Final Thoughts on The Portrait of a Lady (by Jill)

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IMG_4023I finished The Portrait of a Lady a few weeks ago, and I honestly don’t know what I’ve been doing since mid-February because it obviously hasn’t been writing blog posts.  Let’s just say that the first ten weeks of 2013 have been more than a bit fraught with activity and stress.  And now here I am on March 10th, laying on my bed in a hotel room in Yosemite National Park, wondering how in the heck it got to be two days before my 36th birthday and didn’t I just turn 35?  And what have I been doing the past ten weeks that it’s taken me this long to blog about January’s AP Challenge book?  Oh well.  Here goes nothing.  I started this post right after finishing the book, and I don’t remember where I was planning to go with it, but I’ll try to pick up where I left off.

I feel like I got through the second half of Henry James’ masterpiece much faster than the first half.  I suspect because the second half had a bit more action and some suspense surrounding Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond’s marriage.  The book gets billed as similar to Dangerous Liaisons or a Machiavellian theme.  And I see that, but in Dangerous Liaisons didn’t the guy actually fall in love with the woman being done wrong?  Because by the end I got the feeling that Gilbert Osmond hated Isabel and only wanted her around so he could dominate her.  And this is as far as I got right after I finished the book.

I reflected on my 1993 impressions of this book ad nauseam in my first two posts about The Portrait of a Lady, and how wrong I was and how teenagers have no taste.  I wish Fr. Murphy had told us that we probably wouldn’t have the time of day for this book until nineteen years had gone by.  It would also have been nice to hear him say that it was okay to wait almost twenty years to finish it, too.  That would have helped my Catholic guilt a lot.  What’s funny to me is that it didn’t take me nineteen years to realize the March AP book, Dickens’ Great Expectations, was better than I thought it was in high school.  I actually wanted to finish that one, and took my most favorite English class ever, the Nineteenth Century British Novel, in no small part because it was on the syllabus.  Why was Dickens different than Henry James?  Why did I continue to hate him, and The Portrait of a Lady, for fifteen more years?  I don’t know.  I may never know.

Where was I?  Oh, yes.  Henry James, Isabel Archer, and Gilbert Osmond.  Isabel and Gilbert’s relationship was amazingly awful to me.  What was wrong with him, really, that he had to be that controlling?  Was that just how men were in the late nineteenth century?  I don’t think so.  Sometimes I imagined Osmond lurking in corners, wearing a cape, and chuckling like one of those old time cartoon villains.  We don’t really get to know him or his motivations.  It can’t be just his desire to advance his daughter, Pansy, to an advantageous marriage using Isabel’s money and connections.  I don’t think even Isabel has a clue, or if she does she doesn’t verbalize it.  She just suffers.  And when she has a chance to leave, she takes it, but I get the impression that there is at least a fifty percent chance she is going right back there to him, because it’s her duty or some other such nonsense.

Henry James wrote what Fr. Murphy called “dense prose.”  It’s a term I have used often in the nineteen plus years since starting AP English.  I always thought of it as a bad thing, dense prose.  But it’s not, not really.  Modern fiction is much less dense, and that makes for faster reading, which has historically been my goal.  But 2013 has not been a prolific reading year for me.  But everything I’ve read has been dense, with sentences a person “can chew on,” to quote my wonderful boss, and that’s a quality I haven’t ever appreciated until now.  It used to be that I measured the worth of a book by how quickly I finished it.  But as I progress through these books, these classics, I see that there is more to it than that.  These books, especially The Portrait of a Lady, will stand out in my memory for as long as I have a memory.  And it guess that’s the whole point.

A review of Jesse Browner’s Everything Happens Today (by Bethany)

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I’ll get right to the point: Jesse Browner’s Everything Happens Today has been, hands down, the absolute highlight of the month of March for me. Not that March of 2013 has been that great of a month for me: I didn’t win any major literary prizes or suddenly solve any of my medical problems, but I did eat some good sushi, and I did finally find a decent massage therapist west of the Mississippi, and nothing terrible has happened to my car in March, at least not yet. All of these things are good, but trust me – Everything Happens Today is better.

This novel’s protagonist is the thoroughly engaging seventeen year-old Wes – a high-achieving high school junior and aspiring novelist – and its action takes place over the course of a single Saturday. It begins when Wes walks sleeplessly home from a party through early-morning Manhattan streets, briefly encounters his father in the kitchen, slides silently past his invalid mother’s bedroom to avoid alerting her to his presence, takes a shower and sleeps for a few hours before waking up to face both the challenges of the day ahead and the consequences of the events of the previous day and night – events and challenges that are both monumental and ordinary and that are consistently very, very compelling. This novel is wonderfully written, and Wes is a fantastic protagonist; this is the finest contemporary novel that I’ve read in a long time.

Hours before the novel begins, Wes lost his virginity to the infamous sophomore vixen Lucy, in spite of the fact that the composed and dignified Delia, who is also Wes’ mentor in his forays into Buddhism, was present at the same party and has long been the love of Wes’ life. The details of how Wes meandered into his sexual intimacy with Lucy are revealed in pieces throughout the novel and involve the machinations of Wes’ friend James, an exchange of flirtatious text messages, and a series of framed pictures of Lucy’s family that Wes finds intriguing. On Saturday morning, he is consumed with guilt and dread as he imagines his next conversation with Delia, and he is also upset in a more existential way: this was his one change to lose his virginity, and he botched it. Wes is the type of person who worries about this sort of thing: he is an advanced literature student, and he has already started to do what most English majors eventually can’t stop themselves from doing: he sees his life as a series of literary tropes – metaphors and epiphanies, moments of foreshadowing and dramatic irony, characterization and symbolism and exposition and denouement, and he sees his previous night as a moment when his character was not so much revealed as destroyed.

In addition, Wes has an assignment looming over him as the weekend begins. Earlier that week, he had been assigned to choose any work of literature and write about the way the author “emphasize[s] [his] social and psychological themes as much through the use of language and narrative trope as they do through plot and characterization” (19). Never mind that this is exactly the kind of assignment that no high school English teacher would ever give in the 21st century since it positively begs to be purloined off the internet, but never mind that. Wes did not plagiarize his essay; what he did instead was write it not about a novel or short story or play but about the U.S. Army’s M16 Operator’s Manual – a document that he had found recently during an unrelated internet search. “You thought I’d be so dazzled by your iconoclasm and wit that I wouldn’t notice that you’d barely gotten out of bed to write this” (19), his teacher says, confirming what Wes has already admitted to himself: “he also knew something about himself that his facility [as a writer] generally concealed from all but the most astute teacher – that he was a lazy and undisciplined thinker who too often relied on the shining surface of words to mask his disdain for academic pieties” (17). On Friday morning his teacher told him that he would have to rewrite the essay; by his own choice (probably perversely, as a way of thumbing his nose at his teacher in a somewhat less unacceptable way) he is planning to write about War and Peace, and he spends portions of Saturday flipping through Tolstoy’s novel (which he has read), considering its characters and themes (but not particularly considering its language, says the former English teacher reading the novel – but I’ll leave that to his teacher Mrs. Fielding to deal with), and engaging in various forms of essay-writing foreplay that I’m sure all of my readers remember from their student days.

