What I Read in May 2012

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Two teen-age boys are sent to the remote countryside during Mao’s cultural revolution. Their “re-education” there comes not from the hard work in field and mine, but from secretly reading the French classics which have been translated into Chinese. They also educate the little seamstress, but what she learns is not what they expect.

Stendahl, The Red and the Black. The classic French novel from 1830, read by me in translation. The story begins as a tale of poor but ambitious young man on the make, moves into high-flown romance and ends as melodrama.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Translated into Modern English by Nevill Coghill. I started this in a four-session class, where we only read selections, and then finished it on my own. It was a long slog, seemed like. I found many delightful patches, but as a whole it wearied me. I am not the person who can fully appreciate literature from this period.

Alison Lurie, Love and Friendship. After the heavy going in Stendahl and Chaucer, this light-weight academic social comedy was just the ticket. All is not well on the idyllic but isolated campus of Convers College, but then, why should it be?

Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter. The long subtitle accurately describes this affectionate but honest account of John Cheever’s life. After reading Cheever’s published Journals and Blake Bailey’s detailed biography, I thought I knew all I needed — or wanted — to know of this teller of suburban tales. I knew too much. Susan Cheever does it better in this sympathetic telling of her father’s story.

The Canterbury Tales (by Geoffrey Chaucer), adapted by Seymour Chwast.  The whole thing is too long to read? You want a version more entertaining than Cliffs Notes? This graphic interpretation is probably right for you. It’s complete — all the tales and the prologues and the epilogues — but just the good parts, happily interpreted.

Patricia O’Brien, The Glory Cloak. In this historical novel, we meet and mingle real-life figures like Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton with fictional characters. The time is the Civil War, when Alcott served briefly as a nurse in the Union Hospital in Washington.

Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. It was not a quick trip from the Galapagos Islands to The Origin of Species and Darwin did not make the trip alone. He followed along behind Smith and Lamarck and Lyell and all the others who were trying to make sense of the discoveries of science.

Stendahl, The Red and the Black

Under the pen name Stendahl, Marie Henri Beyle published The Red and the Black in 1830, just as the July revolution was overthrowing one monarch to replace him with another. In literature it was a romantic time, and this is a romantic novel, although it does not start out that way. It begins with Julien Sorel, a striver with ability and ambition, who pursues his own interests in a society which has re-ossified into conservatism after the excesses of the Revolution and the imperial ambitions of Napoleon. Hypocrisy is his necessary technique.

“Imagine,” he said to himself, shaking his head, “Napoleon’s portrait found hidden in the room of a man who professes nothing but hatred for the usurper!… And — the height of recklessness — …lines written in my own hand which can leave no doubt about the warmth of my admiration.”

Sorel is sincere in his ambitions, and Stendahl’s mocking of the social pretensions of the day make for effective comedy. A successful businessman who considers the evidence that his wife is unfaithful knows what is important when he makes his judgement.

“I am used to Louise,” he said to himself; “she knows all about my business affairs. If I were free to marry tomorrow, I couldn’t replace her.” Then he flattered himself with the idea that his wife was innocent; this way of seeing things spared him from showing firmness of character and suited him much better.

This was all very well, but events and the tone of the book changed. The trajectory of my reading pleasure looks like this: all down hill after a strong beginning.

At first, Sorel’s love affairs, like his studies in the seminary, are under the control of his desire to get ahead in a world that has little use for him. This restraint doesn’t last. Sometimes he loves her, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes she loves him, sometimes she doesn’t. We are in such a whirl of romantic intoxication that very little makes sense. What does make sense is the gift for comedy Stendahl maintains until just before the end. For example, Sorel’s diligently copies out a series of love letters from a book provided by a worldly acquaintance, addressing them not to his lady love but to a rival, thus provoking a useful jealousy. The tactic works, but then everything dissolves in violence, as Sorel turns away from everything: love, ambition, life itself. The ending is pure melodrama. It would be funny too, if if were not so unbelievable.