L'Embarras Des Richesses

     Yes--that heading IS correct. It is the name of a play published in the late 1700's by a French author named--believe it or not--Leonor Jean Christine Soulas D'Allainval. Which seems like an embarrassment of riches as regards names.
     At present I am overwhelmed by books. The trouble is that I have no control over when I get books from the DC Library.
The Booker short-list prompted me to put a hold on "Hot Milk" by Deborah Levy (A Booker Prize short-listed book), and I was informed by the Library the next day that "Hot Milk" had arrived. I also tried to put a hold on the short-listed novel (the name eludes me) by David Szalay, but it was not in the Library catalogue. The Library did have an earlier book by him called "Spring;" so I put a hold on that.
     And then, the next day, I was informed that both "Spring" and the fourth and last Ferrante book were waiting for me at the Library.
     I read "Hot Milk" fairly quickly--a fascinating novel, about which I will write a few lines in another post. I am part way into "Spring" and into the final Ferrante book. These two books compete for my attention, as both are very compelling.
     And then, having finished reading in the gym on my I-pad, "Why Save The Bankers," by Thomas Piketty, which I do not recommend, I needed to download a new I-book from the Library. One that was immediately available was by the Haitian/American writer, Edwidge Danticat, titled "The Dew Breaker," which I am reading as I exercise on the elliptical trainer. An excellent book--rather more a series of short stories with sometimes tenuous linkages, but very well written.
     So--an embarrassment of literary riches at the moment.
It looks like I will need to take two hard-cover books with me to London tomorrow.

A VERY funny book...

"Brilliantly original and very funny"  Bill Bryson.

From the book jacket--"Molvania, birthplace of the polka and whooping cough, is often overlooked as a tourist destination but thanks to this fully up-dated Jetlag Travel Guide the keen tourist can now enjoy one of Eastern Europe's best kept secrets...."

Example of hotel review: "Situated across from the railway station in a rather run-down section of Lutenblag, Hotjl Oljanka has developed a somewhat seedy reputation as a meeting place for criminals and shady characters. However, the oft-expressed fears about room security are much exaggerated, and with the fitting of time-delay door locks, grille mesh windows, and metal detectors in the lobby, there hasn't been a kidnapping or serious assault here since 1999."

Booker Short List

This is the sort of list that bugs me a bit. It provokes questions such as:

Am I really interested in the legacy of the Cultural Revolution?

Am I really interested in nine stories about male protagonists?

Perhaps I am tempted a little by multiple homicide in the 19th century...

Or maybe, just maybe, a girl at a juvenile detention center...

• The Canadian author Madeleine Thien’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” about the legacy of the Cultural Revolution in China.
• The American writer Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout,” a satire on black life in the United States.
• The Canadian-British author David Szalay’s “All That Man Is,” a series of nine stories about male protagonists.
• The Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet’s “His Bloody Project,” a historical thriller inspired by a multiple homicide in the 19th century.
• The South African-born British novelist Deborah Levy’s “Hot Milk,” a coming-of-age story about a young Anglo-Greek woman.
•  “Eileen,” the debut novel by the American author Ottessa Moshfegh, which centers on a young woman working at a juvenile detention center in 1960s New England.

Milton is a bit daunting...

Looking at free I-books to load to my I-Pad, I saw Paradise Lost, and I thought, "Well, I have never read it--maybe I should--after all, it is a major work in Eng. Lit."

But having tracked through stanza after stanza of text like the following, I began to lose heart...

For never since created man,
Met such imbodied force, as nam'd with these
Could merit more then that small infantry
Warr'd on by Cranes: though all the Giant brood
Of PHLEGRA with th' Heroic Race were joyn'd
That fought at THEB'S and ILIUM, on each side
Mixt with auxiliar Gods; and what resounds
In Fable or ROMANCE of UTHERS Son
Begirt with BRITISH and ARMORIC Knights;
And all who since, Baptiz'd or Infidel
Jousted in ASPRAMONT or MONTALBAN,
DAMASCO, or MAROCCO, or TREBISOND,
Or whom BISERTA sent from AFRIC shore
When CHARLEMAIN with all his Peerage fell
By FONTARABBIA. Thus far these beyond

See what I mean?

"Nora Webster" Post Two

It is difficult for me to know what to say about “Nora Webster.” Every blurb uses superlatives and highly complimentary comments from well-known writers, praising everything about the novel in glowing terms. Even the very slow pace seems to be turned into a cause for praise—“its very slowness results in bright moments of beauty.”