The fact that Wes is contemplating War and Peace is only one way that this novel is very self-conscious in its allusions to other works of literature. Sometimes this kind of intertextuality can be a bad thing, but in this novel I think it works beautifully. For example, Wes’ relationship with his twelve year-old sister Nora is highly reminiscent of Holden Caulfield’s relationship with his sister Phoebe. Wes never thinks consciously of Holden and Phoebe – as far as I can remember, there are no references to The Catcher in the Rye on the page at all – but it’s hard for the reader to avoid making this connection when Browner gives us passages like this: “Wes couldn’t help himself. Every time he saw his sister he was filled with love for her. She was the most delightful, easy, dependable, kind, and intelligent child on the planet, and all he wanted to do was protect her from all this, have him call her ‘daddy-o’ forever and make sure that she didn’t grow up too fast or around the wrong sort of people. But then Wes remembered that he himself had become the wrong sort of person, precisely the kind of person that little sisters need protecting from, and maybe she needed protecting from him too” (10). Even the pace of the novel’s sometimes-frenetic syntax slows down here when Wes thinks about his sister, and he even sort of thinks about her in clichés, something he would be loath to do about any other topic. One of the saddest parts of the novel is the way that Wes does consistently let Nora down – he takes his mother’s side when she wrongly accuses Nora of forgetting to give her breakfast, and then he first takes Nora to a movie that he later realizes is inappropriate for her and then leaves the theatre to answer a text message only to become distracted and abandon Nora altogether – in spite of the fact that he has nothing but loving intentions toward her.

In addition to his own failures, Wes is also determined to protect Nora from the pain and corruption of their nuclear family, in which his mother wastes away in the late stages of M.S. in an upstairs bedroom while his father (a “failed novelist,” in Wes’ words) sleeps with his students in the separate in-law apartment in the basement. The scenes in which Wes visits his mother in his room, patiently helping her to the bathroom and watching the same episode of an insipid painting show over and over, are a wonderful counterpoint to the harder-edged Wes who contemplates sex and shame and failure and War and Peace and are a reminder of just how complicated this protagonist is. He even eventually introduces Lucy (his partner from the previous evening) to his mother – long story how that relationship evolves over the course of this eventful Saturday.

Any time a novel takes place over the course of a single day, I can’t help wondering if the author wants to draw parallels to Ulysses, and with all the allusions dancing all over the place in this novel, I was even more than usually on the alert for references to this novel. Certainly Wes is an “artist as a young man” in the manner of Stephen Dedalus; he is just as determined and stubborn and intense and confused as Stephen, and he is as hard on himself for his perceived failures as Joyce’s protagonist is. The tension between Wes and his father (and Wes’ clear contempt for his father, who for all his other failures is kind to Wes) resembles Stephen’s as well. But it wasn’t until Wes begins preparing sweetbreads for his mother’s dinner that I really began to sit up and pay attention. Here’s how it happens: Wes’ mother usually eats nothing but prepared cartons of rice pudding, but on this particular Saturday she is having one of her more lucid days, and she asks Wes for sweetbreads, confessing that she ordered them at a restaurant in Paris during her honeymoon, not knowing what they were, and she was horrified by them when they appeared and threw them away in her napkin when her husband went to the bathroom. She tells Wes that she wants to finally eat sweetbreads after failing to do so all those years ago, and Wes sees this as her way of trying to repair the rift in her marriage with Wes’ father. Wes dutifully goes to the butcher, buys a sweetbread (he doesn’t know what they are either, at first, and is horrified), and follows the complicated recipe for its preparation, a process that takes all day. By the time the sweetbread is ready, Wes’ mother has forgotten that she requested it and eats her rice pudding as usual, and Wes’ father and sister refuse to touch their portions. All of this works quite well in the novel and contributes to its pathos, but let’s face it: a novelist doesn’t just toss a sweetbread into a novel (especially a novel that takes place over the course of a single day) unless he is trying to suggest a parallel to Leopold Bloom, who famously cooks and eats kidneys in chapter four of Ulysses. I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything absolute about this parallel, and Everything Happens Today is a terrific novel in its own right even without the allusions, but there is something about the wandering quality of this novel – the way Wes is constantly acting with decision and purpose and yet never quite accomplishing what he sets out to do, as well as the centrality of New York as the novel’s stage (as a parallel to Dublin, of course, although the New York setting also suggests The Catcher in the Rye) and also the novel’s great sadness, the world-weariness that Wes feels in spite of (or even because of) his youth, the recognition that so many human endeavors are destined for failure – that feels like an intentional allusion to Joyce’s novel. Even Wes’ mother, languishing in bed, can be seen as a very ironic Molly Bloom: ill rather than sexual, a mother to the protagonist rather than a lover, but equally trapped in the prison of her own mind and equally a locus of confusion, hostility, and deep love for Wes as Molly is for Leopold.

As I’ve said already, this kind of heavy allusiveness could be a liability in a contemporary novel (and, for all its self-conscious placement of itself in the canon, this novel is also self-consciously contemporary, with tweets and Facebook posts and text messages and Google searches all very much part of its plot and texture), but in this case it isn’t. This is a novel about the way literature shapes us, so of course it is only right that we should see how literature has shaped this novel. Literature doesn’t shape everyone, of course, but it does tend to shape those of us who let it. The subject matter of this novel is not too different from the subject matter of this blog, come to think if it – it is about the way people who read (even people who read imperfectly and impatiently, like Wes and like me) sort of become books themselves, and after a while we begin to see our lives as equal parts War and Peace and The Great Gatsby, equal parts The Catcher in the Rye and Ulysses, equal parts Hamlet and The Odyssey, equal parts The Portrait of a Lady and the Outlander series.

I highly recommend this novel. Please, please read it. I haven’t felt this evangelical about a novel since We the Animals. I definitely haven’t delved into everything I wanted to say about it, but I want to know that other people are reading this book and thinking about it, and I want to talk about it soon with others who have read it.

***

Oh, and P.S. When I reviewed Wichita last summer, I spent a good bit of time on how poorly proofread it was. This novel is another Europa edition, and it is poorly proofread too. Its legion of word choice confusions (‘staunch’ and ‘stanch,’ for example), apostrophe errors, and other glitches is tremendously distracting and is an insult to the dignity of this novel. Europa Editions needs a new copy editor, STAT, and should be ashamed of itself.

A Review of Diana Gabaldon’s A Breath of Snow and Ashes (by Bethany)

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A Breath of Snow and Ashes is the sixth novel in Gabaldon’s Outlander series, and if you don’t know much about the series, you might want to read my reviews of Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross. In particular, the review of Drums of Autumn contains a lot of background information about the series and a quick summary of the first three novels.

This book is SO much better than The Fiery Cross. I enjoy this series (ridiculous and sleazy as it sometimes – no, often - is) and feel invested in it, but when I was reading The Fiery Cross I really lamented that something bad had happened to Gabaldon’s narrative judgment. That book was just unspeakably dull – and it was over a thousand pages long. I was so relieved to find Gabaldon back to her old self in A Breath of Snow and Ashes.

