Harry Potter à l’École des Sorciers, by JK Rowling

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Thistle

HP1This is the first book I’ve read in French since late summer 2001. It’s been a really long time since I did anything with my French at all, and I knew it was just about time to try to see what I’ve lost from the last decade and what I could regain through literature. I chose the Harry Potter series because I’m very familiar with it in English, which I thought would help me to understand the French more easily.

It did, though the process has still been fairly difficult. I’ve been reading about 85 pages per week, a schedule which will get me through the entire series by the end of the year. I’m hoping it will start to go faster through time. In the beginning, it took me an hour to read five pages. Now, I can read about fifteen pages in an hour, so I’m definitely improving! It’s amazing just how much of my French is coming back to me! Vocabulary and grammar and structure and all that. I rarely even need to carry my dictionary around with my anymore. If there’s a word I’m unfamiliar with, I can generally gather its meaning through context clues and my knowledge of the original text.

It’s interesting reading in reverse translation like this. I get to see all the things that changed from the original British, from the book’s title (Harry Potter at the School for Wizards) to the names of characters and places (Snape = Rogue, Sprout = Chourave, Fang = Crockdur, Ravenclaw = Serdaigle, Hogwarts = Poudlard, etc). Most interesting was all the wordplay that Rowling uses particularly in these younger books. A lot of that word play was missing from the French version. Some of the word-play names (like Professor Sprout) were changed specifically to incorporate that same word play, but in other places, it just didn’t exist. Some of the jokes didn’t carry across, like the whole “Mars is bright tonight. Unusually bright” from the centaurs. It makes me realize just how much I must be missing in the to-English translations of books I read.

There were a couple issues I had with my copy of this book. It’s a mass market paperback and I think it was cheaply copyedited and printed because there were errors all over the place. A couple times Voldemort was spelled “Voldermort.” In the chess scene at the end it kept changing which color pieces the characters were playing with. There were also a couple places where entire paragraphs were missing, which changed the flow of the narrative. For instance, after Hermione saves Ron and Harry from the Devil’s Snare and Harry says it’s lucky she paid attention in class, the whole paragraph where Ron teases her for losing her head and forgetting she was a witch is just gone. I’m not sure why it would have been taken out, if that’s a change in the translation text or an error, but either way, it was jarring. There were several places like that, and I’m sure some were errors because the next paragraph would respond to something that had been removed. I’m hoping the copyediting will get better on the next book, but I worry because other than book 5, I have the entire series in mass market paperback.

I’m excited to move on to Chambre des Secrets! My brother has been reading these in French too (only his French is more advanced than mine, as he lived in Paris for six months last year) and he said the books keep getting just a bit more difficult as the kids age, which is what I’d expect. I’m hoping I can gradually get better through time so that none of them are too dense or difficult for me to read!

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Protected: The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman (audio)

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Thistle

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Skunk Girl, by Sheba Karim

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Thistle

skunk girlNina is a Pakistani-American Muslim girl in a small town in New York. She feels like an outcast among most of her schoolmates because she can’t date or go out with friends, plus she thinks she’s very ugly, especially because of her body hair. She also suffers at home, where she doesn’t feel she can live up to her sister’s brains or her parents’ expectations of her.

This book is what you could call a typical coming of age story, set on a cross-cultural background. There is nothing particularly different in it from other coming of age stories with regards to Nina’s relationships with family, friends, boys, or school enemies. Those things all turn out exactly how you might expect. Where its uniqueness lies is in the cultural conflicts.

Nina is Pakistani-American, but has never been to Pakistan. She has grown up in America, surrounded by Pakistani customs, food, and culture at home but immersed in American culture outside of the home. She’s caught in a conflict between two worlds and doesn’t know how to reconcile them. Her parents want her to grow up to be exactly what they expect she would have been had she grown up in Pakistan. Nina has only superficial cultural and religious ties to the country, though. She wants to be what she considers “normal.” She wants to be American.

