Day 981: Hag-Seed

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for Hag-SeedHag-Seed is Margaret Atwood’s modern retelling of The Tempest, a part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. It is inventively plotted and cleverly reimagines the events and characters of the play.

Felix wants revenge. Years ago, he was at the pinnacle of his career, director of the Makeshiweg Festival, presenting The Tempest. He was known for his avante garde approaches to theatre. But while he was occupied with the play, he let his assistant Tony deal with the other points of business. In his turn, Tony plotted with Sal O’Nally, the Heritage Minister, to remove him from his job. Making matters worse, Felix’s young daughter Miranda had died a few years before.

Felix has been leading a retired life in a rustic cottage in the country. Several years ago, he took a job with a program at a local prison. Each year, he stages a Shakespeare play staffed and acted by the prisoners. It has become very popular, and the prisoners’ literacy scores have increased.

But Felix is mostly alone with only his fantasy daughter for company.

One year, Felix hears that several ministers, including Sal and Tony, will attend the prison on the day of the broadcast of the play. Their real intent, he hears, is to shut down the program, despite its success. Felix decides this year’s play will be The Tempest, and through the play, he will get his revenge.

link to NetgalleyI thought Atwood’s approach to this retelling was much more inventive than the other reworkings I have recently read, and I found the novel entertaining. Its revenge plot didn’t really grab me, though. I didn’t like Felix very much, although he gets more likable as the novel progresses. It was clever to combine the Caliban and Prospero roles into one for this book. Certainly, readers familiar with Atwood will recognize her acerbic writing style. Not to get to the point where I thought he was a real person, but I also thought his teaching methods were really creative, and the production sounded as if it would be good.

Related Posts

Maddaddam

Alias Grace

Northanger Abbey

 

Day 980: Guy Mannering

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

Cover for Guy ManneringGuy Mannering is the second of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly novels, set in Scotland and featuring Scottish dialect and folklore. It is a romping adventure, with smugglers, hidden caves, a kidnapped child, a gypsy queen, a hidden identity, and murder.

The novel begins in the 1760’s with a visit by Mannering as a young man to Ellangowan, an estate on the southwest cost of Scotland. Mannering arrives there on a rambling tour in time for the birth of Harry Bertram, the son of the Laird of Ellangowan. Mannering is an amateur astrologer, and he casts the baby’s horoscope, revealing that he will encounter dangers at the ages of 5 and 21. Then Mannering disappears from the story for 21 years.

The tragedy of the household occurs when Harry is five. He disappears after being the inadvertent witness to the murder of a customs officer. The family assumes he has been murdered. His foolish father being overwrought by grief, the estate is plundered by his agent Glossin, and Bertram is bankrupted.

Mannering comes back on the scene after many years as an army officer in India. He arrives in time to witness the sale of the Bertram estate to Glossin. It cannot be saved from its debtors without a male heir, and there is only Lucy Bertram, born the day her brother disappeared. In his fury at Glossin, Bertram has a fit and dies, leaving Lucy without home or money. Since Mannering’s daughter will be joining him in a nearby manor, he offers Lucy a home.

Mannering has his own troubles with his daughter Julia. In India, he had reason to believe that a young officer, Vanbeest Brown, was courting his wife, so he challenged him to a duel and wounded him. But Brown was actually courting Mannering’s daughter, and her guardian has caught her meeting secretly with him. Mannering summons Julia to join him, but Brown soon follows.

It is when Brown arrives in the locality that the plot heats up, for he begins finding things familiar, and he meets a mysterious gypsy woman named Meg Merrilies who makes some mysterious pronouncements. Of course, it soon obvious that Brown is the long-lost heir to Ellangowan. But he has the enmity of local villains, who are afraid he can accuse them of murder and malfeasance against him, as well as circumstances that appear to convict him of a crime. Moreover, he doesn’t know who he is, and once he knows, how will he prove it?

This is an entertaining adventure novel about the wild borderlands of Scotland. It has some fine villains, upright heroes, and an amusing couple of comic characters, one being the farmer Dandy Dinmont, a terrier breeder, whose name has since been taken for a breed of terriers.

Related Posts

Waverly

The Candlemass Road

Christowell: A Dartmoor Tale

Day 979: Literary Wives! American Housewife: Stories

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Cover for American HousewifeToday is another review for the Literary Wives blogging club, in which we discuss the depiction of wives in modern fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs. Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

Ariel of One Little Library
Emily of The Bookshelf of Emily J.
Kate of Kate Rae Davis
Lynn of Smoke and Mirrors
Naomi of Consumed By Ink

My Review

Strange short stories seem to be one of the newest literary fads, and Helen Ellis’s certainly qualify. Not only are many of the stories in this selection strange, but her approach to a few of them is unusual, those stories consisting only of lists. Her heroines are frequently demented.