“About as perfect as a book can get,” is one comment. So, if you have time, it is a book you should probably try.

It all depends on what you are looking for in a book. If you want something extraordinary to happen, some strong developmental arc that leads to a major change or epiphany, I expect you will find this book far too slow. The progress of Nora recovering from the death of her husband is drawn out over three years—late 1960’s to early 1970’s--with a succession of small victories as she grits her teeth and, with much soul-searching, decides on behavior that moves her away from the person she has been for a couple of decades and embraces a new life. She has to learn to look after her money, to reassess her relationships with her four children (two boys, Donal and Conor: two girls, Fiona and Aine) and with other members of her family, to return to office work, make new friends, take singing lessons, enjoy classical music, buy a record player, and so on. There are minor crises, major set-backs, but slowly Nora reveals her strengths, and the narration leaves her contented and at peace with herself on the day her sisters clear out Maurice’s clothes, which is also the day she burned Maurice’s letters. “She thought how much had happened since they were written and how much they belonged to a time that was over now and would not come back. It was the way things were: it was the way things had worked out.”

Just as a footnote. Nora’s relationships with her two boys are a major feature of the novel, in particular her problems with Donal, who has developed a stutter since his father died. One wonders how much autobiographical material has been incorporated by Toibin. He was born in Enniscorthy, where the novel is set, his father was a school-teacher who died when Toibin was twelve years old, and Toibin himself had a bad stutter. How much, then, is Nora a portrait of Toibin’s mother?

"Nora Webster" by Colm Toibin (Post One)

    I am some way into "Nora Webster," and in the first one hundred or so pages I have found it a very insightful exploration of the psyche of Nora, whose husband, Maurice, has just died after an agonizing and seemingly long-drawn-out illness. The chasm that has opened up in her life, her feelings about her two boys and their two older sisters, her relationships with her own sisters and their husbands---all this is explored with great sympathy and understanding. But--it IS slow going...
    Some of the blurbs seem to accept this as a merit of the novel ("I found myself unnerved and then exhilarated by Toibin's resistance to an artificially dramatic arc," says Jennifer Egan, an accomplished novelist herself), but I am beginning to want something to happen, and not just the skirmishes in the office where she takes a job, coping with a harridan of a supervisor and the prolonged telephone calls of the spoilt grand-daughter of the founder of the company, with whom she has to share an office.
    But I have a hankering for some big something to happen...and so I will persist...

Footnote on Semi-colons

It seems I am not alone in my criticism of Tessa Hadley's  punctuation. I googled "Tessa Hadley Semi-colons," and I came up with this quotation that referred to one of her earlier novels:

"I could not get past the first page of this book.

In the first paragraph alone I counted five punctuation

errors, including comma splices, misused semicolons, and run-on sentences. I freely admit that I am a grammar snob, though I have learned to be more lenient in contemporary fiction.

These errors go well beyond the acceptable level, however,

and without the excuse of poetic license or attempts at natural dialogue.

I expect a publisher of this caliber to employ copy editors who at least know as much as I knew as a sophomore in high school. My apologies to the author for the bad review. Your publisher should have given you an editor."

But this should not deter you from reading "The Past."

Colons/Semi-colons

I have always been a bit anti the semi-colon. I do not like its asymmetry, and somehow it has always seemed to me that we need not make these fine distinctions in sentence breaks. Does it really matter whether the break is a colon, or even a dash? And sometimes a comma would be quite sufficient. I recently posted a quote from an amusing article on punctuation, which--inter alia--made the point that often a separate sentence would be preferable. I am quoting below a paragraph from Jane Eyre as it appears in the novel. I then split it up into separate sentences, so as to pose the question--does it make any difference?

“The play-hour in the evening I thought the pleasantest fraction of the day at Lowood: the bit of bread, the draught of coffee swallowed at five o’clock had revived vitality, if it had not satisfied hunger: the long restraint of the day was slackened; the schoolroom felt warmer than in the morning—its fires being allowed to burn a little more brightly, to supply, in some measure, the place of candles, not yet introduced: the ruddy gloaming, the licensed uproar, the confusion of many voices gave one a welcome sense of liberty.”

“The play-hour in the evening I thought the pleasantest fraction of the day at Lowood. The bit of bread, the draught of coffee swallowed at five o’clock had revived vitality, if it had not satisfied hunger. The long restraint of the day was slackened. The schoolroom felt warmer than in the morning—its fires being allowed to burn a little more brightly, to supply, in some measure, the place of candles, not yet introduced.  The ruddy gloaming, the licensed uproar, the confusion of many voices gave one a welcome sense of liberty.”