That’s what interested me in the book and kept me reading. While I didn’t think the book was quite as good at addressing these topics as the last one I read – Shine, Coconut Moon – I did enjoy it. It’s the sort of book I’d be happy to let my kids read when they’re a little older, especially to get a broader cultural perspective. I do wish we’d gotten to see more of Pakistan, though…I was really hoping to spend more time outside America!

The only thing that really threw me off was the time period this book took place in. I didn’t realize until about three-quarters of the way through that it takes place in the 90s, though I was confused about references to listening to cassettes. Once it mentioned the “new idea” of email, I placed the time frame. In some ways, though, it seemed to take place even earlier than that, because there was all this big deal about interracial couples. Nina’s friend starts to date a black boy from Grenada and they all worry what her parents will think. That seemed really peculiar to me, like it could have been set in the 70s or early 80s instead.

Despite my confusion, I thought this was a good YA book about growing up caught between two cultures.

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Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Thistle

penguinillustratedeyreOh Jane Eyre, how I love you!! Sigh. This is my second time through Jane Eyre (if I don’t count the graphic novel version and the several movie versions I brought home), and I love it just as much as the first time I read it three years ago. I’m not going to give a synopsis here, as I think most people already know about what happens in Jane Eyre, and if they don’t, it’s best to go in as blind as possible. I didn’t know a thing about the book on my first read and I loved discovering each new point. With that in mind, I also want to give a BIG SPOILER WARNING here – I’ll be discussing many aspects of this book, including spoilerific ones, so if you haven’t read Jane Eyre, you might want to stop reading this review here. Also, another warning – this will be a long post. I have lots to say about this book!

Kelly from The Written World and I decided to read this one at the same time and have a sort-of buddy review for it. We didn’t have time to have a full discussion – the book took longer for both of us to read than expected! – but we did exchange some questions to include with our reviews. One of the things she asked me was since this was a reread for me, what made it worthy of a reread? I guess there are several answers to that, and many are involved with how and why I came to read Jane Eyre in the first place, January 2008.

At that time, I was just starting to write one of my novels, and the main character, Nina, was highly romantic. I wanted to find a book in classic literature that she could carry around as a talisman and call “the greatest love story of all time.” I wanted something that fitted her nature and also the story, a dystopian world where people were governed by a matchmaking corporation. Classic literature is fairly devoid of happy endings. Great love stories end up tragedies like Romeo and Juliet or Anna Karenina, or they’re violent and scary like Wuthering Heights, or they’re dispassionate and calm like Dr. Zhivago or Jane Austen’s books. I started asking around about good classic love stories, and the only one mentioned to me that I hadn’t already read and rejected was Jane Eyre.

I’d just read Wuthering Heights less than a year before and hated it, and I expected the same from Jane Eyre. I learned my lesson, though – never judge an author by her sister! I adored the book, and not only that, but it fitted into my story perfectly, in more ways than I expected! I spent months weaving sections of Jane Eyre into my novel, by quotes and references. It became a major thematic element. I already loved the book when I read it, but that constantly continuation with it made me love it even more. I’ve been excited to reread it for awhile now. I was worried, after only making it through half of Villette and a quarter of Shirley, that I had changed and wouldn’t like Charlotte Bronte’s writing anymore, but I needn’t have worried because I adored the book even more this second time through. It read differently, because I knew what was coming beforehand, but I still loved it.

Why do I love it so much? There are so many reasons! First, I have to admit, I’m one of those people who adore Edward Rochester. There are many people who think he’s a selfish bastard, imprisoning his first mad wife and manipulating Jane the way he does. I’m sorry, but I can’t see him in a selfish bastard light at all. He is the most human character I’ve ever read. Ever. He feels more like a real person than any other fictional person I’ve ever come to know. He has flaws, and major ones, and yet I still love him. I’m so used to reading characters who are either so flawed that they’re unlovable (or at the least, unrelatable), or who are nearly perfect, whose flaws don’t really matter. But Rochester is different. Is he selfish? Yeah. Aren’t we all? Is it wrong of him to want something for himself when he’d been cheated out of so much in his life? I don’t think so. I think I’d be just as selfish. He’s also very jealous and insecure, but I don’t see him as the evil guy who keeps trying to hurt Jane. I see him as very playful, and she certainly holds her own when she banters with him. They are perfect foils to each other, which is why I think their relationship works so well.

