Tag: satire

Review 2646: #NovNov25! The Sweet Dove Died

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It’s November, so it’s time for another yearly event, Novellas in November. I’ll start out this post with a recap of the novella reading I did during the year and finish with my first review. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been tagging books with the word “novella” so that I don’t have to look at the page count for each. I think that since last year’s event, I have read quite a few more novellas than usual, and at least two that I read about during the event.

Novellas Read So Far This Year

Here are the novellas I have read up to this point, not counting the ones I am reviewing for this event, 20 of them!

I know that some people are counting short nonfiction, but I am not, and anyway, that would only add one more book to this list.

My Review

I decided to include this book as the first one for Novellas in November even though it is a few pages too long at 210. It is a book that wasn’t published for some years after it was written, during a time when Pym was considered past her prime before being rediscovered, and in its subtle way, it’s a little darker than she is known for.

Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James meet Leonora Eyre at a book auction when she nearly faints after a successful bid. Leonora is an elegant woman of a certain age, the kind then considered fragile. (I don’t think we have any of those anymore.) She is single and can be cold, and she is definitely snobbish, but then so are James and Humphrey. Both James and Humphrey are attracted to her, but although she is closer in age to Humphrey, who is in his 60s, she prefers James, in his 20s. (We know Leonora is “of a certain age,” but exactly how old is hard to say. Middle age came earlier even as recently as the 1960s.)

James is comfortable with Leonora, but there is no hint that he feels romantic about her, whereas when Leonora learns he has a girlfriend in the country, Phoebe, she sets to work to drive her away. While he is on a buying trip in Europe, she boots out her old lady tenant and moves his things into the attic apartment in her house, even taking some of them to decorate her own rooms. But he returns with an even more dangerous friend, an American named Ned. In the meantime, Humphrey is competing with James.

James is sweet-tempered and naïve, so he worries about hurting Leonora’s feelings, but she seems to me like an attractive spider. It’s ironic that she disdains her friend Meg for a similar relationship with a young gay man named Colin.

This novel is insightful into human behavior and slightly biting. It contrasts the new behaviors and mores of the young with the much more formal manners of the older characters. In fact, from the first few sentences, when stodgy Humphrey remarks that a book sale is no place for a lady, I wondered if I was in 1867 instead of 1967.

I received this novel from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2632: #ReadingAusten25! Northanger Abbey

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Northanger Abbey is, of course, partially Jane Austen’s spoof of Gothic novels, and her heroine, Catherine Morland, is definitely a fan of them. But before that story line kicks in, Catherine gets to visit Bath in the company of family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Allen.

Catherine is not a well-informed girl and tends to be naïve and to take people as they present themselves. The first few days at Bath go slowly, because the Allens don’t know anyone. Catherine, however, has a dance with Henry Tilney and is inclined to like him. Then Mrs. Allen meets an old school friend, Mrs. Thorpe, and Catherine immediately becomes bosom pals with Isabella Thorpe.

It seems that Catherine’s brother James is friends with Isabella’s brother John, and Isabella has set her sights on James. Despite the vaunted friendship, Isabella and John (who is obnoxious enough that even Catherine notices it) do a great deal to disrupt Catherine’s growing acquaintance with Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor in favor of foursomes with them.

Finally, Catherine is invited to stay with Eleanor and delighted to learn the Tilneys own an old abbey. Unfortunately, Catherine lets her taste for Gothic literature carry her away.

Catherine is one of Austen’s most serious heroines, trying to navigate society and do what is right but fallen in with people whose intentions aren’t as honorable. But she is adorable, and her naïve reactions are amusing. Henry is genuinely witty and just the man to teach her to examine her assumptions a little more thoroughly. All in all, this is one of the lightest and most fun of Austen’s works.

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Review 2576: Moo

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I have an uneven relationship with Jane Smiley. I have by no means read all her books, but I found some of them to be entertaining (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and Horse Heaven) but her trilogy beginning with Some Luck to be over-rated. However, The Greenlanders was excellent, and I thought A Thousand Acres was one of the best books I ever read. Checking her oeuvre, I see now that I haven’t read any of her more recent books. This book is not one of the more recent.