I think you can justify Charlotte B's colons--it is a sort of list, and each section does describe an aspect of "The play hour" of the first 
sentence. But does it really make a difference?

Tessa Hadley "The Past"

"In her patient, unobtrusive, almost self-effacing way, Tessa Hadley has become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists… She writes brilliantly about families and their capacity for splintering. She is a remarkable and sensuous noticer of the natural world. She handles the passing of time with a magician’s finesse. She is possessed of a psychological subtlety reminiscent of Henry James, and an ironic beadiness worthy of Jane Austen. To cap it all, she is dryly, deftly humorous…These talents are on formidable display in her latest novel, The Past. It is the story of a family and a three-week summer holiday in the house they have inherited, beneath whose affable surface run deep currents of tension…Here she has created a Chekhovian trio of sisters who love and resent one another. Alice, the middle one, is 46, flighty, forgetful and romantic; Fran, a teacher, is practical and decisive and a mother of two young children, Ivy and Arthur; Harriet, the eldest, is independent-minded and shy, a former revolutionary in retreat from the fray. They are later joined by their brother, Roland, a pop philosopher on his third marriage, in a new white suit. Pilar, the latest wife, is one of two family outsiders, the other being Kasim, moody son of Alice’s ex-boyfriend, who takes an instant shine to Molly, Roland’s teenage daughter.”

    This quotation--somewhat shortened--I have filched from the review in The Guardian by the novelist Antony Quinn (Thank you, Mr. Quinn). The house where the cast of characters assemble for a holiday belonged to their grandparents, and it was the childhood home of their mother, Jill, and the vicarage of the ancient church close-by. Jill's father was the vicar, a poet, and a classical scholar, and Jill grew up much under his influence. She went to Oxford, got a first in Greats (Latin, Greek, and Philosophy) and then moved into marriage and motherhood. The novel is divided into three parts--Present, Past, and Present, and the middle section deals with Jill coming home to her parents--with three small children--as a means of breaking up her marriage to her journalist husband Tom. We are not far into the book--no 'spoiler alert' needed--when we learn that Jill died of cancer, and that Harriet, at sixteen, had to become something of a substitute mother to the younger siblings, whose number had by then been increased by the addition of Fran.

And so, in the two parts of the Present, our omniscient narrator explores in intriguing detail all that is going on in the minds of her characters--children as well as adults--and the story starts to focus on two major developments that come to fruition, both involving the non-family members:  Kasim, the Pakistani son of a prior lover of Alice, a student at LSE, and Pilar, the new wife of Roland, who is an exotic Argentinian lawyer. It does take some time before these two plot lines start to develop.

My experience with reading this book was similar to my reading of the Ferrante novels: once started, difficult to stop.Thoroughly recommended.

Tessa Hadley

I am reading with pleasure "The Past" by Tessa Hadley. But one aspect of her writing that bothers me a bit is her profligate use of semi-colons and colons. It prompted me to go back and look at an article I read recently about punctuation, which included the following paragraphs, the second of which could readily be applied to Hadley's writing:

"Semicolons are pretentious and overactive. These days one seems to come across them in every other sentence. "These days" is alarmist, since half a century ago the German poet Christian Morgenstern wrote a brilliant parody, "Im Reich der Interpunktionen," in which imperialistic semicolons are put to rout by an "Antisemikolonbund" of periods and commas. Nonetheless, if the undergraduate essays I see are representative, we are in the midst of an epidemic of semicolons. I suspect that the semicolon is so popular because it is the first fancy punctuation mark students learn of, and they assume that its frequent appearance will lend their writing a properly scholarly cast. Alas, they are only too right. But I doubt that they use semicolons in their letters. At least I hope they don't.

More than half of the semicolons one sees, I would estimate, should be periods, and probably another quarter should be commas. Far too often, semicolons, like colons, are used to gloss over an imprecise thought. They place two clauses in some kind of relation to one another but relieve the writer of saying exactly what that relation is. Even the simple conjunction "and," for which they are often a substitute, has more content, because it suggests compatibility or logical continuity. ("And," incidentally, is among the most abused words in the language. It is forever being exploited as a kind of neutral vocalization connecting two things that have no connection whatever.)"

But, as I said, apart from this minor qualification, I am very much enjoying "The Past."