I adore Jane, too. I love how strong and witty and passionate she is, and how she has managed to control her passions as an adult the way she was unable to as a child. Another thing Kelly asked me was what I thought of the religious aspect of the book, and despite not being religious myself, I really enjoyed them! I felt like they fit. I never once felt like the book was preachy, as if Bronte was trying to push off Christian dogma onto the reader. Awhile back I discussed the strange lack of religious characters in non-religious modern-day fiction, and Jane Eyre is the sort of book I was talking about. I don’t mind at all that Jane has her religious convictions that she upholds. It makes her Jane. People have viewed her as weak, but I think she’s the strongest person in this book, standing up for her morals in the face of every temptation. How many of us would have that strength, no matter if our moral convictions were religious or not? I think most of us would just give in to the temptation.

When my book club read Jane Eyre, only a few months after my initial read in 2008, one of our members talked a lot about how strong Jane was, and how Bronte used Jane’s strength and convictions to put forth a feminist novel. I’ve seen reviews where people have talked about this book being the opposite of feminist, and I disagree. I like the way that book club member presented it: Jane was poor but morally rich, whereas Rochester was the opposite. Had there been no Bertha in the attic and they’d been able to marry, they would never have been equal. As Jane feared before her almost-wedding, she would never have been able to hold him the way an equal would, even if he always loved her. He would always be superior to her in a worldly way. Instead, she clings to the strength of her morals and leaves him, and only comes back once two things happen. She gains family and an independence, and he is crippled and made dependent. They are more equal when they go to the church a second time, or perhaps Jane is elevated slightly above Rochester at that point.

But what about Bertha? How does Bertha fit into the idea of a feminist novel? All I can say to that is in the end, despite her imprisonment, she destroys her prison, maims her husband, and chooses her own end, much like Edna in The Awakening. I’d love to read a story about her, from her point of view (besides Wide Sargasso Sea, which I’ve read and liked, but where there are huge discrepancies in fact and personality from the original novel and so the two books are completely disconnected in my mind).

Bertha is another reason I don’t think Rochester is just a bastard (going back to that point…). Yes, he kept her locked up and hidden, and he didn’t tell people about her. That first point, I don’t fault him for. Locking up “mad” relatives – I use the quotes because it was often unclear if they were actually insane – was common practice. He could have done so many other things with her. He probably could have annulled his marriage in the beginning, leaving himself free but her culturally tainted. He didn’t. He could have locked her away in the house he had which wasn’t very healthy, in which case she probably would have died quickly and been off his hands. He didn’t. He could have sent her off to an institution, which would have treated her even worse. He didn’t. He could have slowly starved her, or in some other way harmed her. He didn’t. He could have left her to die in the fire. But he didn’t! He tried to rescue her. Even through his hatred, even through his bitterness at being tricked into marrying a woman who was already starting to go mad, even after losing Jane, he crippled and maimed himself in trying to rescue Bertha. Do I feel sorry for Bertha? Yeah. The poor woman needed help probably no doctor was qualified to give in that time period. But I don’t blame Rochester for hating her, or for keeping her locked up and under good care, which is more than an institution would have done for her. Was he wrong to keep her a secret? Selfish, perhaps, but as reputation was such an important part of life then, I’m not sure I could call it wrong. We all keep secrets, sometimes huge ones, even today. Are we wrong to have them?

The last question that Kelly had for me was how this book compared to other Gothic novels I’ve read. It’s an interesting question. Originally I meant to reread this last RIP season, but I ran out of time. When I reread now, I didn’t really feel the Gothic elements so strongly. Perhaps it’s because I knew what was coming already, but the mystery didn’t feel so mysterious and I was far more interested in the characters and their interactions. The part at Thornfield is balanced by Jane’s time on the moors with St John and her other cousins. While that section of the book is relatively short, it feels like half the book to me and is rather tedious, not at all Gothic in nature. I understand why it’s important to the book as a whole and I appreciate it being there, especially for the contrast between Rochester and St John (who I think is a complete bastard no matter how Christian he considers himself), or between love and companionship. Still, it takes away from that Gothic feel of the book and I’m glad I reread it now, rather than for RIP.