The central tension in this novel is the approach of January 21, 1775. When Claire Fraser was in the twentieth century at the beginning of Voyager (the third novel in this series), she did some research on her eighteenth-century husband Jamie Fraser’s past with the help of historian Roger MacKenzie, who later becomes her son-in-law, and Roger unearths a newspaper article stating that Jamie Fraser and his wife were killed in a house fire on January 21, 1775 and that they left no surviving children. When Claire returns to the eighteenth century, she shares this information with Jamie. They both fear this approach of this date – not only for themselves but for their daughter Brianna and her husband and son, since the article suggests that Brianna will die before this date – but Jamie, as always, remains confident that he can protect Claire and avert this fate.

This novel is full of fire. At its outset, bands of marauders are roaming North Carolina burning down houses. The reasons for these attacks aren’t always clear, but the people of the colony are certainly becoming more and more politically divided as the Revolutionary War approaches, and in some cases the fires seem politically motivated. In addition, Claire and Brianna are becoming more and more adventurous about trying to bring twentieth-century technology to Fraser’s Ridge, and every so often they get a shipment of raw phosphorous or oil of vitriol or some other ingredient for Claire’s homemade ether or Brianna’s homemade matches, and of course these items are flammable, and there’s a constant tension in this novel that the whole place (Claire and Jamie’s house, Brianna and Roger’s house, all of Fraser’s Ridge, all of North Carolina…) will soon go up in flames. I won’t tell you exactly what happens on the twenty-first of January; all I’ll say is that the predicted (or reported – the lines between journalism and prophecy are blurred thanks to all the time travel in these novels) fire both happens and doesn’t happen, and of course Claire and Jamie don’t die, silly, because there are still two more novels to go in the series. Brianna and Roger don’t die either. But you knew that.

One of the reasons I was so frustrated with The Fiery Cross was that it did so little to advance our understanding of how time travel works in Gabaldon’s world. This novel does a lot to rectify that problem. Over the course of the last two novels, Claire has become vaguely aware that at some point a Native American man from the twentieth century (called “Otter Tooth” for the fillings in his teeth) traveled to the eighteenth century and died there. Well, in this novel we meet one of Otter Tooth’s friends, Wendigo Donner. The moment at which Claire meets Donner and learns that he is from the twentieth century reflects Gabaldon at her best: this moment is dramatic, outlandish (no pun intended) and one hundred percent surprising. Here’s how it happens: Claire is in the middle of being gang raped (Gabaldon writes very flippantly about rape in many of these novels – ho hum, yes, there’s more rape going on – so I might as well do the same in my review, although I don’t mind telling you that I feel fairly strange about it), and after one of her assailants leaves, the next arrives, and he leans in as if he is about to begin raping her, but instead he whispers in her ear, “Does the name Ringo Starr mean anything to you?”

I mean, that’s great, right? Trashy as hell, but great – at least insofar as the word “great” can be used to describe a situation that involves gang rape. This moment is as electrifying as the moment in Outlander when Jamie is carrying Claire away from the scaffold where she was about to be burned as a witch and she looks back at her friend Geillis Duncan and sees that she bears a smallpox vaccination scar. It’s been a while – certainly not since Voyager – since Gabaldon surprised me in this way.

The more we learn about the mechanics of time travel, the clearer it is becoming that Gabaldon wants us to consider themes of predestination and fate. Predestination is part of this novel’s subject matter in part because Roger MacKenzie spends part of this novel preparing for his ordination as a Presbyterian minister, and he is expected to pledge his belief in the doctrine of predestination. This theme is important as Jamie and Claire prepare for the expected fire on January 21 as well – does the presence of the newspaper article in the twentieth century mean there is no way that they can prevent the fire from taking place? If the house catches on fire, can they at least save themselves? In Dragonfly in Amber, Claire and Jamie try to interfere with the actions of Prince Charles Stuart in order to prevent or at least mitigate the effects of the battle of Culloden and are totally ineffective – the battle is just as catastrophic as it was when Claire heard about it in the twentieth century. It does seem, though, as if there are small changes that Claire and her family can make from their vantage point as time travelers, and Gabaldon keeps this preoccupation with predestination at the forefront of Claire’s mind throughout the novel.

This novel is more contemplative than others in the series. The point of view sticks much closer to Claire than either of the last three novels, and I think this is a very good move on Gabaldon’s part. Jamie, Brianna, and Roger are still important characters, of course, and some chapters are told in the third person from their point of view, but these diversions are kept at a minimum. As she moves toward what might be the day of her death, Claire spends a lot of time looking back, and she contemplates many of the events of the earlier novels both in her thoughts and in her discussions with Jamie. I can’t tell you exactly why I enjoy this series and why I keep returning to it even after disappointments like The Fiery Cross, but I do think that both Claire and Jamie are fascinating characters and that their relationship – implausible and fantastical as it is, of course – is extremely well drawn. Jamie is both supremely competent at just about every task required of an eighteenth-century male and also inwardly wounded and vulnerable; Claire is smart, intuitive, assertive, and confident, but she also possesses the arrogance of the twentieth-century surgeon that she is: she thinks she should be able to solve every problem and manage every catastrophe, and she needs the eighteenth century to teach her that she too can be defeated. These characters complement and uplift and comfort each other beautifully, and their relationship is, in my opinion, Diana Gabaldon’s great gift to the world of escapist fiction.

Of course there is plenty of silliness in this novel too. The kidnapping and gang rape of Claire is impossible to take seriously; even though such an event would have been horrific if it had happened in real life, I mostly just snorted my way through it. The last hundred pages or so are devoted to the further adventures of Stephen Bonnet, who carries his amputated and bullet-holed testicle around with him in a glass jar and talks openly about his penis (named LeRoi) as if it were the first mate on his pirate ship. The Frasers’ servant Lizzie finds time between bouts of malarial fever to marry both Beardsley twins and bear a child by one or the other of them – no one involved knows which twin is truly the father – and set up house in this comfortable though bizarre threesome. Gabaldon continues her awkward attempts to write the voices of children, and I was just as happy when Fergus, Marsali, and their brood packed themselves off to the city to run a newspaper and the antics of lascivious six-year-old Germain became someone else’s problem. And then of course there are elderly Jocasta Cameron and Duncan Innes and their supposedly chaste marriage – which is chaste because both spouses are having hot and heavy affairs with the slaves.

But whatever. I hardly ever read books that are this silly, but I enjoyed this novel. I am both looking forward to the remaining two novels in the series and also sort of sad that the end of the series is in sight. This novel was just what I needed during a stressful couple of weeks in my life. I needed a book that could provide a true escape, and I most certainly found one.