“What I Do All Day” is one of those list stories, recounting the events of the daily life of a housewife with too little to do. “The Wainscotting War” is about a feud between co-op owners over the decor of a shared hallway. This story features a woman who becomes unhinged by this disagreement, losing her job and her husband because of her behavior.

My favorite story is “Dumpster Diving with the Stars,” in which an author agrees to compete on a reality show. I liked this one because it sends up so-called reality television while having mostly likable characters. But some of the other stories just go too far over the top for me, like the one about the novel sponsored by Tampax, although I get the underlying message about what it takes to get some writers to write. Of course, one of Ellis’s main tools is exaggeration, and sometimes it is funny.

What does the book say about wives or the experience of being a wife?

It’s hard to generalize about marriage from these stories as the husbands are mostly in the background. Only in “Dead Doormen,” about how a wife takes over from her mother-in-law in caring for her husband’s position on the condo board, is their relationship at all stressed, and in this case, her husband is a privileged slob whom women control. Sometimes the husband is referred to affectionately, but often ironically, as when one narrator’s husband gives her a warm kiss every morning, but that’s the only one she ever gets. Although some of these wives work, most of them seem to be idle or to wait on their husbands hand and foot. I don’t get the feeling that Ellis’s housewife is representative of the women I know. On the other hand, maybe the term “housewife” is used ironically, as it is an old-fashioned word. Most of these stories seem to be steeped in irony and exaggeration.

Classics Club Spin #14!

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Another Classics Club spin is starting, so here is my list. Classics Club will pick a number between 1 and 20 on Monday, and that will determine which book I will read. I only have nine books left on my list that I haven’t read (although I haven’t yet reviewed all that I have read), so I have repeated all of them on this list to make 20. I listed them in order backwards by the time year they were written and then went back the other way, and then randomly filled out the list. Most of the ones left on my list are re-reads. We have until December 1 to read the next book chosen. I can’t wait to finish this list, because I have a new one already prepared!

  1. Cover for The MoonstoneAda by Vladimir Nabokov
  2. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  3. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  4. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
  5. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
  6. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  7. The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
  8. Henry VI Pt. III by William Shakespeare (if I get this one, I’ll have to read the next one first)
  9. Henry VI Pt. II by William Shakespeare
  10. Henry VI Part III
  11. The Vicar of Wakefield
  12. Vanity Fair
  13. Bleak House
  14. The Moonstone
  15. The Idiot
  16. Middlemarch
  17. Ada
  18. The Moonstone
  19. Vanity Fair
  20. Bleak House

Day 978: Eileen

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Cover for EileenJust by coincidence, I read Eileen before it ended up on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. So, unusually for me, I have already read a book on the list and can publish a review shortly after they announced it. Since I have only read one book on the 2015 short list so far for my project, this is really getting ahead of the curve for me.

* * *

Eileen is an astounding combination of character study and thriller. What is more astounding is that very little happens until the end of the novel, which still draws you along and builds suspense.

Eileen is an unhappy young woman who lives with her alcoholic, verbally abusive father in a suburb of Boston. She is deep in self-hatred and combines an ignorance of the world with a fascination with grotesque and ugly things. She is outwardly prudish but secretly obsessed with sex and bodily functions. All-in-all, she is deeply unpleasant, but we still manage to have some sympathy for her and understand how she got that way.

Eileen works at a prison for boys, where she has a crush on one of the guards. She spends a lot of her free time stalking him.

link to NetgalleyBut then she meets Rachel and becomes completely infatuated. She does not realize that Rachel is not the person she seems. Eileen’s occasional comments from many years later indicate that she has only a few days more in her hometown, and the suspense builds as we wonder why she left. One thing we know is that it involves Rachel.

This novel is a masterful character study of a deeply troubled person. She is all too human and believable.

Related Posts

The Lace Reader

The Girl on the Train

Tethered

Day 977: Far From the Madding Crowd

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

Cover for Far From the Madding CrowdBest Book of the Week!
I had to laugh at the blurb on my old 1960 paperback copy of Far From the Madding Crowd. It says, “She was a wanton who needed taming.” I think that says a lot more about 1960 than it does about Thomas Hardy’s novel.

Bathsheba Everdene is not a wanton, but she is a spirited, beautiful young woman. We first see her from the eyes of Gabriel Oak, a farmer and sheep breeder, as she moves house to live with her aunt. He observes that she is vain, but she takes his fancy. Soon, he proposes marriage.

