Day 552: Dracula

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Cover for DraculaHaving experienced other gothic classics of the 18th and 19th century, I was delighted to find Dracula unexpectedly readable. I was also surprised to find how little it resembles its many theatrical and movie productions, even those that attempt to stay closer to the original work.

All versions begin the same, however, with poor Jonathan Harker sent out by his office to Transylvania to complete a property deal with his client, Count Dracula. While staying at Dracula’s castle, he begins to suspect something is badly amiss and eventually fears for his life.

Back in England, his fiancée Mina Murray corresponds with and later stays with her good friend Lucy Westerna at a seaside town. In one day, Lucy has received proposals from three different young men, who all feature strongly in the novel. Dr. Jack Seward is in charge of a local insane asylum. Quincy Morris is a manly, amiable Texan, whom I feared all along was designed for a ghastly death. Lucy’s chosen is Arthur Holmwood, another manly young man who is soon promoted to a lordship by the convenient death of a benefactor. (I don’t think these things work this way, since Arthur is not his benefactor’s relative, but never mind.)

After a freakish storm, a Russian ship arrives unmanned at the port where Mina and Lucy are staying with Mrs. Westerna, who is gravely ill. As it arrives, a large dog jumps off it and runs ashore. Aboard is not a single live human. We horror aficianados know that Dracula has arrived.

While Mina waits for news of Jonathan, Lucy begins sleepwalking and behaving oddly. Dr. Seward makes notes about a patient who eats bugs and babbles about his master. Soon Van Helsing will be needed.

Unlike in most of the spin-offs, except for Jonathan Harker’s experiences at the beginning, Dracula is mostly an unseen menace for much of the novel. I’m guessing that the original readers did not necessarily realize the identity of that bat fluttering outside Lucy’s window.

In any case, the novel covers a lot more ground than does the standard remake. It is epistolary, written entirely as letters and journal entries. It is well written and moves along nicely except for the occasionally long-winded expulsion of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo by Van Helsing or Seward. In the true gothic fashion, it is a classic battle of good versus evil, with the prize the soul of our heroine Mina.

Modern readers may be bothered by the depiction of the two women. Lucy is supposed to be a modern woman—who else would have three suitors at a time? She is both innocent and pure in herself and quite the seductive vamp when under the spell of Count Dracula. The men do a lot of harm to both her and Mina by trying to protect the “little women” from knowledge of what is going on. Again, try to judge the novel’s attitudes by the standards of its own time, when it was simply considered a whomping good tale.

Day 551: Mrs. Dalloway

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Cover for Mrs. DallowayMrs. Dalloway is preparing for a party at her home. She goes out herself in the morning to pick up the flowers.

Clarissa Dalloway enjoys her walk. She loves the air, the invigorating city of London, the people. As she walks, she thinks about events from her past, particularly a summer when she was being courted by Peter Walsh at her home of Bourton.

On her walk, Mrs. Dalloway briefly encounters an old friend and we follow him and his thoughts for awhile. So through the day, the novel moves from the consciousness of one character to another, culminating in Mrs. Dalloway’s party. Thoughts and memories are triggered by random images, as Woolf tries to replicate human consciousness.

Woolf’s express purpose in writing this novel was to depict one day in a woman’s life. She also does a turn on the marriage plot—for we see thirty-some years later how that plot worked out.

Mrs. Dalloway harks back to her youth, when it seemed possible she would marry Peter. They argued a lot, though, and it seemed to her that he criticized her. We learn from Peter’s memories that he suddenly had the flash of a thought that she would marry Richard Dalloway. Convinced of this, he left for India. Now, he has returned to tell her he is in love again—with a much younger married woman who has children and is not of his class. Still, by the end of the novel it is as if he has forgotten his new love.

Clarissa married comfort and stability in Richard Dalloway. Instead of a challenging and more bohemian existence with Peter, she has a very structured life. But she is recovering from illness and sleeps in a narrow, prim bed in the attic. It is unclear whether she is happy, except in the delight of living she feels by her nature.

Septimus and Rezia Smith are a couple unknown to Clarissa who are also important to the novel. Septimus is suffering from a delayed shell shock and hallucinations from his experiences in World War I. Rezia, the wife he brought back from Italy, is taking him to see Sir William Bradshaw. Bradshaw is a Harley Street specialist who appears later at Mrs. Dalloway’s party.

As with other modernist novels, I sometimes felt I was missing something. At other times, though, I felt that my reaction was supposed to be something like “This is what life is.”

Having recently read The Hours (wrong way around, I know), Michael Cunningham’s tribute to the novel, I was fascinated by how, with slight adjustments of character and by breaking the novel into three time periods, he invokes even stronger feelings and gives us a fresh look at the material.