A Review of Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners (by Bethany)

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cover image of we sinners

I love it when novelists put their protagonists in really awkward, painful situations right from the start, and this novel scores quite high in that regard. Here’s how it begins: the Rovaniemi family – two parents and seven children – are moving into a new house, but they have to be out of their old house a month before their new house will be available. At the same time, their van breaks down. A cousin offers them the use of her apartment while she is out of town, but she instructs them to keep the children quiet and out of sight so the landlord doesn’t learn that they are there. It is the middle of the summer, and the entire family is hot, cramped, and miserable. They have no transportation and their budget is extremely tight. Then one of their children develops the chicken pox, and one by one all the children get sick. Exhausted and consumed with nursing the sick children, the Rovaniemi parents allow the healthy children to play outside quietly, with instructions to hide if they see the landlord. Soon, though, there is a commotion outside, and the family learns that Julia, who is about seven, was bitten by a dog. So much for keeping the children out of sight. But it gets worse: the dog belongs to the landlord. The situation is horribly awkward, because of course the landlord now knows the family is there, but of course he also can’t exactly kick them out since his dog has bitten one of their children. He sees that Julia receives medical care, and when he returns, he steps into the apartment to speak to the Rovaniemis briefly. Then, a week or two later, there is more commotion when the landlord’s dog starts barking uncontrollably from inside his apartment, and many of the other tenants are trying to find the landlord. Turns out that he has contracted the chicken pox after his contact with the Rovaniemis, and he is very sick with the more virulent adult form of the virus. He is rushed to the hospital, but very shortly thereafter he dies.

And all of this happens in just the first chapter of this novel.

As its first chapter indicates, this is a novel about awkwardness and closeness and guilt. It is a novel about the way we can hurt one another irreparably just by going about our daily lives with perfectly fine intentions, and this first chapter does a great job of preparing the reader for these themes. The first chapter is also quite a bit more engaging than the rest of the novel, which becomes predictable after a while (and after that it briefly becomes truly bizarre – but more on that later). But its language is clear and its pace is quick, and overall this is an enjoyable, fast-paced contemporary novel that is worth reading.

The Rovaniemis – who later have two more children, for a total of nine – are members of a Finnish fundamentalist Christian sect called Laestadianism (“a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans” [154]) and live in twenty-first-century Michigan while keeping themselves largely separate from the rest of the twenty-first century, abjuring television, movies, alcohol, and “music with a beat” and socializing only with other members of their church. The tendency to have large families and to eschew any form of birth control is another quality that sets the Laestadians apart from their neighbors. In the novel’s second chapter, Warren Rovaniemi is chosen by his congregation as its new minister, in spite of his own hesitations about his ability to serve in this role – a role that he holds for the rest of the novel. Other than religion, the family’s defining characteristic is chaos. They can never really keep track of their children and possessions, and they live in a house where “a withered orange peel sat alongside a staling swimsuit in the same drawer as the old church songbooks” (125).

We Sinners is ALMOST a novel-in-stories, although with the exception of the first each chapter really doesn’t have enough structural integrity of its own to qualify as an independent story. In a way, I wish they did. The structure of this novel is a little baffling. It consists of eleven chapters, and for most of the novel it seems as if each chapter will be told from the third-person-limited point of view of a different member of the Rovaniemi family. The first chapter is told from the perspective of Brita, the family’s oldest daughter, and the second is told from the perspective of the patriarch, Warren. The novel seems to uphold this pattern until close to the end, when the ninth chapter is once again told from Brita’s perspective. This bothered me, although there’s really no reason that it should have. Once an author sets up a shifting point of view, she can shift back and forth between characters at will, I suppose, and of course there can be plenty of reasons to set up a pattern and then break it – but I still didn’t like it. I didn’t like knowing that there was at least one member of the Rovaniemi family who wasn’t going to get a chance to have the story told from his or her perspective, and – more so – I found myself becoming obsessed with the question of why Pylväinen felt that Brita needed a second chapter told from her point of view, and I really can’t think of a reason.

But then, when chapter eleven rolls around – only twenty pages from the end of the novel – something really weird happens. The perspective shifts back in time to 1847, and the story (not the Rovaniemis’ story, obviously) is told from the perspective of Gunnà, a woman in a reindeer-herding tribe in Finland who is married to a drunk. (WHAT, you ask? I KNOW! This is crazy, right?). Gunnà and her husband are contemporaries of Laestadius, a controversial minister among the nomadic herding tribes who, of course, is the founder of the movement of which the Rovaniemis are a member. Gunnà was undesirable as a bride for reasons I never quite understood, and the coarse, drunken pagan named Aslak is the only man who would marry her. She has a baby in horrible conditions – while her tribe is on the move following the migrating reindeer – and one morning she and Aslak wake up and the baby is dead. She blames Aslak for the death, thinking it likely that he rolled over and smothered the baby in his drunken sleep. Gunnà seeks comfort from Laestadius, who tells her stories of other women who suffered.

And that’s it – the novel ends there. Of course on some level it’s clear what Pylväinen is doing here: she presents her readers with the origins of Laestadianism, which, like most religions, attracted followers who wanted some kind of an explanation for why people suffer. The death of babies and children – much more common for most of human history than it is today – has always been harder to accept than other forms of suffering, presumably because children are so innocent. This final chapter also presents Laestadianism in its original social context, where it provided comfort for desperately poor people living tremendously harsh lives at the mercy of freezing temperatures. Twenty-first century Laestadians do not drink alcohol, refusing the ephemeral pleasure that comforted people like Aslak, and they also place great emphasis on bearing and raising lots of children. Their religion emphasizes community – the greatest sin a Rovaniemi child can commit is to leave the church – and a sense of community and of working for the common good is clearly necessary to the morale of a tribe of nomadic herders. Seeing the origins of Laestadianism helps reinforce the idea that the Rovaniemis and their fellow believers are truly out of context in twenty-first-century Michigan; they have held on desperately to a faith that they probably don’t need any more, given the circumstances of their lives.

The fact that I more or less understand the purpose of this final chapter does not stop me from finding it very, very strange. The first ten chapters of this compact novel are entirely ordinary – which is not to say that they are not well written and compelling; they are – and remind me of any number of contemporary novels that focus on family life. The novel I was most reminded of as I read was Justin Torres’ We The Animals (and it is only as I type this that I notice the similarities in the two titles – how interesting), but I could probably name another dozen that I’ve read in the last year that are part of this general subgenre. But the last chapter is something else entirely. Being something else entirely can be a good thing, of course, but in this case the effect of the last chapter is jarring and offputting, and I don’t like it.

What a strange journey this novel takes: from the young Rovaniemis as one unit, cramped and crowded into an apartment that is not theirs, suffering through the heat and illness and misery and guilt of the opening chapter; to the older, slightly more prosperous Rovaniemis of the novel’s middle chapters, which are largely devoted to the question of which of the adult children will stay in the church and which will leave (and, of course, to the many consequences of these decisions); and then, finally, to – um – nineteenth-century Lapland. It’s bizarre. It’s certainly unique. And, while I enjoyed the novel as a whole, it’s ultimately not effective, in my opinion.

Pre-Reading Notes on King Lear (by Bethany)

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We’ve already told you about the time the human cruelty in Light in August made Fr. Murphy throw up. Now I’m going to tell you about the time Fr. Murphy got angry because the human cruelty in King Lear DIDN’T make our class throw up. I can’t believe Jill didn’t tell this story. She said it was a Clockwork Orange story – but it’s not. It’s a King Lear story, and it’s been the first thing that came to mind for me whenever I’ve thought of this play ever since.

Most AP teachers that I’ve known in my teaching career make good use of the time after the AP test. They use it for oral reports or for teaching a short book or for covering topics that the rigidity of the AP curriculum hadn’t allowed them to discuss during the year. For some reason, though, when Jill and I were in high school, AP courses absolutely ground to a halt after the AP tests, and every teacher just showed movies.