Moo is set in the 1980s in Iowa in what used to be called an agricultural university (nicknamed “Moo U”). I believe the novel is supposed to be a satire. It starts with students, a boy named Bob whose job is to feed a pig as much as it can eat and take measurements, a project that seems only to be known about by the faculty member who is paying him, and four freshman girls, roommates.

But we don’t really get to know them, because then we meet a bunch of faculty members, administrators, and staff. The Spanish professor begins sleeping with the English professor. The Dean has decided, on almost no acquaintance, to marry the lunch lady. The provost seems to be entranced by money and about to make some sort of shady deal with the rich Texan who almost ruined the university’s reputation years ago. He’s seeing dollar signs in his eyes at a time when the college is cutting costs to the bone.

At page 120, I felt like I’d been introduced to about 50 people I only knew one or two things about and didn’t care. I assumed it was a satire, but nothing was funny, and it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. So, sadly, this was a DNF for me.

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Review 2541: Erasure

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If you’ve seen the movie American Fiction, you already know the plot of Erasure. I haven’t seen it yet, and I read this book for my A Century of Books project.

Thelonius (Monksie) Ellison is a writer of high intelligence whose dense, uncompromising novels have failed to make a hit with the general public. He has just put out his latest book, but his agent, Yul, is having difficulty placing it and has been told that Ellison is too far from his ethnic origins as a Black man.

Ellison lives in California, where he is a university professor, but on a visit to Washington, D. C., for a conference, he finds that his mother isn’t doing well. Eventually, he is forced to move back to D. C. to take care of her. That means taking a leave of absence, but he hasn’t sold his book. His mother’s affairs are in poor shape, so he finds he needs money.

He is infuriated by a recent book that is making a splash, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. It’s written by a middle-class midwestern Black woman based on one week that she spent with relatives in New York, and it employs every known cliché about the lives of Black people.

On a whim, Ellison sits down and writes a parody of this kind of novel, which he titles My Pafology. He submits it to Yul, who is horrified, and asks him to submit it to publishers under the name of Stagg Leigh. Shockingly, Random House takes it as straight and offers him lots of money.

This novel produces spoof upon spoof. Even Everett’s character Ellison takes himself so seriously that I think he’s being mocked. Certainly, he starts out mocking academia with the learned talk he gives at the beginning of the novel. This talk is incomprehensible, and yet it makes another academic leap up and shout, “Bastard!” at him. He also hits the publishing industry, the reading awards organizations, and television interview programs.

The novel is presented as Ellison’s diary, so it includes learned jokes (most of which I didn’t understand), imagined conversations between various dead people in the arts, recollections from his past, especially about his father, and the entire text—about 50 pages—of My Pafology.

As My Pafology gains attention, Ellison begins to lament that he ever compromised his standards. Forced occasionally to masquerade as Stagg Leigh, he feels as if his own persona as a cultured Black man is being erased. Maybe he feels that that whole culture is being erased.

Parts of this novel were above my head, particularly some of the little scribbles in the diary. Also, when I say Everett is heaping on the satire, I’m not saying that the novel is funny (although some of it is). Most of the time I felt sorry for Monksie, who is too unyielding for his own good and knows it, but cannot stop.

Percival Everett is having a moment lately, which has resulted in four of his books being in my pile, of which this is the second. I’m not sure if I like his work, but it is at least interesting.

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Review 2480: Glory

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I tried really hard to finish this book, as it is on my Booker Prize project list. I read more than half the book, but it was really not for me. Despite raves by critics, for me it was a DNF.

The novel fairly straightforwardly covers the recent history of Zimbabwe, beginning with the overthrow of Robert Mugabe but then going back in time to show the beginning of his reign of terror. The twist is that all the characters are animals. Everyone is giving the nod to Animal Farm, but Bulawayo credits a cultural background of using talking animals in stories. Both novels are satires and deal with the use of language, though.