Bathsheba is not interested. Still, Gabriel has fallen in love with her and stays in love. Soon, in a horrible mishap, Gabriel loses all his sheep and has to sell his farm for debts. His first thought is relief that she didn’t have to be brought low by his sudden poverty.

By this time, Bathsheba has left the area. When Gabriel is hired as a shepherd, he finds himself working for her, as she has inherited a substantial farm from her uncle. Soon, she has dismissed the thieving bailiff and put Gabriel in his place.

The bulk of the plot of this novel is about Bathsheba’s relationships with three different men—her growing friendship with Gabriel; the obsession Farmer Boldwood has for her, which is provoked by an act of mischief; and her own infatuation with Sergeant Troy, a liar and womanizer.

Far From the Madding Crowd is the first of Hardy’s Wessex novels, and it is much sunnier than any of the others. That is not to say it is light-hearted. It has many dark threads—Farmer Boldwood’s fetishist obsession, Gabriel’s ruin for a freakish reason, the fate of Fanny Robin, a supposed suicide, and a murder. Victorians would have categorized this novel as sensationalist.

With Tess of the D’Urbervilles, this is one of my favorite Hardy novels. I love its depictions of English rural life and customs of the times. I think Bathsheba is an interesting heroine and Gabriel a fine hero. I have been meaning to reread this novel since I saw the new movie last year (good, but not up to the Julie Christie classic), and I’m happy to have finally done it. Also, this is one of the few remaining books left on my current Classics Club list.

Related Posts

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Rustication

The Land of Green Ginger

Day 976: The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Cover for The Wicked BoyDuring a scorching 1895 July in East London, Robert Coombes murdered his mother while she was sleeping. He and his younger brother Nattie continued to live in the house for ten days with their mother locked in her bedroom, decaying. They hocked items from the house for money and attended a cricket game and a play. They told neighbors and relatives their mother had gone to Liverpool to visit her sister. They invited a laborer named John Fox to live with them, and they all slept downstairs in the parlor. Their father was away at sea at the time.

When the boys’ Aunt Emily forced her way into the house and found the body, Robert told her that his mother had beaten Nattie and that Nattie had asked Robert to kill her when he gave the signal. This story later seemed to have been forgotten, and Nattie testified against Robert in trial.

This crime was shocking to the Victorians, and there were many theories about it, from the morally debilitating effects of the penny dreadfuls Robert loved to ideas about children’s innate base instincts that must be covered over by civilizing influences. No one really knows why Robert killed his mother, but journalist and writer Kate Summerscale has her ideas.

link to NetgalleySummerscale was able to follow Robert’s movements to Broadmoor Asylum after his committal and traced his career in World War I as an instrumentalist and stretcher bearer. At first I wondered where the epilogue was going but figured it was connected with the opening of the novel, about a fleeing boy.

I found this book very interesting. Although most of it focuses on the crime and trial, I found this story of a murderer’s redemption satisfying.

Related Posts

The Invention of Murder: How Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America

The Secret Rooms

Day 975: Master & God

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Cover for Master & GodFor many years I faithfully read Lindsey Davis’s entertaining mystery series set in ancient Rome and featuring informer Marcus Didius Falco and his lovely wife Helena Justina. I only stopped reading after about 20 books because I was a little tired of the situation. Still, I occasionally pick up one of the series.

So, when I saw that Davis wrote a straight historical novel about the reigns of Domitian and Vespasian and Titus (Domitian’s father and brother), this seemed perfect to me. The novel covers the whole of the Emperor Domitian’s reign and has as its main characters Gaius Vinius Clodianus, a Praetorian guard, and Flavia Lucilla, a hairdresser.

And this was a bit of a problem. I initially had a hard time getting into this novel, and one reason, I think, was the sort of bifurcated story of Domitian’s reign. Gaius Vinius and Flavia Lucilla are just too far removed from the action to integrate them successfully into this story. The result is that the bulk of the novel is exposition, pages and pages of the author telling us what’s going on rather than events being told through the story of its characters.

Later, the two main characters become more important to the general thrust of the novel, and it improves. But for most of the novel, we’re left with a two-pronged approach, Domitian’s reign on the one hand and the romance between the two main characters on the other. This approach even becomes three-pronged during several years when Gaius Vinius is prisoner in Dacia. I couldn’t help contrasting this novel with Colleen McCullough’s excellent Master of Rome series (about Sulla, Julius Caesar, and Mark Anthony), or even better, Robert Harris’s series about Cicero (reviews upcoming).

This isn’t to say that I didn’t eventually settle down and enjoy the novel. I did. I just didn’t think it was one of Davis’s best. Occasionally, a hint of her trademark sardonic humor appears, but overall, I feel that she struggles to keep the novel moving.

Related Posts

Alexandria

Quo Vadis

Acté