Classics Club Spin #35

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It’s time for another Classics Club spin. For the spin, members select 20 titles from their Classics Club lists and post them in a numbered list on their blogs. On Sunday, October 15, the club selects a number, and that determines which book to read for the spin. The goal this time is to read that book by Sunday, December 3, and post your review.

So, with no further ado, here is my list of 20 books:

  1. The Book of Dede Korkut by Anonymous
  2. The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair
  3. Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe
  4. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini
  5. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  6. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  7. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  8. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  9. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette
  10. Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton
  11. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Fanny Burney
  12. The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos
  13. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  14. The Methods of Lady Waldhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  15. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  16. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  17. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
  18. Merkland, A Story of Scottish Life by Margaret Oliphant
  19. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  20. The Prophet’s Mantle by E. Nesbit

Since I have exactly 20 books left on my list, this will be the last spin that I can participate in for a while that doesn’t require repeating some of my entries. I’m interested to see how it turns out.

If I Gave the Award

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As I just posted my review for the last short-listed book for the 2019 James Tait Black Award for Fiction, it is now time for my feature where I decide whether the judges got it right. This time the choice is difficult for me, because I didn’t really like any of the shortlisted books. Most of them share a strong intellectualism, although that’s not why I felt so-so about them.

It’s kind of a toss-up which of the books I liked least. I remarked in the review of Murmur by Will Eaves how much I dislike books with dreams in them. In this novel about an Alan Turing-like figure, the main character eventually experiences wakened dream states as a side-effect from chemical castration. It’s ironic that the other book I disliked, Crudo by Olivia Laing (the winning entry), is also a fictional character study of a real person, a woman very much like the poet Kathy Acker, with whom I was completely unfamiliar. In this case, I found Kathy really annoying in her neuroticism and use of crude language. Both of these books were extremely well written, but I had difficulties with them.

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires was probably the least intellectually removed of the four books. It’s a collection of short stories linked by common characters that explores black identity in the California middle class. The stories are insightful and original, and some of them are bizarre.

That leaves me not quite knowing what to do with Sight by Jessie Greengrass. It’s about seeing below the surface, narrated by a woman who is conflicted about her own pregnancy. It combines her ruminations with stories about scientists whose discoveries also have to do with seeing below the surface. I found it to be written in meticulous prose but also to be distanced from the reader, and I didn’t like the main character’s neuroticism.

I guess I’m going with Sight, but this one was a tough choice.

Review 2249: Murmur

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When the cover of a book calls it “hallucinatory,” I know it’s not going to be a good fit for me. However, since Murmur is part of my James Tait Black project, I felt compelled to read it.

The novel aims to portray the mindset of an Alan Turing-like scientist named Alec Pryor after he is undergoing chemical castration because of a homosexual encounter. Aside from making his body more feminine, the chemical makes him dream and eventually induces wakened dream states, including ones where he fantasizes letters from his friend June, whom he hasn’t seen in years, and relives events of his boyhood.

Those who have been reading my reviews know how much I hate reading about dreams. Since it is difficult to know some of the time whether he is dreaming or remembering, this was a novel I found it hard to stick with, despite it being very short.

The rest of the novel is filled with philosophical musings about whether machines could have consciousness and other subjects. I felt that either I didn’t want to follow his thoughts or they were too hard for me to grasp. The journal section at the end is the most accessible part of the novel.

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Review 2248: Road Ends

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Mary Lawson’s subject is always dysfunctional families in distress living in the far north of Ontario. That sounds deadly, but her novels are absorbing and touching, and Road Ends is no exception.

The novel is told from three different perspectives at slightly different times. Megan Cartwright begins it in 1966, although there is a prologue set in 1967. In the prologue, the best friend of her brother Tom commits suicide where Tom will find him. This doesn’t at first seem to have much to do with Megan’s earlier section but informs Tom’s behavior throughout.

