builds to its crisis when Maggie, the always innocent, finds herself in an extremely complex infidelity with Stephen, forcing her, like a disreputable woman, horrors!, to live a life of abandonment and disgrace (Tess?, think) until highly melodramatic accident changes everything (for weird contemporary comparison, see video re the Murtaugh family in SC). Mill on Floss is, as with other early GE works, is a step closer to the great Middlemarch, though the characters and their crises feel far less contemporary and original and the social scope is considerably narrowed - a great domestic drama with intimations of social criticism but not on the scale of nor the originality of Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch.

Elliot's Reading - Jan. 2023 - George Eliot, Graham Greene, Bob Dylan

 Elliot’s Reading - January 2023: George Eliot, Graham Greene, Bob Dylan

For the past several weeks I’ve been reading George Eliot’s monumental first novel, Adam Bede (1859, about 1290 pp on iPad), which shows her continued growth as a writer - a much wider scope in her lifelong study off village life in England ca. 1800 compared with her earlier collection of 3 long stories that were more tightly focused on clerical life. AB is, as well, concerned with a religious motif - a central character, introduced in the first chapter, Dinah, is part of what was then a new and controversial preacher of the Gospel according to a new Protestant sect, the Wesleyans or Methodists; but it’s really not per se a novel about religion - it’s really a novel about love & marriage, one of the first if not the first great English Romance novels. The eponymous Adam is the most honest and upright guy in the world, but his fatal flaw is that he has no judgment about women. He falls desperately in love with the beautiful Hetty, who is living w/ her aunt and uncle as in essence one of their servants. Everyone’s attracted to her, but she is entirely vapid and uninteresting - Adam doesn’t see that at all. The novel takes its time getting going for sure, but at about the midpoint there’s a huge crisis as Adam spies Hetty in the woods in a tryst with Arthur, a young, self-centered aristocrat (also a good friend of Adam’s), and Adam takes out his fury on Arthur and he feels crushed and humiliated, asHetty was obviously in love with Arthur, primarily for entree into his social class - not at all his goal, however. Eliot is discrete, as required and expected even of a “male” writer to present the sex scenes by inference rather than depiction - but there we have it: Hetty was not only vapid but also licentious (loose) - a topic that interestsGE both for its say about the oppression of women and, I would think, her feelings about a woman who has nothing but her looks to attract men - GE being notably homely, I say without bias, it’s just a fact - and readers may expect there is some glee as well as accuracy in her depiction of Hetty and her fate. So why read this novel? For one thing it’s way beyond its prototype as throughout we get a strikingly detailed presentation of life as it was led in the “simpler” times of travel by foot or sometimes on horseback. Throughout, we get amazing insights and epigrammatic perceptions from GE about all aspects of life - with here being a few at random examples: “I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing, too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be liked those little words, “light” and”music”…; or, “How is it that the poets have said so many find things about our fist love, so few about later love?”; or, “…and his broad-shouldered aspect something of the bull-dog—‘Don’t you meddle with me, and I won’t meddle with you.” It’s a long way from Adam Bede to Middlemarch, but we see in this novel GE’s first attempt at what today we see as naturalism: Here limited to two characters and to the conventions of marital bliss; later, in her masterpiece, a portrayal of an entire culture and community, with many surprises and many consequences of false first love and poor decisions about life, a world in which not everything turns out for the best, a world much like ours today.

Somewhere around the time that Graham Greene was writing The Confidential Agent he decided to separate his fiction work (aside from short stories) into either Novels or Entertainments. From what I’ve read, the Greene estate no longer recognizes those categories and treats all as novels (good idea), though the categorization seemed to have helped GG organize his thoughts and ideas. Aside from his “entertainments,” he wrote a # of screenplays, I believe, and at least one of his “entertainments,” The Third Man, became a movie classic (and I think others have adapted his novels, such as The Quiet American, to film). The problem, though, is that he must have considered his “entertainments,” such as The Confidential Agent (1939) as plot-driven, non-literary diversions and sometimes, therefore, pleasing neither readership. Thus, the CA, which has some great, recognizable GG scenes - the threats leveled against the protagonist (always called D.) on his nighttime arrival in England, the train ride and visit to a foundering coal town in the Midlands, the cockeyed plan to escape from England by boat … - yet, at the end, the story line - an “agent” for an at-war European country (Spain?) comes to England to strike secret deal to provide coal to his country (and thereby re-opening some of the dormant mines - is so convoluted and at times thinly sketched that I can’t imagine anyone even trying to adapt this novel, and in fact it’s damn difficult to read as well and troubled by some flaws, e.g., the “love interest” is so scattered and bizarre and obscure that we never quite understand her desires and motives (same with D.’s), the most interesting and appealing character - the teenage maid in a cheap hotel where D. lies low as the scheme unfurls - gets done away with too early - suicide or murder? - that the story feels deflated. It’s worth a look for GG fans and completers, but not great entertainment per se. 

Despite/In spit of its ridiculous/whimsical/provocative title, Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022) turns out to be not a toss-off but a terrific source of insight as to what we might more accurately called Themes and Motifs in Popular (mostly) American Music of the 20th Century. Dylan has selected 66 songs to depict and give substance to his major themes; though he never summarizes with an over-riding thesis statement (of essay), several themes, familiar to most Dylan devotees, emerge, notably sympathy for rebels, outsiders, criminals justly or unjustly accused or dispatched, lost love, and vagabonds. Some of these are obvious choices to illustrate this master theme (e.g., Don’t Take Your Guns to Town) and some far more subtle and unexpected, such as a chapter on The Street Where You Live, in which Dylan imagines “you” (many of the essays are in 2nd person) as a guy standing in an alley or street corner waiting for a fix. A second theme throughout concerns the very nature of popular music - CW, rock, folk (a little), Broadway, Crooners, to name a few. His take on Black Magic Woman is among the best accounts I’ve ever read regarding what music means to listeners and thinkers. Many of the brief essays include a background look at the music industry, short accounts of the careers of some of the musicians, discussion of battles over copyrights, a look at stardom and at most talent. These are emphatically not Dylan’s Top 66 songs; rather, these essays recognize and define the driving force that pushed these songs to the forefront (or in some cases didn’t do so). Some of the essays are odd and fanciful: Long Tall Sally as an take on an obscure reference in Genesis to a tribe of tall women. Others are just plain surprising: We all know that Dylan has been a Sinatra fan, but who knew he was also into Perry Como and Rick (not Ricky, thank you) Nelson? There is only one “folk” song (Seeger’s Big Muddy anti-war piece), only one poem (more of a spoken word song, I’d say) and it’s not on any “modern” poet (e.g. no Robert Frost of T.S. Eliot, whom Dylan has quoted from in a radio broadcast: April is the cruelest month. And there’s nothing about the musicians most often compared with Dylan or who performed with Dylan: No Baez, no Simon, no To Petty, not Leonard Cohen. There’s one song from the 1920s though it picks up largely in the ‘40s and there’s only 2 or 3 in the 21st Century (The Who, The Clash, the other Elvis). And only the briefest reference to Dylan’s own corpus (a mention of Subterranean …). Among the surprises are an essay w/ numerous citations of passages in classical music that appear in modern song (he must have had some help in tracking down this info, right?). All told, a terrifically informative book not only for Dylanologists and lot of fun to read; I’d recommend listening to each song before reading Dylans’s take - all are easily available online, many with videos of live performance,