Although using animals as characters does nothing for me, I also felt as if it did nothing for the book except make the characters emblematic—hence, undeveloped and one-sided. What was worse for me was being subjected to so much political and religious speech. The first chapter is 30 pages long and consists almost entirely of one speech after another lauding the Father of the Nation, known as Old Horse, on the occasion of the anniversary of the revolution.

In the next chapter we learn that Dr. Sweet Mother, his wife, intends to take the position from him. Only there is a coup by the vice president, Tuvius Delight Shasha, and at least in the next 200 pages, we never hear from her again.

Next, there is supposed to be a free and fair election, so everyone gets excited, but you can guess how that turns out.

I quit because the plot finally seemed to be moving a little with the return of a goat named Destiny who has been missing for 10 years, but then we got yet another chapter where the different views of the election are aired. I just couldn’t take it. I wasn’t enjoying one word.

This is going to be a book you either love or hate, although in glancing at some reviews, I was astonished to see a five-star review by a person who only read 50 pages and then blamed her dislike on herself. At 400 pages, this novel is extremely repetitive, going over and over the same tropes, sometimes repeating a word or phrase many times for emphasis, and using the word “tholukuthi,” which is a word for emphasis, sometimes several times in the same sentence.

The characters have no depth and there is no real character development. There are lots and lots of political speeches and sermons.

This novel is deemed important because of its look in the recent history of Zimbabwe. Maybe it would have been too difficult to read with people as characters, but it would have been much more readable and relatable for me.

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Review 2448: Ferdydurke

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I thought that Ferdydurke would be something different that I could read for the 1937 Club, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. When I returned to it, I still couldn’t make any headway. I didn’t finish it but read about 70 pages.

The unnamed narrator is turned from a middle-aged writer into a juvenile boy by an old schoolmaster and forced to go back to school. The sense of humor is juvenile, jokey, and forced, and I didn’t think it was funny. I quit reading during the mock introduction to a story (the first of two, apparently) that Gombrowitz chose to interrupt the flow of the novel. Not that the flow was very interesting.

Gombrowitz uses a Polish word, “pupa,” which means the butt or core of the body, to signify the concept of infantilization. He uses the word so often that I never wanted to hear it again.

This novel is supposed to be a masterful satire, but I couldn’t stand it.

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Review 2426: Mrs. Martell

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Mrs. Martell is not a nice person. She is beautiful and ambitious. Her goal has always been to marry a wealthy, influential man. She’s always had plenty of attention from men, but somehow she has not been lucky. Mr. Martell was a mistake, of course.

Cathie Martell never paid much attention to her cousin Laura until Laura married Edward West, wealthy and with great connections. Since then, she has made it her business to befriend Laura and has almost succeeded in detaching Edward for herself, but somehow he stays married to Laura.

Just in case Edward doesn’t come up to scratch, Cathie has encouraged the attentions of Mr. Hardy, a young newspaper reporter, who is able to get free tickets for shows. He is madly in love with her, but she doesn’t want Edward to find out.

This darkish social satire rivals the story of Becky Sharp, only Becky is more likable. Eliot’s prose is sharp and biting, although she tends to shift point of view without warning, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, which I found confusing at times. Still, I was driven to find out if Cathie would succeed or get her comeuppance.

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Review 2238: Castle Rackrent

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Castle Rackrent is a novel I picked for my Classics Club list. Published in 1800 although set before 1782, it is an early example of the use of an unreliable narrator.

That narrator is Thady Quirk, a servant to the ancient Irish Rackrent family, but the novel is also annotated by a scholarly character called the Editor. Thady informs us in the first paragraph that he’s known as “Honest Thady,” a phrase that puts us on the alert.

Thady quickly runs through the older history of the family and then tells in greater detail the story of the last three owners of the Castle, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy. These are satirical tales of mismanagement either by penny pinching and bleeding the tenants or by wasteful consumption. Thady is vehement in his avowals of support for the family and in this role makes some astonishing assertions, such as, about Sir Kit who married a woman for her money and then locked her away for seven years because she refused to give him her jewels, “He was never cured of his gaming tricks, but that was the only fault he had, God bless him.”