I kind of hated watching movies in class in high school. For one thing, the experience was too passive. I functioned on about four hours of sleep at all times back then, and if the level of responsiveness that was required of me was eased, I had to struggle to stay awake. I was good at keeping up the frenetic pace of school, and of course I enjoyed vacations and breaks, but it made me uneasy to combine the two. If I was at school, I didn’t want to be sitting back and staring at a screen. It didn’t help that I went to elementary school during the Golden Age of the Filmstrip; I think on some level I associated the presence of screens in classrooms with that condescending filmstrip narrator voice. Did you ever notice that it was always the same voice narrating those things? And you could just tell that the voice thought that all children were very, very stupid. I hated the filmstrip voice.

I took five AP courses my senior year in high school, and that is how I ended up spending the most impatient weeks of my life – the weeks leading up to my high school graduation - watching five different movies. Some were loosely relevant to the course material – in Government we watched All the President’s Men, I think – and others were just silly (The Princess Bride in AP Physics). Fr. Murphy’s contribution to this little film festival was to show two different movie versions of King Lear, a play that we had not read during his course. He told us that reading the play was optional, which meant that I bought a copy and carted it around with me so it would look as if I was reading it, which is also what I did with books that were mandatory.

I didn’t pay attention to the movie at all. I remember that my mind was somewhere far, far away when all of a sudden Fr. Murphy was turning the VCR off and giving the class a very dirty look and saying something like “We know we must live in terrifying times when the young can look on such depravity with such composed impassivity.” I don’t at all pretend to be quoting him verbatim here, but this is the sort of thing he probably said. There is a line coming up that I do know for sure I can quote word for word, and I’ll tell you when we get there. It turned out that the scene we were watching was the one in which Gloucester gouges Cornwall’s eye out with the toe of his boot. And Fr. Murphy was railing on and on about the callousness of the young and what have you.

At some point, someone – and I have a very strong suspicion that it was me – said, “Fr. Murphy, we are watching movies all day long. They all start to run together after while. Two periods ago, in psychology, we were watching A Clockwork Orange. How can you expect us to – ”

At this point Fr. Murphy crumpled. He brought his hands up to his face and almost looked as if he would curl up in the fetal position. “Oh, that movie!” he said. “That terrible movie!” (These are the lines I remember verbatim.) “They’re showing you that terrible movie. Oh. Well in that case, you’re right. Never mind.”

And then he pressed PLAY on the VCR and we resumed our glassy-eyed acceptance of human cruelty.

As it happens, I don’t remember much about A Clockwork Orange either – just Malcolm McDowell prancing around with a big dildo and saying “Ludwig Van!” a lot, and then being strapped into some contraption that held his eyelids open and forced to watch violent movies, which, come to think of it, was a lot like what was happening to us during the disorienting final weeks of our otherwise-rigorous high school education.

Fr. Murphy was right of course, as he usually was. The eye-gouging scene in King Lear is absolutely terrible. The way I remember it is that Cornwall is on the ground, already defeated, and Gloucester – the winner of the battle – comes along and grinds out his fallen enemy’s eye with his boot as if it were a cigarette butt, taking away the man’s dignity as well as his sight. It’s awful. Thinking about it now, my first question is whether this scene is Shakespeare’s invention or whether it was part of his source material for the play. It is common knowledge that Shakespeare usually recycled the plots of earlier plays or stories; he was an innovator of language and of character, but he was not an innovator of narration. He did sometimes insert his own details into the plots he borrowed, and I am curious to know whether the eye gouging is one of them. It seems as if it should be.

For years, thanks to Fr. Murphy (and, I guess, thanks to The Clockwork Orange too), this scene was the first and only thing that I remembered from this play, with the exception of the fact that there is a character whose name is “Fool.” And the memory was powerful, even if it didn’t affect me much at the time. When I read the play again in graduate school, I was struck by how real it was. This play very much grasps the great horrors of being a member of a family. Shakespeare explores these same horrors elsewhere, of course – in Hamlet and in Henry IV, Parts I and II, to name just a couple – but I think King Lear might be his best depiction of the ways that human beings treat the people to whom they are closest. I remember a phone conversation with my friend Mary during my grad school years. I don’t remember if we were talking about her family or about mine – it could easily have been either – but one way or another one of us was relaying whatever frustrating nastiness was going on among the females in her family, and at some point the one who was listening interrupted to say, “You know what this is? This is King Lear. This is Goneril and Regan all over again.” At which the other one said, “Oh, my God. You’re right. You’re so right. How did I miss it?”

I also remember that conversation as the first time I ever wondered out loud (and, as far as I know, the first time I ever consciously thought) how people who don’t read ever manage to live their lives. I still don’t understand. The world must be a constant barrage of surprises for these people. How do people learn to die without King Lear? How do they understand the behavior of their nasty relatives? I guess they use Hallmark cards and maybe song lyrics, and those stupid cartoons that people are always sharing on Facebook, the ones where women in vintage clothing say snarky things about men and housework and alcohol.

It occurs to me that in reading King Lear I will be breaking a vow I made to myself a couple of years ago. After my mother died of Alzheimer’s in 2010, I promised myself that I would never read a book about dementia. It wasn’t a vow so much as a visceral state, really: I just found that when I browsed in bookstores and picked up a book to read its jacket, the word “Alzheimer’s” just acted on me like the drugs they gave the Malcolm McDowell character in A Clockwork Orange, and I almost retched. And I am aware that this play may affect me this way as well, because I think that among other things King Lear is very much a play about dementia, especially during Lear’s period of wandering with his Fool. There were lots of moments when my mom was dying when I thought that dementia was just another form of sanity – and maybe even an elevated one, a form of sanity that I couldn’t understand because I wasn’t there yet, in which emotion and memory and intuition take over the roles once played by trustworthy senses and by facts and reason and logic. I expect that I’ll see some of this quality in Lear’s wanderings, and I both look forward to this scene and dread it at the same time. To be honest, other than some general impressions, the only specific detail that I remember from this scene is the iambic pentameter line that is begun by the Fool and completed by Lear saying “No, no, no, no, no!”

It seems to me that of all of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear is the one that most reminds me of the ancient Greek idea that theatre (and specifically tragedy) is intended to be a public means of catharsis and expiation. We bring our private struggles and private griefs to a theatre, where we sit in a densely-packed area with a lot of other people – mostly strangers – and see our own failures and sins and miseries played out by actors – who are themselves just vessels for the words of playwrights – and somehow we move forward in the acting out of our own emotions and struggles in ways that we would not be able to do in our homes, with our own family members. I don’t know – I’m not an expert on this stuff. But I don’t think I’m wrong that there is something magically real about King Lear – something that, yes, should have made me writhe with terror when I was eighteen, but that didn’t, of course.

