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.