This novel is a light commentary on the class system and its abuses, as the series of barons get up to all manner of hijinks while the servants (particularly Thady and his son) arrange to purchase assets at low prices. It is moderately funny but is considered by critics to be an astonishing first novel by a woman at this period.

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Review 2191: Sally on the Rocks

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Sally Lunton has been living in Paris as it waits for a German invasion in 1915, and she is at her wit’s end. Her sketchy career as an artist has been finished by the war, and she is stone broke. She has changed from a blithe Bohemian to a woman nearly middle-aged (by the standards of 1915—she’s 29) who thinks her only hope is to marry someone well off.

Then Sally gets an apparently friendly letter from Miss Maggie Hopkins telling her that there is a new bachelor in her home town of Little Crampton, a bank manager, and he will soon be snapped up by a young widow with a daughter. Sally thinks Mr. Bingley will be horrible, but she goes home prepared to fight for him. She returns to the home of her guardian, the mild-mannered and affectionate Reverend Adam Lovelady.

Mr. Bingley turns out to be worse than Sally expected. He is plump and unattractive but full of himself for his lofty position in town. He is also religious and judgmental and is looking for a wife who is above reproach. He is guided by a book left by his deceased mother telling him what to look for in a wife—or rather what to avoid (hint—everyone).

Unfortunately, Sally has a skeleton in her closet. Six years ago, madly in love, she went off to Italy with Jimmy Thompkins. But after a summer in Italy, he left her. Sally has never really recovered, but it is vital that Mr. Bingley not learn of this escapade. Unfortunately, Jimmy is living in the village with his wife and two children, and he thinks Sally should not marry Mr. Bingley without telling him.

Another peril is Miss Maggie, who senses there is something between Jimmy and Sally and is determined to ferret it out.

Despite these complications, Sally’s appearance and pretenses of admiration are getting her ahead of her rival, Mrs. Dalton. However, soon there is another problem. Up on the moors, Sally meets Robert Kantyre, a disgraced former officer on the point of suicide. Sally is determined to save him from himself and from alcoholism.

This is a complex little book considering when it was written. Not only is it a satire of village life, but it makes some surprising observations about the differences in how men and women in the same circumstances are viewed and treated. Although Mr. Bingley is usually a figure of fun, he shows another side, even though his feelings for Sally fight with his yearning for his dinner at times. The only real villain is Miss Maggie, whose idea of fun is mischief making at the expense of others’ lives.

Except for tiring a little bit of Mr. Bingley’s internal battles, I found this novel very enjoyable and insightful.

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

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Review 1818: Quichotte

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I was fairly sure I was going to hate Quichotte. I did not much like Midnight’s Children or Don Quixote for that matter, which Quichotte retells. However, this novel is part of my Booker project, so I opened it with hope.

Quichotte is Ismail Smile, an elderly consumer of all things TV who becomes infatuated with Salma R, a young TV star. He decides to go on a quest to earn the love of his beloved. This is a road trip, and for a partner he takes Sancho, his imaginary son. To add another layer, Quichotte is himself an imaginary character, created by Brother, a writer of spy novels who has decided to change his genre.

This novel is one full of circumlocution. As we meet each character—and we meet a lot of them—we go off on the tangent of that person’s life story. Further, there are lots of subplots, for example, the one about Smile’s cousin and employer, whose pharmaceutical company has developed a drug even more dangerous than OxyContin and who has himself developed a similar model to that of the makers of Oxy, delivering it in huge quantities to small rural communities.

The genre for this novel is fantasy and of course satire. Fantasy is not my genre, and although I wouldn’t have thought the same was true about satire, I have not enjoyed the satirical entries on the various shortlists. They all feel the same to me: ponderous, overblown, and written by old men. Definitely lacking subtlety. Even the reviewer from The Guardian remarked that the book was funny but not as funny as Rushdie thought it was. That is exactly how I feel about it, except I didn’t think it was very funny. I sensed Rushdie winking all the time.

Still, I was enjoying parts of the novel, although it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Then Sancho decided he wanted to be a real boy, and guess who popped up? Jiminy Cricket. At that point I had to restrain myself from throwing the book across the room (only because it was a library book), and I stopped reading.

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