The Cartwrights is a large household of boys with only Megan and her mother the females. Megan’s mother Emily keeps having babies, and Megan is the only one keeping the household organized. Emily retreats to the bedroom with the baby, and Edward, her father, to his study after work. In 1967, baby Adam is a toddler, and Mary has overheard the doctor telling her parents he must be the last child, so she feels free to leave, having realized she will never have a life if she stays. She makes plans to go to Toronto in order to save money to go to London and stay with a friend, but when her father learns her plans, he pays for her to go to London.

Edward has withdrawn himself from the family. One reason is that he is terrified of becoming like his father, a drunkard who used to beat him. He has felt an overpowering anger at times, especially against his sons Peter and Corey, who are always fighting and breaking things. His section of the novel is set in 1969 in roughly the same timeframe as Tom’s, but because of his withdrawal, he hasn’t noticed the household descending into chaos.

For Tom, his friend’s suicide has sent him into a tailspin. He thinks he could have saved him if he had paid more attention. Tom was graduated from college and had job offers in engineering from two aircraft companies, but six months later, he is driving the snow plow at night and spending the day reading the newspaper. He can’t stand to be around people. But he starts noticing that Adam, now four, isn’t being cared for. His mother has had another baby and seems to only care for it. The house is filthy, the child is filthy, and there is no food in the house.

Mary, after a very rough start, has found her dream job in London running a small hotel. She was furious to hear her mother was pregnant again, and she is still homesick but determined not to go back.

I was extremely touched by the ending of this novel. Another really good book from Lawson. I can’t seem to go wrong with her.

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Review 2247: Girls Who Lie

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Boys discover a body hidden in a cave on a lava flow. It’s quickly established that it’s the body of Marianna, a woman who has been missing for seven months and has been presumed to have committed suicide. But Marianna was murdered.

When officers Elma and Sævar investigate, they find that Marianna has had periods when her daughter, Hekla, was removed from her care. Now, things seem to be going well, but 15-year-old Hekla spends a lot of time with her foster parents.

Interspersed in the novel is a narrative by a woman containing at times disturbing information. But we don’t know who this narrator is. Is it Marianna or someone else?

This is the second book in this series featuring Elma (last name? first name? Ægisdottir seems always to use just one for all her characters). I have mixed feelings about the series. The plotting is fairly good, and the novel ends in a chilling way. However, the dialogue seems unconvincing, and characterization is minimal. This is the same way I felt about Camilla Lackberg’s novels, so it’s hard to know whether it’s a translation problem (the dialogue, I mean) or the author’s writing ability. I don’t think I’ll be sticking with this series.

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Reading Thirkell’s Barsetshire Series in Order: #29 Three Score and Ten + #28 Love at All Ages Wrap-Up

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Thanks to everyone who is keeping up at least with comments for Love at All Ages. One more to go!

I see now why some of the lists of the Barsetshire series include Three Score and Ten, and some do not. It’s because Three Score and Ten was finished posthumously by a friend. It should be interesting to see what difference there is. I will be posting my review of this novel on Tuesday, October 31.

Review 2246: One Year’s Time

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Liza, a “bachelor girl” in 1930s London, has a job as a secretary in an office where she likes all the people and a basic flat that she’s fixing up. It’s January 2 and she’s painting the floor and feeling lonely when she gets a call from Walter, a young man she met at a party. She invites him over and they quickly become lovers.

Everything is smooth at first, and she quickly falls in love, but she is always trying to match his mood and to appease him. When he disappoints her, she thinks it is her fault for being disappointed. She madly wants to marry him, but he doesn’t ask.

In April, he decides to spend the summer in the country. He asks her to go, and with very little planning, she quits her job and gives up her flat.

Liza is the type of person who’s either very happy or in the depths of despair. She has high expectations for this trip, but we already know it won’t go as planned.

I hope girls have gained more self-confidence, but I’ve known girls like this who spent a lot of time waiting by the phone (which you presumably don’t have to do anymore, because you carry it with you), and even when I was young, quite a few decades after this book is set, I knew girls who were focused only on marriage. It was interesting but sometimes excruciating to observe what’s going on in Liza’s mind. When will she realize she always puts Walter first and so does he, charming as he may be?