Okay so this is super-long already, so I think I’ll end with just a quick note on the version of Jane Eyre I chose for this reread. A couple years back, Jason gave me the Dame Darcy illustrated version of Jane Eyre. All throughout are lovely illustrations, some tiny, some full page, in the style shown on the cover. This replaced my old copy of Jane Eyre which was none too great, and I think the illustrations lend themselves perfectly to the story. It made the reread even more pleasant than it would have been otherwise!

Note: Originally read in January 2008. Reread (by audio) in October 2013. The audio (read by Wanda McCaddon) was good but not particularly noteworthy.

Posted in 2008, 2011, 2013, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert (audio)

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Thistle

Eat-Pray-Love-935178After a rough divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert set off on a year’s journey through Italy, India, and Indonesia. This book is her memoir of that year.

I’ve considered reading this book for years now, but never really had any motivation to do so. It seemed kind of new agey, not quite something I’d enjoy. But then I saw the preview for the movie and the scenery looked so pretty that I decided to try an audio version of the book. I figured, why not? All three of those countries, especially Indonesia, are ones I’m interested in.

There seems to be a fairly universal book blogger hatred towards Eat, Pray, Love, from what I can tell. For myself, the book wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t great, either, but it didn’t bother me as it seems to bother so many others. It was easy to listen to and I wasn’t offended by Gilbert’s journey or the way she went about trying to find herself. Her depression didn’t bother me, and I didn’t think she should just “stop whining” because she has so many wonderful things (something I’ve heard several people say, which bothers me because having dealt with depression myself, I know it doesn’t matter how many good things you have. Good things don’t fight depression). I didn’t mind that she got all semi-spiritual, because I didn’t see this book as a how-to guide for my own journey. I saw it as one woman’s personal journey, and I figure hey, she’s allowed to experience these things however she wishes to experience them.

So having got that out of the way, I’ll tell you what did bother me about this book – it was far too easy to see the hand of the writer in it. Of course, in a memoir, the narrator and the writer are obviously the same person, but the narrative voice and the writer’s hand are two different things. The narrator simply tells her story. The writer makes that story presentable to an audience, and in this case, the writer tried way too hard. It was all these little things. For instance, if Gilbert made a big deal about a word or phrase, you could bet everything you owned that somewhere, full circle, we would come back to that word or phrase and the coming back to it was meant to be “poignant.” That was very cheesy. There were lots of little tricks in there that were eye-rollingly groan-worthy.

But! Beyond those little tricks, I actually enjoyed listening to Gilbert’s story. She didn’t take the same path I would have taken, but I felt like she was sincere in the way she traveled. That sincerity is, to me, the most important thing in a memoir, and so I appreciated it and respected Gilbert for that. I didn’t always agree with her (Venice is NOT sombre!), but I could respect her opinion. I did think some of her ideas were a little silly, but she didn’t try to force them on me, so I could just agree to disagree with her.

Oddly, the whole time I was listening, I kept thinking how much better this book would have worked as fiction rather than memoir. Of course I know that it’s nonfiction and shouldn’t be treated like fiction, but I couldn’t help thinking how much better it would have flowed with less random interlude stories and more story arc. Ironically, though, the movie version was far more fictional, and I didn’t like it at all! They changed a lot and added a bunch of pointless conflict to increase melodrama and make it more cinematic. It was pretty, but the story was awful. Jason and I both watched it and both hated it. Funny, considering that a preview for the movie is what got me to read the book in the first place…

Performance: This audiobook was read by the author. It was, as per usual, read way too slowly, so it was perfect double-speed material. I liked the reading mostly, but was bothered when Gilbert would imitate the accents of the people she met. I tend to cringe when I hear people imitate accents in general, though, so maybe that’s just a pet peeve of mine.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Troll: A Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Thistle

trollMikael (aka Angel) has just broken up with his boyfriend to date a new guy, but the new guy, conflicted about his sexuality, rejects him the night they go out. Mikael returns home, drunk and dejected, to find a baby troll outside his apartment building. He takes the troll in and begins to care for it as if it was a pet, and an unusual relationship develops between them.

