What I Read in May 2011

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s well-known 1929 essay about women and fiction. This is the May book for discussion at Feminist Classics. You are invited to join the discussion there.

Pat Barker, The Ghost Road. This is the third of the trilogy of novels set during World War I. The other two are Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.

P. J. O’Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations. P.J.’s take on Adam Smith’s great work. You receive a good summary of the basics of Smith’s book and of classic economy if you don’t let O’Rourke’s snide comments get in the way. I read this book, along with the Karl Marx book listed below for a course, Smith Vs. Marx, where we looked at what these two giants of economic analysis actually said, versus what people think they said.

Albert Camus, The Stranger. Translation by Matthew Ward. Meursault is a murderer; he also tells the truth.

Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life. A well-written biography of the author of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.

Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth. Short stories by the Canadian writer.

Jane Gardam, The Flight of the Maidens. An earlier novel by the author of Old Filth. Three provincial English girls win scholarships to prestigious universities. Their flight is both a flight from — leaving a life that could not

be sufficient for them — and a flight up — a reaching for something higher, and perhaps better, but certainly different.

Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth

I read books by Alice Munro in no particular order, whenever one comes to hand. I usually comment, most recently on The View from Castle Rock.

The short stories in Friend of My Youth are set in Canada, many in the town of Wally, where of course everyone knows everyone else — even after many years. The themes here are of return, return to a place and time one knew at an earlier stage of life; confidences, women tell each other how it was or how it might be; betrayal, betrayal of friends,  sisters, lovers. People have secret lives and aspirations and sometimes they share them with others, but not always.

In the story “Wigtime” Anita returns to the town where she grew up and encounters Margot. The used to walk home from school together.

They spun the day out a little longer, talking. Any subject would do…. They talked so easily and endlessly that it seemed they talked about everything. But there were things they held back.

Anita held back two ambitions of hers, which she did not reveal to anybody. One of them — to be an archeologist — was too odd, and the other — to be a fashion model — was too conceited. Margot told her ambition, which was to be a nurse. You didn’t need any money to get into it — not like university — and once you graduated you could go anywhere and get a job. New York, City, Hawaii — you could get as far away as you liked.

Two teen age girls talk. Some things are said and some are not. It’s real life, so Margot gets married and never gets away, while it is Anita who becomes a nurse. Confidences return, as they tell each other how it happened, betrayals and all.

Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock

The view from Castle Rock in Edinburgh is America. It is a long way off, but you can see if from there if you know what you are looking for. Alice Munro’s “America” is Canada, mostly, where her ancestors came from an impoverished Scotland.

This is a rather curious book. I have enjoyed Munro’s short stories and find that they often  hint of her personal experiences. These are memoirs of personal experiences with hints of of having become fiction. Speaking of her family researches, she says

I put all this material together over the years, and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into something like stories.

Toward the end of the book, she finds it necessary to explain apparently-unrelated researches to a librarian:

If you are doing a paper, a study, you will of course have a good reason, but what if you are just interested? The best thing , probably, is to say you are doing a family history. Librarians are used to people doing that– particularly people who have gray hair–and it is generally thought to be a reasonable way of spending one’s time.

What she was looking for at the time was an explanation of a crypt in a country graveyard. With a possible cancer diagnosis, death is on her mind, but she doesn’t say that. She makes it remote, a matter of exploring an unidentified death, an unconventional burial. Something of the same remoteness infuses these stories of a little girl growing up on a failed fox farm near a town where it is not a good idea for a woman to be too smart. In no way could her great-great grandfather see the real America from Castle Rock. He knew it existed and he expected to go there, but knowing more had to await his arrival.

What I Read in March 2010

I have posted on most of the books I read in March, some several times. For the rest, see comments below.

Laura Lippman, Life Sentences. Is there wish fulfillment in the occupation Laura Lippman assigns to the heroine of Life Sentences? Best-selling author, able to finance a comfortable life style from her books — until she decides to do some research to link past memories with a current mystery. Intriguing puzzle, if a bit improbable in places.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid

Ivan Turgenev, First Love and Other Stories

Alexander McCall Smith, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs. Normally I would avoid a book with a title that included the term “sausage dogs” but I made an exception for this one from the Von Igelfeld Trilogy. Alexander McCall Smith has several series in play, the most popular being The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. His readers have come of love his lady detective, Mma Ramotsee. I have come to esteem and admire the renowned Germanic  expert in romance philology, Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria Von Igelfeld. Start with the first book, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, and conjugate from there.

Ian McEwan, Chesil Beach

Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy

Sophocles, Oedipus. Look for a post in a few days on Oedipus at the Movies.

Ivan Turgenev, First Love and Other Stories

This collection of six novellas and short stories is part of the Oxford World’s Classics series. The translator is Richard Freeborn.

The theme is love, especially first love. In the stories Asya and First Love, we see through the eyes of an adolescent boy, coming to terms with his feelings about the first women he loves. She may walk and talk and have a name, but she is most of all a woman of his fantasies.

The most affecting story, for me, was Mumu about a deaf and dumb peasant. First he yearns for an unobtainable young woman, then learns to give his love to Mumu, the dog he adopts. Finally he discovers that no love is available to a man in his situation.

Certain people appear again and again in Turgenev stories, for example, a giant of a man whose incoherence is both a cause and a result of his limitations. Gerasim in Mumu and Martin Harlov in King Lear of the Steppes are such men. Also present is the dominating and domineering woman, mistress of her own wealth (so, usually, a widow) who enjoys her power over others. Sometimes she is wicked, a quality she doesn’t recognize in herself. In Mumu,

…she rarely went out and was solitarily living through the final years of avaricious and boring old age. Her own day, cheerless and unpleasant, had long since passed; but the evening of her days was blacker than night.

She may mean well, but meddling often has unforeseen consequences. In King Lear of the Steppes,

My dear mother was very selective in her acquaintances, but she would receive Harlov with particular warmth and was always ready to make allowances for him…. My mother also found him a wife. She married him to a seventeen-year-old orphan who had been brought up in her house.

These fictional women are based on Turgenev’s own wealthy and imperious mother. He can use her character successfully, both the good and bad sides, because his power as a writer is to tell the story. The characters may judge each other — and do — but Turgenev does not. For example, his sympathies are with the peasants, but he still tells us that they are ignorant, given to petty thievery and usually drink too much when it is available.

The Stories of John Cheever

After reading the review of the new biography of John Cheever, I decided to sample his short stories. Did I remember any of them from New Yorker days? I wasn’t sure. I certainly did not expect to plow (crawl? amble? swim?) through the entire length of a 693-page book, but I could not disengage. Every day I treated myself to a a half dozen stories and looked forward to another day.

Cheever develops more than one type of story. There is the incident, brief and well told, in which character is all. There is the span of years story – I saw him as a boy and then 20 years later and then last week – and these are not always successful in suggesting the flow of time. There is the story in another voice, the Italian maid telling us of her adventures in the new world.

Best of all, there are the stories where it all comes together: the time, the place, the people. The enormous radio communicates with those who are not worthy to understand its revelations. A man, full of contempt for the weakness of others, develops a fear of crossing bridges until his fear is sung away by an angel. Another man oppressed by an angry wife uses Euclid to escape.