Day 550: The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan

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Cover for The Invisible WomanThe Invisible Woman is the interesting story of the relationship between Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan, the true nature of which is still being debated. Although Dickens’ reputation was jealously guarded by himself during his life and by his friends and family after his death, Claire Tomalin shows convincing evidence that the two had an affair during the last 13 years of his life.

They met when Nelly was just 18 and he was at the height of his fame at 45. She and her mother and two sisters were struggling, hard working but respectable actresses, or as respectable as actresses could be during the Victorian era. It is possible that Dickens at first thought he had latched onto a bird of a different feather as he befriended the family.

Although Nelly was excited by the attention of such a famous man, it seems clear that she succumbed to him only reluctantly. He offered her a chance at a life free from the worries of poverty but one in which she could not be a member of society.

This is a fascinating story, particularly because of the lengths Dickens went to protect his own image even while shedding his wife Catherine in a cruelly public way and telling lies about it. The actions of his sister-in-law at this time toward her own sister seem almost inexplicable. Also interesting is how Nelly managed to reinvent herself after Dickens’ death.

This book is an engrossing, well written, carefully researched account of events in Dickens’ life that were hidden for years. Only a few years ago I read another biography of Dickens that glossed over this friendship, alternately suggesting that it was perfectly innocent and that Nelly was a gold digger while never actually committing itself about the nature of the relationship. Although there were rumors even at the time of the affair, the cover-up was so pervasive that details are still being uncovered.

Day 549: Classics Club Spin #6! Herland

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Cover for HerlandHerland is the novel chosen for me from my Classics List by the Classics Club Spin #6!

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I guess most of my reaction to Herland is based on a dislike of utopian fiction, which seems to be more than ordinarily didactic. I like the occasional dystopian novel, but in my experience the dystopian writers are a bit more subtle about their lessons. Or in the case of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, if not subtler, funnier. I chose this novel for my list just because I thought I had never read it and I was trying to make sure I selected quite a few notable works by women.

Vandyck Jennings, Jeff Margrave, and Terry Nicholson are traveling when they hear of a land of only women and female children. They hear that men are not welcomed, so of course, they decide to go there. The land is isolated at the top of an unclimbable mountain, but the three fly up in Terry’s plane. There they are taken prisoner by the women, who educate them in their customs before allowing them to mix freely with the inhabitants. It is this education and subsequent discussions that make up the bulk of the novel.

These women have been isolated for thousands of years and began to reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis. Their world is a garden, perfectly peaceful, with no disease or strife. Although two of the men are sympathetic characters (the third is a first-class chauvinist), the implicit message is somewhat misandrist—that women can get along perfectly well, better really, without men.

The book is funny at times, as these bewildered males take in the lessons of Herland. The funniest scene is after the men marry, and Van is trying to get his wife Ellador to understand the pleasures of having sex more often than when she’s scheduled to reproduce. But most of the charm the novel has is overridden for me by its didacticism, even while I believe Gilman brings up some important issues.

Development of character is not something Gilman is very interested in for this novel. The men all have distinct but pretty much one-dimensional personalities, and the women are virtually indistinguishable except for older versus younger. Science and psychology must have been hot topics at the time (1912), because terms from both are thrown around quite a bit. Unfortunately, there is also an implicit advocacy for some of the theories of eugenics.

What I was most interested in was what happened to Ellador after she and Van escort the exiled Terry out of the country. But Gilman doesn’t say.

In Gilman’s time, many of the ideas that don’t seem so revolutionary now—like the need of all people to have a sense of purpose and the idea that subordination results in stunted humans—were probably revelatory and maybe even shocking. Some of them still are. Gilman certainly deserves to be read, but I prefer some of her other works, notably The Yellow Wallpaper.

Day 548: The Good Lord Bird

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Cover for The Good Lord BirdBest Book of the Week!
Henry “Onion” Shackleford is a boy working with his father in a barber shop when John Brown and his followers ride into town. He relates his story many years later when he is more than 100 years old.

Henry and his father are African-American slaves living in the Kansas Territory near Laurence, a hotbed during the Border Wars, referred to as Bleeding Kansas. Brown has come to help the Free Staters, those who want Kansas to be free of slavery. But Brown’s ultimate goal is to rid the country of slavery, and he doesn’t care how he does it. In the resulting fight, Henry’s father is killed, and Brown “frees” Henry by kidnapping him.

Because, as Henry points out several times in his narrative, John Brown sees only what he wants to see, he mistakes Henry in his potato sack clothing for a girl. From then on, Henry is a girl as far as Brown’s followers are concerned, and Brown calls him Onion.

What follows is an an account of the deeds of John Brown, leading up to the assault on Harper’s Ferry. This tale is often cynical or ironic, boundlessly energetic, irreverent, and funny as well as touching. Brown is depicted as a sort of half-crazed, raggedy zealot, who is capable of stopping midway across a stream while being pursued by his enemies to pray for half an hour. Only his son Owen is brave enough to interrupt him and try to get him on his way.