This was one of the most bizarre stories I’ve read in a very, very long time. It takes place in a world nearly identical to ours, with the big exception that trolls actually do exist. They are wild animals, but very intelligent as well, and much like the legends you hear of our elusive fairy creatures such as Bigfoot or the Chupacabra, humans rarely get a glimpse of them. But accepting the fact that in this world, there are trolls, the rest of the story is also really, really bizarre.

There are many elements to it. There is Mikael’s downstairs neighbor, a mail-order Filipino bride with an abusive husband. There’s Mikael’s odd relationships with three different men. And then there’s Mikael’s relationship with the troll itself, who is eventually named Pessi. The relationship starts as something almost parent-child in nature, but grows into something more…bestial…after a time. The whole book is punctuated every few chapters with excerpts from books (both real and fictional, I believe, though I can’t be sure) all about trolls.

I can’t say I particularly enjoyed this book. The concept was interesting and I was hooked right away. Then the book got a little too weird for me, and yet, I just had to keep reading. I was fascinated and sort of scornful all at the same time. Near the climax, it took a really interesting turn, but then fell apart at the end again. I don’t know. It was definitely a very different experience and I don’t regret reading it, but I’m not sure I fully understood the point. I read a couple reviews that said the trolls represented the more animal, instinctual part of a human being, and I guess I can see that, but I didn’t feel like all the disparate elements came together into a cohesive whole enough for me to get anything out of the book. Maybe some of it was lost in translation. I don’t know. In the end, I think it just wasn’t for me.

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Passing, by Nella Larsen

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Thistle

passing-nella-larsen-paperback-cover-artOne day as Irene is visiting Chicago from New York, she meets up with an old friend of hers from childhood, Clare. Both women are African American, but pale-skinned enough that they can “pass” as white. Irene has chosen not to “pass,” but Clare has slipped into white society to the extent of marrying an extremely racist white man. This book deals both with the nature of Irene’s relationship with Clare and that of her relationship with her husband in New York as well.

I really enjoyed the first half of this novella. Before I read Karen’s review of this book, I’d never heard of “passing” at all. I’ve known African Americans who were very pale-skinned, but I never thought about that being an active tool for changing one’s life back in the age that this book takes place. It was interesting, because it showed three different women, all pale enough to “pass,” and the ways that they lived. Clare lived a very dangerous and precarious life with a racist husband. Gertrude, another childhood friend, had married a man she’d grown up with, so he knew about her race even though she “passed” for white in society. Irene never “passed,” though she used her coloring to defy rules of restaurants, hotels, etc who would keep her out because of her race. The juxtaposition of these three different women, especially when they all meet Clare’s husband together, was fascinating.

The second half of the novel dealt more with Irene’s troubled relationship with her husband. I felt like this part of the story detracted from the central narrative set up in the beginning. Actually, I felt like I’d stepped out of one story and was now in a completely different one. The two came back together, in ways that were chilling, but I did feel like much of the second half of the story meandered too far away from the center. If more had been written about Irene’s homelife before meeting Clare, or the two plots had been interwoven more, I think it would have worked better. There was just a certain amount of disjointedness in the flow, and I felt the end message was far different from what the beginning of the book said it would be.

I wanted to read more about “passing” and the consequences of living a life that denies who you really are. It was interesting to hear about Clare’s aching to go back to her home and her roots. It’s the same way I imagine a refugee or someone in exile must feel, unable to safely go home again. That was the part that interested me. I wish that had stayed the central focus of the novella. It didn’t, and what became the center was okay, but not what I was looking for.

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Mondays in the Middle East, by David Cross

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Thistle

Mondays-in-the-Middle-East-9781600346538Mondays in the Middle East is a collection of emails. David Cross and his family lived in the Middle East for many years, where he studied the culture. Every week on Monday he would send an email home to friends/family as a way of giving updates on what was going on in his world. These emails usually contained cultural stories, similarities or differences, often with a bit of humor to them. The emails in this collection talk about things that happened in Oman, Bahrain, and Egypt, though primarily the first two.