Pre-Reading Thoughts on Shakespeare’s King Lear, February’s AP English Challenge. Yes, I’m posting this before finishing my The Portrait of a Lady review. (by Jill)

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king learI read King Lear once in college and I actually remember the gist of the plot and the names of many of the characters, which is more than I can say about the first Shakespeare play we read for the AP Challenge, Measure for Measure.  I found a receipt from Super Crown in my high school copy that says I bought this book on 5/12/94, which confirms Bethany’s memory that this was the last book we read for AP English.  How absurd to make us read Shakespeare at the very end of the school year, don’t you think?  I was hoping for something fun, something modern.  But such is life.  And I actually did enjoy King Lear.  It’s sad, of course; it’s a Shakespeare tragedy, but at least amidst all the death in this play justice is served.  It’s not like in the romantic tragedies.  Poor Lear isn’t cut down in his prime; he’s an old man and is preparing for death the whole play, except when he goes mad and forgets entirely what he is about.

This is the plot as I remember it: Lear is king of England and he wants to “retire,” and divide up his kingdom amongst his three daughters before he dies.  The way he is going to decide who gets what is to have his daughters tell him how much they love him.  His two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, play this game very well and spout off beautiful speeches about how much they love dear old dad.  Cordelia, the youngest, who actually loves Lear the most of the three daughters, tells the truth and says that of course she loves her father but she is going to love her future husband more, for the obvious reason that he’s her husband.  This makes Lear furious and he disinherits her.  One of Cordelia’s two suitors abandons her at that moment, and the other one says he doesn’t care about the money/land and off they go to France or somewhere.  As the play proceeds, Goneril and Regan belittle and abuse their father more and more, taking away his entourage of soldiers until he is alone with his court jester, wailing on the moors, completely insane.  And then a bunch of people die, but some live.  I remember that though Lear dies at the end of the play, justice seems to be served—he figures out before the end that Cordelia is the good daughter and that Goneril and Regan don’t really love him.  I believe that the two evil sisters turn on each other before they die, as well.

I’m curious to see if the scenes of Lear wailing and mad on the heath are more powerful to me now than they were then.  I’ve watched older clients and older pets and older relatives age and change and lose themselves as their brains degenerate.  That was knowledge I didn’t have at seventeen when we read this play.  I see it in my dog every day, and it’s terrible to watch.  I really think that I’m going to find King Lear more emotional at thirty-five than I did the first (or even second) time around.

You know what I just learned in googling “King Lear Images” to find a picture for this post? There are a lot of famous old actors who have played King Lear.  The picture above is of Sir Ian McKellen, who is probably my favorite actor over seventy.

Our One Hundredth Review, NOT in Solitude

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one hundred years of solitude cover image

When I (Bethany) was a kid – say about six, seven, and eight years old – and would visit a friend or invite a friend over to play at my house (in an arrangement that Americans had thankfully not yet started to call a “playdate”), I remember that my friends and I would often spend most of our time DECIDING what to play. This was the age of the toy entourage; everywhere I went I was trailed by dolls and doll clothes and art supplies and plastic carrying cases full of crap. A typical get-together with a friend looked like this: 1) we were overwhelmingly happy to see each other, and there was shrieking and jumping around, 2) we identified a play area – a bedroom or playroom or living room, 3) we unloaded all the plastic crap into a pile on the floor, mixing the host’s possessions and the guest’s possessions willy-nilly, ensuring that clean-up would be as chaotic, time-consuming, and tearful a process as possible, 4) we began divvying up the dolls or horses or whatever other toys between us, conducting long debates about who would use which item, and which doll or other lump of plastic would “be the mother” (there always had to be a mother), trading and negotiating and bartering in a process that resembles nothing as much as the NFL draft, 5) we painstakingly laid out the play area into various territories, planning out rooms, houses, swimming pools, stables, and that sort of thing, and then 6) the guest’s parent would arrive to pick her up. And then every time – every single time – we would throw fits, complaining that we didn’t even get a chance to play and life was so, so unfair.

Jill and I didn’t know each other yet in those days – we didn’t meet until we were sophomores in high school – yet our joint review of One Hundred Years of Solitude bears a fairly close resemblance to these predictable play sessions. We planned it out weeks in advance and were excited about it. We had to reschedule our planned writing time at least once – my fault, I think – and when the time came to sit down and work, I still had a few more pages to read. Our plan was to discuss the book in a free-form manner, in hope that brilliance would emerge. This is our one hundredth review, after all, and brilliance seemed like an essential ingredient. What we ended up doing can best be described as talking about talking about One Hundred Years of Solitude. We generated a lot of cool ideas and said, “Let’s talk about this!” but then we moved right along to other things, like manna from heaven and substitute teachers from high school who just weren’t up to snuff.

The end result is below. Obviously we didn’t accomplish anything, although we enjoyed tossing some ideas around. This dialogue is edited a little bit for the sake of coherence, but mostly this is what we would sound like if you invited Jill and me over to your house for dinner and we ended up ignoring you and talking to each other about books the whole time. Which we probably wouldn’t do. But we might.

BE: I still have 11 pages to go… if you want, you can start with kind of an opening statement with an introduction to what we’re doing and some general thoughts, and I’ll join in as soon as I’m done…

JMH: Okay, here goes. In honor of our one-hundredth book review on Postcards from Purgatory, we decided it would be fun to read a book individually and then jointly write a review. We hear we are pretty entertaining when we dialogue, or at least we think so. The book we decided on was Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The one hundred in the title made it an obvious choice and the ability to riff on the title of the book with the title of our review was also appealing.

Bethany did a bit of an intro to her thought on this book on this week’s (Editor’s Note: This was about 3-4 weeks ago now) Yarn Along post. So here are my introductory thoughts. I recently made a shelf on Goodreads titled “books I really should’ve read by now,” and this book was one of the first ones I put on it. I’ve loved magical realism for years and years, since we read Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits in AP English. That book also began my love affair with Latin American literature. As such, it comes as a surprise to most people that I had never actually read One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’ll tell you why. I bought it at Green Apple Books sometime in the mid 1990′s but the only copy I could find was a pocket book with an ugly cover and very yellowed pages. I started it once, but couldn’t get past the aesthetics of my copy. When Bethany and I decided to do this project, I actually went out and bought a new used copy in the trade paperback format. This was also a bit tricky, because OHYOS was an Oprah’s Book Club book a while back, and I had to avoid copies with that horrible giant “O” sticker on them.

This book is the story of the Buendía family of Macondo, in an unnamed Latin American country, though we can assume it’s García Márquez’s homeland of Colombia, in an indeterminate time frame. Okay, it’s one hundred years in the life of the Buendía family, but it’s not clear when the hundred years begins or ends.  This lack of determinate setting is one of the few things about magical realism that bothers me. I like to know the when and the where of things. I also enjoy knowing ages of characters. The ages of the characters in this book were generally pretty vague as well, until they got downright ridiculous. I mean, come on. Úrsula was supposedly one hundred and forty five when she died. That’s just silly.

BE: I’m done! I just have to go to the bathroom really quickly and then we can start. (should we include this part on the blog?) :-)

JMH: Yes! We have to talk about potty breaks.

Correction of Úrsula’s age: she is supposedly between one hundred fifteen and one hundred twenty-two when she dies.

I swear someone was one hundred forty five….

BE: Pilar Ternera was 145.

JMH: And that is also ridiculous.

BE: This provides a good introduction to the point I wanted to begin with. Even though I do want to get into the details of the magic realism, I wanted to start with the fact that for me I was struck by how much this novel reminded me, in its language and its characters and its plot, of the Old Testament. Characters living to ridiculous ages is one example.