Onion and other slaves they encounter are reluctant to be freed, afraid they’re going to end up in hotter water than they started. They have some cause. Onion, in fact, is almost always planning how he’ll escape the group and does so several times. But he always ends up back with Brown. His adventures lead him to residence in a whorehouse, a visit with Frederick Douglass (who gets drunk and tries to seduce “Henrietta”), and a more impressive meeting with Harriet Tubman in Canada. All the while, Brown attempts to “hive the Negroes” to revolt at the appropriate time.

The wonder is that with all this poking fun, McBride somehow manages to make us care deeply for John Brown and to honor his place as a trigger for the Civil War. This is an unusual novel—highly entertaining yet also deeply serious.

Day 547: Signed Confessions

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Cover for Signed ConfessionsI confess to only having read about half of the stories in Signed Confessions, which was not to my taste. The main characters in the first few stories are all unlikable men who have committed acts for which they desire forgiveness.

After his gay son’s suicide, an implacable attorney regrets how he treated his boy. He remembers an earlier time when as a young boy, he was cruel to a bereaved schoolmate and found how that cruelty gave him power. Another man deserts his family and then spends his time making up stories to tell in support groups.

These two stories are written in a virile style that seems like an imitation of writers like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. The third comes from another genre—that of dark Jewish comedy. A Jewish man who plagiarizes insults ala Don Rickles to be funny is suddenly gripped with remorse and tries to beg forgiveness of some of his victims. I will admit that the results are a bit humorous.

Walker ties the first few stories together by giving a character in one story some characteristic that you can recognize and then bringing him in as an unnamed character in another story. In one case, the attorney of the first story throws legal terms into regular conversation, as does a member of a support group in the second story. My problem was that I couldn’t imagine a lawyer actually talking that way, especially one who was son of a lawyer. It seems more likely the behavior of someone who has taken one or two law courses.

In general, the stories are written in uninspired prose and show no signs of subtlety. The fourth story, “Ode to Billy Jeff,” is a little more thoughtful than the others. Nevertheless, I chose not to finish the collection.

A disclaimer here: I received this book from from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Day 546: Boy, Snow, Bird

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Cover to Boy, Snow, BirdI find it fascinating when someone takes a well-known story and puts a wildly creative spin on it. Such is the case with Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi’s re-imagining of the story of Snow White.

The story begins in the 1950’s with Boy Novak. Boy flees to a small town in New England to escape her verbally and physically abusive father. Although Boy is a strikingly beautiful icy blonde, she has no sense of herself, so much so that when she looks in a mirror, she sometimes cannot see herself.

Boy meets Arturo Whitman, a widower with a little girl named Snow. Although Boy believes she loves someone else, she marries Arturo. It is not until she has her own dark-skinned daughter, whom she names Bird at Snow’s suggestion, that she learns she has married into an African-American family passing for white.

Boy is appalled to learn that Arturo has a sister, Clara, whom she has never met. Arturo’s mother Olivia sent Clara away as a child because her features were too African-American.

Boy is also worried about Snow, a beauty who has always been fawned over by her family for her pale skin. Boy sees something hidden in Snow and begins to fear for Bird. Finally, she has Arturo send Snow away to live with Clara.

Bird takes up the story at the age of fourteen. She shares her mother’s problems with mirrors. She is a bright, lively girl who is intensely curious about her sister Snow. Soon she begins a correspondence with Snow. When Boy, Snow, and Bird are finally reunited and other secrets emerge, they are forced to explore the differences between appearance and reality.

The setting of this novel during the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement adds dimension to this truly original novel. It is also beautifully written. I felt it slowed down a little in the section where Snow and Bird are corresponding, but it was otherwise absorbing. Although the novel has a realistic setting, it harks back to its fairy tale beginning through dreams, a few hallucinatory moments, and the symbolism of the mirror.

 

Day 545: Twelfth Night

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Cover for Twelfth NightFans of the Lady Julia Grey mystery series will probably enjoy this novella, which seems as if it was written for Christmas even though published in June. It is a simple little holiday story, a bagatelle.

The Marches, Lady Julia’s family, have gathered together during the holidays to celebrate Twelfth Night. Every decade the family itself performs the Revels, which are attended by the countryside around. During the rehearsals, an abandoned baby is found in the stables.

Lady Julia’s father asks her husband Brisbane to try to find the mother, but Brisbane’s initial inquiries turn up nothing. Lady Julia has heard her young niece and nephew buzzing about a witch living in an abandoned cottage, and then Lady Julia catches her niece Perdita sneaking out at night to see the witch.

http://www.netgalley.comThis short piece doesn’t involve much of a mystery, but it is always enjoyable to spend time with Julia and Brisbane.