I’ve mentioned in the past that my sister has spent years in the Middle East, first in Yemen and now for the last three years in Palestine. She comes back to the US for a few months every year, and the stories she relates about her experiences there are very similar to the way the emails in this book were written. Jason asked me, when he found out what this book was about, if these usually-funny anecdotes were written in a way that treated the people in the Middle East as “silly little foreigners.” So many Americans, I’m sad to say, often treat other cultures this way, but I’m glad to say that these stories were not at all like that. They were far more like the ones my sister tells, with full respect for the culture, and often poking fun at the respective narrator for bumbling around trying to figure out what he/she is supposed to be doing. I never felt like David Cross thought of the cultures he was living in as inferior or silly or wrong. They were different than his Midwest-Wisconsin culture in some ways, similar in others. He was able to compare and contrast without any sort of judgement, which was lovely.

There isn’t too much else I can say about the collection. I laughed quite a lot, I learned about Bahrain and Oman (and definitely want to travel to both now!), and there were several stories Cross told that made me get all sentimental and almost weepy. I’ve not spent much time in the Middle East myself, just ten days in Palestine when my sister got married, but I recognized a lot of cultural things, particularly the friendliness and generosity of many of the people in that region. My favorite story was when Cross recounted the efforts an Egyptian salesman took to make him feel welcome and happy. This man spent hours of his time and a (comparative) good amount of his money in just being friendly. That friendliness is something I loved about that short time I spent in the Middle East and what I think very few Americans see when they hear news stories about that part of the world. In a time when “Arab” and “Muslim” has become synonymous with “terrorist” in the minds of so many in our country, it’s books like this one that really show that those things aren’t really one at the same. Cross really shows just how beautiful and wonderful a culture different from ours can be.

I should mention one other thing about the collection – the only thing that bothered me in it. Each email ended with the phrase, “that’s just another Monday in the Middle East.” Because these were sent as a series of emails once a week for many years, this was probably just fine for reading on the original schedule. However, sitting down to read twenty emails in a row one afternoon, the phrase becomes irritating very quickly. To make sure it didn’t influence my feelings on the collection as a whole, I just trained myself not to read the last sentence of each email, which worked pretty well for me.

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Mrs. Craddock, by William Somerset Maugham

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Thistle

mrs craddockWhen Bertha Ley falls in love with a farmer on her family’s land, Edward Craddock, she flies against convention to marry beneath her. Her love is passionate, violent, and irrational, while Edward’s love for her is calm, sensible, and steady. Due to this inequality, Bertha is often more miserable than happy as the years pass.

This is a book about an unequal marriage, about the contrast between expectations and reality, and about disillusionment. It’s an adult coming-of-age story of sorts. Bertha’s violent romantic sentiment doesn’t go well with Edward’s equanimity. His only passion is for his Country and his Duty, and everything else he takes with complete calm. Bertha’s aunt, Miss Ley, makes a very telling statement on the inequality of their marriage:

…for Bertha…the book of life is written throughout in italics; for Edward it is all in the big round hand of the copy-book heading. Don’t you think it will make the reading of the book somewhat difficult?

Bertha is slowly brought to misery by her unequal marriage, slowly brought to see the truth – that her husband isn’t who she imagined him to be. She, like so many people, put her own expectations onto him, blinded herself to the truth because she was in love. What did she care for his faults? Faults made him all the more beautiful…until they inconvenience her. She accuses Edward of selfishness all throughout the book, but in truth, she is just as selfish. All the characters are.

You see the same sort of relationship echoed in multiple ways in this book. One half of the relationship wants to be loved, the other half is fairly indifferent and takes advantage of that love. For example, Bertha unconsciously plays the same role with her friend Fanny Glover as Edward plays to her. Her friendship with Fanny is not romantic, but Fanny is a lonely woman who wants nothing more than to have a real friend, and Bertha wouldn’t even notice if she disappeared, and treats her that way. Sometimes she goes right from chastising Edward for neglecting her to neglecting Fanny in the same afternoon. It really shows just how blind Bertha is.