JMH: I haven’t read the Old Testament in a long time, so you’re going to have to elaborate more.

BE: There is also something very Genesis-like in the opening of the novel, when “the world was so recent that many things lacked names,” and there are babies that supposedly appear in baskets like Moses and all kinds of events that seem like versions of the Biblical plagues.

BE: The main purpose of the novel, though, other than to be beautiful and fascinating and introduce the world to a new form of storytelling (all of which it does beautifully) is to trace the lineage of the Buendía family down to the arrival of a new kind of creature (the baby with the tail of a pig), which may or may not be a new species (I believe it is referred to as a new “race”), while the purpose of the Old Testament is to trace the lineage of the ancient Hebrews through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and so forth down to King David, and if one’s perspective is Christian, the whole purpose of all THAT is to demonstrate how special the lineage of King David is because his is the lineage of Jesus.

JMH: It’s interesting that the baby that appears in the basket here, Aureliano (MeMe and Mauricio Babilonia’s son), was the end of the family, not the savior of the race like Moses was.

BE: Right – although Aureliano is the one who finally deciphers the parchments that reveal the secrets of his family, so if you think of knowledge as a form of salvation, then he does provide a sort of ironic salvation for his family.

The baby with the tail of a pig sounds horrible to us, of course, but like Jesus his birth was foretold for generations.

Oh! And also… there is a ton of crucifixion imagery surrounding the time when Colonel Aureliano Buendía faced the firing squad (wrong Testament, I know, but bear with me)

I was just surprised because I was expecting to see so much Faulknerian influence (as GGM himself has said that he couldn’t have written the book without Faulkner), and I did see some, but the primary influence I saw was Biblical, as if GGM was trying to rewrite the creation myth and the foundation myth of “his” people – who, of course are both Christian (his education was Christian) and pre-Christian, as he was raised partially by his grandparents who still held on to some pre-Columbian traditions.

JMH: But the new creature ends up being covered with ants and dragged away by the ants. Dead. Right?

BE: Yes, the ants carry him away.

JMH: The last few pages of this book got a bit weird. Do you think that it was a nod to this book on Allende’s part when Clara the Clairvoyant in The House of the Spirits refused to name any of her children after anyone else, because it made confusion in her notebooks that bore witness to life? All the Aurelianos and Arcadios got more than a bit confusing. I was glad for the family tree in the front.

BE: The confusion in the naming in this novel drives me nuts, and I do think the Allende reference is probably intentional. But I also think GGM does this on purpose to show how the patterns repeat themselves in each generation, that time is circular, etc.

JMH: I’m sure he did it on purpose for just those reasons. What was Faulknerian to you? I’m trying to think if I saw any of that.

BE: Mainly circular time. This novel really seems to embody Faulkner’s idea that “the past is not dead; in fact, it’s not even past.” Also, the tendency toward long wavelike sentences with subordinate clause after subordinate clause.

JMH: At one point I found a sentence that went on for like three pages.

BE: My least favorite thing about magic realism (at least at this moment) is the way it so often seems to serve as a substitute for real characterization. In this novel and others, including The House of the Spirits, I think, each character is known by only one or two characteristics, which are usually created through some form of hyperbole. I think of this as “tagging” rather than characterizing, and it is something that many authors do with their MINOR characters in order to cement them in the readers’ minds, but major characters are usually more fleshed out. This relates to the repetitive naming, I think, and I do think GGM does it on purpose – the idea that individual personalities don’t matter. But I don’t like it – although I like many other elements of this book. The biblical and mythological overtones actually helped me to like this book more, since I don’t expect traditional characterization in mythology and scripture.

JMH: That’s true. These characters are not true individuals to be known, more cogs on a wheel to demonstrate how things never actually change, etc.

BE: I’m going to toss a few other ideas out there – let me know which ones you think are interesting and worth talking about: 1) that this novel is not really about solitude but about loneliness, since most of the time the characters have plenty of company (there are a couple of exceptions), but the Aurelianos and certain other characters have sort of a melancholy or solitary air about them. Why do you think both GGM and his English translator chose “solitude” instead of “loneliness” for the title (other than the fact that it’s a more interesting word in my opinion)?

2) Does this novel have a protagonist? In some ways to me it seems to be “about” its women more than it’s “about” its men, since the men are the ones who embody the patterns. The women do have personalities that are more fleshed out than the men. The women also tend to become more energetic as they age, while the men tend to become shut-ins and are often dependent on the women in their old age.

JMH: Interestingly, “soledad” can be translated into “solitude” or “loneliness.” “Soledad” when it’s voluntary translates to solitude, when it’s involuntary means loneliness. I remember seeing the word “solitude” a ton in the book, but not loneliness. I wish I had been paying more attention now.

BE: That’s interesting about solitude and loneliness – now I really do wonder why GGM chose the word. “Solitude” of course contains the Latin root “sol” for “sun” – which is connected to the idea of a center (since the earth revolves around the sun) and also connected to the idea of a monotheistic god.

BE: Oh – and more ideas: 3) I also see a motif here that I see in other works of literature that are from or take place in equatorial climates – specifically in The Bend in the River and in The Poisonwood Bible – in which humans sort of have to race against nature in order to survive because plants grow so fast and insects and other small creatures come in uncontrollable swarms. I enjoy this when I see it, although it would never occur to me to use this motif myself since I’m so used to a natural world that humans feel fully in control of.

JMH: And the center of this book is, I think, the Buendía house. Everything comes back to it.

I think we should definitely address the concept of solitude/loneliness, and the idea of nature overcoming the town. The concept of a protagonist is also a good one, too….

BE: The language is amazing too. I have so many favorite passages: “Pilar Ternera let out a deep laugh, the old expansive laugh that ended up as a cooing of doves. There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendía that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.” (396)

“the house had plunged into a crisis of senility” (358)

“the chancre of blind obedience” (302)

JMH: Yeah, I didn’t mark hardly anything. I would have had to have marked the entire pook.

BE: I hate it when I have to mark the entire pook.

JMH: Shut up.

BE: Oh, and 4) The significance of sleep and 5) smells. And there is also a lot of poison coffee in this book. If I were a Márquez character, I would never drink the coffee.

JMH: Smells?

BE: All the smells in the book – Ursula finding her way around by smells when she’s blind, the various odors that are attached to different characters. These characters all have a sense of smell that is almost canine.

JMH: And what exactly is Melquiades? Maybe he is the protagonist.

BE: I don’t think Melquiades is the protagonist, since he doesn’t really grow and change as a result of the actions of the novel, but in a way he is sort of a god-figure, since he knew everything that was supposed to happen before it happens, and he is also the source of inspiration who keeps pushing various Buendía to continue to learn, create, invent things, study their world, etc.

BE: I think it’s amusing that there are “gypsies” in this novel set in south America.

JMH: Apparently the gypsies got around. God-figure. Yes. That’s what I meant.

BE: If anything Melquiades is sort of a catalyst for the story of the Buendía. He provides them with a Pandora’s box to open, a puzzle to solve. He sets them on their journey. Which raises interesting questions about fate: do we have a fate if no one is around to tell us what it is?

