Mary's Library

Saturday, September 30, 2006

What I’m Reading


I’m supposed to be reading a lot of things. Mrs Gaskell’s Gothic Tales, in which I’m bogged down near the end. The Professor by Charlotte Bronte, a discussion of which I’m leading during October. The Duke’s Children, the next book on my online trollope group schedule. The Moral Trollope, by Ruth apRoberts, which I’ve borrowed on ILL and which is due soon.

But I’m spending all my time immersed in a book called Pot Luck by Emile Zola. My not-trollope group is going to read Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise next month. (This is a prediction, but I feel certain this is the book we will choose.) And since Au Bonheur des dames (1883) is a kind of sequel to Pot-Bouille (1882) I decided to take a look at the latter before beginning to read the former.

185 pages later and I’m still looking. The book is about the bourgeoise families living in a pretentious but crumbling apartment building in Second Empire Paris. The main character, Octave Mouret, will go on in The Ladies’ Paradise to build the world’s first department store. But in Pot Luck he is a 24-year old newcomer to Paris working as a clerk in a draper’s shop.

I haven’t read much French literature. I’ve made my way through Proust and I’ve read and re-read The Count of Monte Cristo. The Three Musketeers, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a little George Sand, a little Anatole France.

All of which in no way prepared me for the “naturalism” of Zola. For the first time I understand why the good middle class English parents in the novels of Trollope forbid their daughters to read French novels.

This isn’t simply a risqué novel. It’s not just a book about adultery and infidelity and money. It’s saturated with sex and greed and filth. You can almost smell the offal the servants throw from the kitchen window into the courtyard, a concrete manifestation of the incredible corruption in the lives of their masters and mistresses.


I’m shocked. And this is only Zola. What unimaginable horrors must be awaiting me in Balzac!

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Romantic Affinities


“‘This is the sort of book which will drive the professors mad,’ begins Richard Holmes’s enthusiastic review of Romantic Affinities in the Evening Standard. ‘It is a history of the Romantic Movement, told in the episodic style of an inspired, intellectual soap-opera.’

“The book opens as the young Andre Chenier dashes off his last poem—on the brown paper used for wrapping dirty linen – before he is carted off to the guillotine, and concludes as a restless band of students and artists – shouting and stamping – waits five hours in a cold, dark Comedie-Francaise for the opening of Victor Hugo’s Hernani. In between, Paganini plays a violin whose G string is said to have been made from the innards of his murdered mistress; the poet Holderlin shrouded in a white sheet frightens a servant in the middle of the night; and Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron mingle on the page – as they never did in life – with the likes of Goethe, Kleist, and Madame de Stael.

“These are the characters who people the tales of long walks, failed love, bank loans, slammed doors, seedy hotels; who play out the scenes of moments that changed lives, of bitterness choked back, of music heard over the water, and of notes scribbled at attic windows. Theirs are the stories of hunger, lies, and carnage; of waiting beyond the appointed hour; of running down empty corridors; of confronting death and grasping at joy.

“‘Both scholarly and funny’ – again in the words of Richard Holmes – Romantic Affinities is ‘a brilliant, sultry evocation . . . a flamboyant work of popularization . . . a stylish, spirited, and provoking extravaganza. The professors may rail, but it is well worth cramming.’”

Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age, 1770-1830 (1988) by Rupert Christiansen. From the jacket.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Virginia Woolf














Yesterday, for the first time in history, I gathered all my Virginia Woolf books together on one shelf. For the last 40-odd years as their numbers grew they have been scattered around in the bedroom, the living room, the guest room, the family room, my library, and in Boxes 113, 125, 136, 206, and others. There was even one in among my cookbooks, Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography.

I have more than 40 books by and about VW, if you count Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage, a biography of Lytton Strachey, and a couple of other peripherals. I even have the five volumes of VW’s diary and the six volumes of her letters

And yet, when I decided to read along with the informal “Woolf for Dummies” course Susan Hill is doing on her blog, I had to order two books for just the first part. How could I own more than 5,000 books and not have Jacob’s Room?

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Body Language

Using research in pupillometry done at the University of Chicago, they were able to help Revlon increase sales of its lipstick by enlarging the pupil size of the models in the catalogs. I’m hard pressed to think of a better example of science at the service of humanity.
– Christopher Buckley, in a review of The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease, in today’s New York Times Book Review section

Friday, September 22, 2006

What I'm Reading (cont)



Various Haunts of Men (2004) by Susan Hill. This is the first of the author’s Simon Serrallier detective stories. It’s a cut or two (or three) above the rest. I look forward to many more mysteries in this series.

The Fugitive, the sixth novel in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (aka The Remembrance of Things Past.) This book, first published in French in 1925 as Albertine disparue, has been newly translated by Peter Collier.
If you have had trouble reading Proust in the past (and who of us hasn’t), it’s time to brush off your New Year’s Resolution from 1963 and give it another go as the entire work has been re-translated into English, each book by a different person. So far I’m finding it much superior to the old Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation.

Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell. I’m not much for short stories or for the paranormal or gothic, but these stories are pretty good. A couple are very good.

The Professor by Charlotte Bronte. This novel was written in about 1846 but not published until 1857, after Bronte’s death. It’s the sort of book about which we English majors want to pose a dozen essay test questions per chapter:

How reliable is the narrator?
Why does his brother treat him harshly?
Describe the conflict between the man of inherited wealth and the self-made man. Which does Bronte favor?
What part does the Industrial Revolution play in the plot?
What does the mysterious Hunsden represent?
Why was Bronte unable to get the novel published?


And so on and on. I could list a lot more juicy exam questions. It's that kind of book.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

What I'm Reading

At the moment I’m reading eight books, which for me is modest. I routinely juggle 15 or 20 books at a time. I’ll post the rest of the titles later, but for now here are four of them.

Victorian London: The Life of a City, 1840-1870 (2005) by Liza Picard. Judy mentioned the book favorably in my not-trollope group and her advice is invaluable. The book is excellent.

The Moral Trollope (1971) by Ruth apRoberts. Acquired on Interlibrary Loan (ILL.) it’s tough sledding so far, with all those Latin terms and references to Cicero . . .

The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay, published between 1848 and 1855. I’m only dipping into this; I’m not reading all 5 volumes.

I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni, written in 1825-26 but set in the 17th century. Believe it or not, I first read this book when I was about 8 years old. (I knew you wouldn’t believe it.)

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

A Woman Walks Across America


On the 5th of May in 1896 a Spokane woman, Helga Estby, headed eastward along the railroad tracks intending to reach the town of Mica by the end of the day. She was taking up a challenge from “the fashion industries,” who offered to pay $10,000 if she would walk from Spokane to the east coast.

Finances were tight for the Norwegian-American and her family and she saw this as the only way to save their farm. And so Helga, accompanied by her teen-aged daughter, Clara, left behind her other eight children and started walking eastward.

This astonishing story is the subject of a recent book by Linda Lawrence Hunt called Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America (2003.)

I won’t tell you any more of the details of this expedition, some exhilarating and some tragic. You must read it for yourself. It’s a laugh-and-cry sort of book, suspenseful, gratifying, heartbreaking, unputdownable.


With thanks to Vickie Munch for telling me about this first-rate book.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

A Writer Needs a Cat

"A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys." - Barbara Holland

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

A First Class Cup of Tea


The NY Times had an article today about high-end teas and how they are now being sold in teabags. These aren’t the usual tea dust that we have come to appreciate in America, having for centuries been drinking the dregs from the holds of tea clippers after the good stuff was offloaded in England.

These are whole leaf teas, put into nylon pyramid shaped tea bags that can set you back two bucks apiece. I was fortunate to have been given some of these treasures for Christmas (in a tin box, of course) from Wilhelm's folks, so after reading the story in the Times I went upstairs and made myself a cup of the best tea I’ve had since the last time I made myself a cup from one of these tea bags a month ago.

Of course you know where this leading: to a book. I pulled off the shelf a book I had begun reading a while back, The History of the World In 6 Glasses (2005), by Tom Standage, the technology editor of the Economist. But I had read only only the beer section before my attention was drawn elsewhere.

However, judging from the beer and tea sections the book is a treasure. (The other glasses are wine, spirits, coffee, and Coca-Cola.)

Monday, September 11, 2006

Cousin Henry

My online Trollope group is reading one of Trollope’s lesser known and mildly controversial books, Cousin Henry, written in 1879, three years before his death. The book is very short, which alone makes it unusual among Trollope’s oeuvre. We associate the name of the author with thick, 800-page novels with half a dozen subplots and half a hundred characters.

Cousin Henry is different. The plot goes like this: The old Squire of Llanfeare is dying and he has decided to leave the estate to his niece, Isobel, who has for a dozen years been like a daughter to him, managing his household and taking care of him in his illness. But he is a conservative man and it bothers him that he should leave the estate away from the male line of the Jones family. Unfortunately, the male heir, one Henry Jones, is a thoroughly inappropriate choice to be squire of Llanfeare.

The squire wants Isobel to marry Harry Jones, but she despises the man and refuses. The old man, reluctantly and in great sorrow, makes a new will leaving the estate to Cousin Henry. Cousin Henry arrives for a visit to the squire and Isobel leaves for a visit to her father and his family.

Then the squire dies, Isobel having hastened back to be at his bedside.

When it’s time to read the will, two tenants report that the squire made another, later will leaving everything to Isobel. But that will is nowhere to be found, despite a thorough search of the house. The estate passes to Cousin Henry.