This is an unusual novel for the 30s, showing how things have opened up a little for women sexually but not too much, as her fretting over her fake wedding ring shows. I felt both impatient with and sympathetic to Liza for most of the book.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2245: LOTE

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This is a very unusual book, and von Reinhold has created an unusual protagonist in Mathilda.

Mathilda worships beauty, a particular baroque, florid kind of beauty. Black, gay, and from a poor background, she is trying to work her way into higher echelons of society to live an opulent life. She periodically becomes obsessed with different figures from the 20s and 30s, Black artists in the periphery of the Bloomsbury Circle, and doesn’t so much research them as immerse herself in them. She calls them her Transfixions. The latest is a Black poet named Hermia Druitt.

Because Mathilda does not always earn her money honestly, she has to sometimes change her identity. She’s been staying in a vacant flat of a friend who is away when her host returns and meets neighbors who know her as Sadie. She has just lost a job at an archive because it wasn’t an official position. She needs somewhere to live and some money, so she thoughtlessly applies for an artists residency that she sees is located in Dun, a town in Europe where Hermia lived. To her surprise, she gets it.

When she arrives in Dun, she finds the town enchanting but the residency dire. The other residents seem to be uniformly drab, so much so that at first she fears she has unwittingly applied for a business residency. They always carry around textbooks written in incomprehensible jargon and speak in that jargon. Mathilda continues her search for evidence of Hermia while pretending to do her work on the residency.

Behind the bemusing and sometimes funny portrait, von Reinhold has a serious theme—the erasure of Black European culture from the public consciousness. A good deal of Hermia’s story is told by excerpts from Mathilda’s Bible, a book called Black Modernisms. Sometimes this novel was a bit esoteric for me, but it was always interesting. I read it for my James Tait Black project.

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Review 2244: #ThirkellBar! Love at All Ages

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If Love at All Ages can be said to have a plot, it’s the wedding of the vicar Mr. Oriel and Lady Gwendolyn, the sister of the Duke of Towers (not to be confused with the Earl of Pomfret Towers). If these names do not sound familiar, it’s because as far as I can remember, we have not met these characters before, or anyone else in that family, and we don’t really seem to get to know them now. However, other familiar characters help with or appear at the wedding.

The back of the novel also mentions the christening of the first child of Lady William Harcourt (previously Edith Graham, who monopolized at least three of the previous novels), but by the time we get done with the wedding, I’d forgotten it.

The title hints that the book includes another love affair, and since Lady Gwendolyn and her intended are well into middle age, the implication is that it involves younger people. This is just a hint that there may be a suitable mate for young Ludo, Lord Mellings, the heir of the Earl of Pomfret.

Otherwise, the book contains the usual plethora of literary allusions, tea parties, boating parties, and so on. The preoccupations that I complained about last time are still all there, too—including yet another mention of Mrs. Fewling’s lack of proper undergarments when she was still Margot Phelps—although not repeated as often. However, there is a scene where Lydia Merton remembers her husband’s old infatuation (with someone very much like Mrs. Brandon but not her, I can’t remember) and then two pages later, her husband thinks about it, and as if that weren’t enough, it’s mentioned again later in the book.

So, no improvement here and less interest, because so much of the book is about characters we don’t know and don’t get to know. However, there’s only one book left to go. (In fact, the cover of my book says this one is the last one, which if it were, would be quite a disappointment as the last in the series.)

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Review 2243: Antarctica

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Looking for more to read by Claire Keegan, I came across this collection of short stories written in the late 1990s.

In the title story, a happily married woman decides to try a one-night stand, with disastrous results.

In “Men and Women” a girl still young enough to believe in Santa gains some insight into her parents’ relationship.

“Where the Water’s Deepest” contrasts the care an au pair has for a boy with her employer’s disdain of her.

“Love in the Tall Grass” tells what happens after Cordelia’s married lover asks her to wait for him for ten years.

“Storms” is about a young girl’s memories of her mother, who has been put away in an asylum.

These are summaries of the first few stories, but there are several others. Many of them are about the mistreatment of women by their partners. Keegan’s writing is always beautifully lucid and her stories contemplative.

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