JMH: Ha. How about this: would the Buendía family have come to an end if Aureliano hadn’t translated the scrolls?

BE: Yes, I think that is more or less the same question I was asking. Since he was almost finished translating them when the winds finally came and blew everything away, you can say that the destruction would have happened anyway – but if he hadn’t spent so much time translating them in the years prior, maybe he would have done something to prevent the destruction of the town.

But back to the gypsies for a second – I think it’s both funny and significant that Macondo is simultaneously a tiny town in a swamp that is constantly being eaten by ants and some kind of destination for travelers from around the globe. The American banana company makes sense, since they would be looking for a remote location – but the gypsies are constantly showing up, plus there are a bunch of Turks and Arabs, and every so often “the latest Paris fashions” are mentioned. The town sort of seems to grow and shrink depending on the needs of the moment, which I think is “true” in an emotional sense when it comes to how people feel about their hometowns – which sometimes seem small and embracing and stifling and at other times seem infinitely rich with variety, regardless of how big or small they actually are.

JMH: Do you want to discuss the banana company as a symbol of North America/Europe colonizing/overrunning Latin America? The stuff with the banana company and the trains full of the thousands of dead bodies was interesting to me, mostly because it didn’t necessarily fit in with the rest of the book.

BE: Sure – I think there’s a ton in this novel about western encroachment into Latin America. The first paragraph of the novel is a wonderful mish-mash of European and pre-Columbian references: adobe, gypsies, Macedonia, alchemy, nails and screws, gold, a suit of fifteenth-century armor.

JMH: It’s this concrete tragedy (that is later denied) where the rest of everything that happens has this sort of flowing/hazy/not quite real feel to it. And then the banana company is gone and it’s almost like it never was there.

BE: Yes, the political elements seemed more like something out of Allende than out of this novel. Even Colonel Aureliano Buendía and his 35 unsuccessful civil wars taste of “real” Latin American politics in ways that the rest of the novel doesn’t.

JMH: But even the reality of Col. Aureliano Buendía having 35 different civil wars fits in with the feel of the book better than the mass killings at the train station. There’s a hyperbole to that many wars that makes it work. Does that make sense? But a mass killing at a train station just seems like it doesn’t fit. Of course, a living person waking up in a train full of dead bodies is appropriately placed in this book.

BE: I don’t know… I see what you mean about the hyperbole, but I think it applies in a similar way to the killings at the train station. And I think part of the point is that somewhere off in the distance is a corrupt government that is violent and terrorizing and not at all cute and whimsical like the rest of the novel and that has a great deal of power over people’s lives, even though most of the time the characters are oblivious to what it is doing.

JMH: Okay, I buy that. As I was typing it occurred to me that multiple train cars full of dead bodies was a bit hyperbolic, especially when the train cars were leaving a small town in the swamp.

BE: I also think that “love” in this novel is interesting – I am thinking of Ursula’s thoughts about Colonel A.B. when he is dying: “She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had not lost his love for his family because he had been hardened by war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone, not even his wife Remedios or the countless one-night women who had passed through his life, and much less his sons. She sensed that he had fought so many wars not our of idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason: pure and simple pride” (249.

There’s more in this passage that’s interesting that I want to get to in a minute, but first I wanted to connect this to a statement at the end that says that the final Buendía baby, the one with the pig’s tail, was the only Buendía ever conceived in love.

Also that for a while I was thinking that maybe Ursula is the protagonist, since she seems to be the only one who ever learns anything from the events of the novel (except for Aureliano at the end, maybe). But I’m not sure how valid I think that theory is anymore.

Also from that same passage on p. 249: “One night when she was carrying [Colonel A.B] in her belly she heard him weeping. It was such a definite lament that Jose Arcadio Buendía woke up beside her and was happy with the idea that his son was going to be a ventriloquist. Other people predicted that he would be a prophet. She, on the other hand, shuddered from the certainty that the deep moan was a first indication of the fearful pig tail and she begged God to let the child die in her womb.”

There is so much Christ imagery connected to Colonel A.B. (the idea that people thought he would be a prophet, the crucifixion imagery before his firing squad incident, when the sores in his armpits make him hold his arms out to the side, and the way he sort of becomes mythologized later in his life and after his death, when there are mysterious sightings of him and lots of people don’t believe that he exists. But this doesn’t fit in very well with the other Biblical imagery in the novel.

JMH: I wondered about those armpit sores. I meant to look up if they were representative of some sort of STD.

BE: One reader’s crucifixion imagery is another reader’s STD, I guess. Also, I meant to ask you – did you like it? Do you like it more than Allende, the same? How does this novel contribute to your already-well-developed feelings about magic realism?

JMH: I did like it a lot. I liked seeing it as the parent of The House of the Spirits. On some levels I like it more–I think Marquez is a better writer than Allende, and if it weren’t for him I doubt she would exist as a writer. But Allende is better at character development (not necessarily in The House of the Spirits, but in her later books), and then there’s the whole she’s a woman thing.

BE: Sexist. :-)

JMH: Yeah yeah. I’m getting better. I do read books by men now, you know.

BE: By the way, I do think the characterization in The House of the Spirits is better than in this novel.

BE: But about the idea that this book is the parent of all magic realism: I don’t know – now I kind of think that the Bible is the parent of all magical realism. Am I allowed to say that?

JMH: But that stuff in the bible all REALLY HAPPENED.

BE: So they say. I seem to remember a certain 9th grade religion teacher at SI teaching us that the manna from heaven was really pigeon shit.

JMH: Who? Was that Mrs. O’Malley?

BE: Yes, Mrs. O’Malley. That may have been the only moment of her class that I enjoyed.

JMH: You know she went on maternity leave about two weeks into the semester I was supposed to have her. Leaving us with the horrible Mr. Wilson, nSJ. He was a prize.

BE: Was he only there as a maternity leave replacement? I remember the name but not the face.

JMH: Not sure. He wasn’t back the next year.

BE: Oh, and I take that back about the pigeon shit incident being the only moment in Mrs. O’Malley’s class that I enjoyed – I also enjoyed the day when she yelled at all five of her classes because someone had complained to his/her parents because she called him/her a “little shit,” and the subject of her rant was that you shouldn’t complain if someone calls you a little shit. You can complain if someone calls you a fucker, but not if someone calls you a little shit. With 23 years of hindsight, that actually strikes me as damn good advice.

JMH: I wonder if that’s why she went on maternity leave and never came back?

BE: I actually think she did come back after we graduated. She might actually still be there now (but even if she’s not, I’m pretty sure she was back for a while).

JMH: Oh that’s nice. I thought she was funny.

BE: Just checked the website – not still there now.

And that’s the end. There was actually a little bit more, about how we were both in the mood to read something light next and about how cool it would be if the religious right started to boycott our blog because of what we said about the manna from heaven (not that the religious right reads our blog now, but whatever. It was an offhand comment.) But there you go: our one hundredth review. Not bad for a blog that’s only been around for eight and a half months, staffed by two bloggers who are also busy doing things like working, moving cross country, taking cats to their acupuncture appointments, taking naps, knitting, shopping for new cars, following exercise regimens, taking pictures of cats, breaking up cat fights – and, of course, reading.

And thanks to all of you for reading, too.