And here the story warms up. Isobel, who interpreted her uncle’s last words to mean that he had changed his mind and that she was to inherit, believes, along with the rest of the populace of the estate and the nearby town, that Cousin Henry has either burned or hidden the will. He certainly acts like it, being unable to look anyone in the eye, sweating when asked about the whereabouts of the latest will, sitting up late in the evening alone in the book room, hardly eating, and wandering about Llanfeare in a distressed state.

Then the newspaper starts a crusade. In every issue they come closer to accusing him outright of a crime until finally Cousin Henry’s lawyer, Mr ApJohn, bullies him into suing the editor for libel.

Cousin Henry has not burned the will, nor actively hidden it, but he knows where it is and he knows that the estate is not rightfully his. Under the pressure of the people’s dislike and the newspaper’s accusations, he suffers terribly from this knowledge. All he wants now is to be rid of the burden of this ill-gotten estate. But he is unable to force himself to burn the document, hand it over to the lawyer, or fake a dramatic “finding” of it, even as the days go by and the date when he will have to testify in public as to what he knows about the true will comes ever closer.

There you have it. The reader knows from the first that there is a valid will leaving everything to Isobel. We know that Cousin Henry is keeping the information from the authorities. We even know where the will is located and how it got there. And yet for me this book has more suspense than one of the thrillers on the best-seller list. It is mesmerizing to watch a not-very-good man without much courage, beset by the distain and disrespect of his tenants and neighbors, wrestle with his sin and search for a way to escape his predicament without either going to jail or being forever condemned by God.

Not your run-of-the-mill Victoriana. But well worth reading for a glimpse into the places that Trollope could have taken us if it hadn’t been unfashionable to write this sort of thoughtful novel.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Self-Restraint

A gentleman is one who can play the bagpipes, but doesn't. --Rory O'Farrell, Trollopian

Friday, September 08, 2006

The Coes


We’ve had a little flutter of excitement here in Spokane this last week as Kevin Coe, the “South Hill Rapist,” was brought to the city jail for a hearing about his future. He was found guilty and sentenced in 1981 and has just become eligible for release.

Coe was convicted of raping four of the many women who have asserted that he attacked them. He went off to jail avowing his innocence, with his mother, Ruth, backing him up. But not many people believed them, and now that he could get out of jail there’s a buzz about what might happen.

Something tells me that even if they let him go he won’t stay here where he is so well known and so well hated. A hearing will be held in six weeks to determine whether he is a sexual psychopath and should spend the rest of his days in a secure psychiatric facility. Not many folks are rooting for his release.

All of this is being reported on the evening news and curiosity has sent me to re-read Jack Olsen’s 1983 book about the affair called “Son:” A Psychopath and his Victims. I have to quit reading it at about 2 PM or I wouldn’t sleep at night. He’s a scary guy.

His mother, by the way, didn’t like the verdict and tried to hire somebody to kill the prosecutor and the judge. That didn’t do her son a lot of good and landed her in jail, too.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Small World


My interlibrary loan prayer for Susan Hill’s first Simon Serrallier mystery has been answered. I picked up The Various Haunts of Men today at the South Hill Library (no relation) and I’m having a really hard time leaving it alone while I do some necessary chores.

I heard about Susan Hill from my pal dovegreyreader, who talks about SH in her blog and has made me eager to get my hands on some of the Serralier novels. I thought about buying the books from England but the site where they are offered says nothing about the US and I fear the cost of postage would be prohibitive. (I know, I could buy them secondhand, but I try to make a good faith effort to buy new books before resorting to a transaction from which the author earns nothing.)

dovegreyreader sent me to Susan Hill’s blog, which I read pretty regularly these days. I wonder how the woman has time both to blog well and write good books. She must sleep 2 hours a night.

This book is singing to me. Unassuming black cloth cover, no dust jacket, gold print on the spine, ILL sheet wrapped around it warning me to get it back to the library by the 29th of September OR ELSE. The book came to me all the way from the library at The College of William and Mary in Virginia. Small world.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Katie Fforde

I was rearranging some of my books today and came across my Katie Fforde novels.

Fforde is an English writer whose airily charming books have given me many hours of pleasure. At Fantastic Fiction

they tell us that “Katie Fforde lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and some of her three children. Her hobbies are ironing and housework but, unfortunately, she has almost no time for them as she feels it is her duty to keep a close eye on the afternoon chat shows.”

My favorite of her books is Stately Pursuits (1997), in which a young woman, dumped by her boyfriend and out of a job, agrees to house-sit a stately home and pulls the entire town together to save the house.


Jasper Fforde tells me he is her nephew. With a name like Fforde they had to be related. How many Fforde families can there be?

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Optimism

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser -- in case you thought optimism was dead.
-Robert Brault, software developer,writer