I first read this book ten years ago, the first week of 2001. I really connected with Bertha, all the parts of her. I knew what it felt like to be overly sentimental, to be in love with love, to feel aggrieved when my emotions were treated like they were nothing more than silliness or due to fatigue. I knew what it felt like to go from one extreme of love to the other extreme of hatred in a moment of severe disillusionment, a circle of intense emotions skipping from one end to the other so much more easily than growing indifferent. I felt everything that she felt, even as I knew she was acting like a fool. Now, a decade later, I still feel for her. I still love Bertha despite her blindness and foolishness. I know what it feels like to be that young in mind, and then to grow up too fast and feel far above your age. Maugham captured that personality and those emotions perfectly.

This is still one of my favorite books by Maugham. There is so much in here that I’m having trouble parsing out what I want to talk about. I could probably go on for quite a lot longer than this, but I shouldn’t. I could talk about Maugham’s ripping apart the sort of politician Edward Craddock becomes, or about Miss Ley’s standoffish cynicism, or how the false idol Bertha holds in Edward’s place in her mind gets stripped away, or Bertha’s almost-affair with a boy nearly ten years younger than her, or more. There is so much in this little book! But I’ll stop now. I’ve said enough. I hope more people will read this book, because it’s really wonderful!

Note: Originally read in January 2001.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Stories, by Vladimir Nabokov

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Thistle

the_stories_of_vladimir_nabokov.largeNearly 70 short stories fill this volume, which is supposed to be all of Nabokov’s known short stories. I read most of these over the last few weeks of December, leaving only a handful to finish up in 2011.

I’ve read a lot of Nabokov over the years, and while I have the utmost respect for everything the guy writes, I find myself pretty divided on what I enjoy and don’t enjoy. I’m particularly fond of his earlier works, and less fond of the latter, mostly because I believe his more recent novels tend to sacrifice story for style. Nabokov is a stylistic genius, but I do think at times he lets that go to his head and goes a little overboard on style. I don’t remember where I found it, but I read an article once where he was quoted as saying the story was less important to him than the way the words fit together, and that makes perfect sense with what I’ve read by him. My favorites of his are when words and plot and character all come together to balance each other out.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find a lot of that in these short stories. In story after story, the language was beautiful, poetic, and sometimes so thick that I had a hard time finding my way through it. But at the same time, I felt Nabokov often just didn’t have time to put together enough plot and character to make all that beautiful language feel worthwhile to me. To others, perhaps, but not to me, because all three of those elements are important to me, and I don’t feel like he reaches his full potential in most of this volume. Maybe I’m just ignorant and maybe most of the stories just went over my head. I’ll be the first to admit that Nabokov is a million times more intelligent than I am! But at the same time, I couldn’t help it: I was bored. A lot.

The nice thing, though, was that slogging through almost 70 stories that I didn’t really enjoy, I would occasionally come across one that appealed to me, and they seemed brighter for the dullness around them. There were four in particular that I really, really enjoyed and I’m going to touch on each of them briefly instead of spending any more time discussing the collection as a whole. These are in the order they appear in the collection, not in preference order.

The Thunderstorm: This had to be the most beautifully written story in the entire collection. Perhaps it helps that I love thunderstorms and Nabokov really captured the feel of all that static in the air, the anticipation, the way your heart starts shivering as the storm rolls in. My favorite line in the collection came from this story: I was intoxicated by those bluish tremors, by the keen, volatile chill. I went up to the wet window ledge and inhaled the unearthly air, which made my heart ring like glass.

The Return of Chorb: An interesting little story about a man whose wife dies on their honeymoon, and how he can’t bring himself to tell her parents what happened. The muted grief, drowning in a state of semi-denial, was so well done here, and the ending chilled me. This was the best story for mood and tone.

Lips to Lips: This was probably my favorite of all the stories. It’s about a writer trying to get published, who gets buoyed up only to be disillusioned in a brutal way. It opens with a section of the man’s writing, with correction marks and everything, and my heart twisted for him as he went on what is obviously, to the reader, a naive and dangerous path. He was my favorite character and the one I connected with most in the collection.

The Word: It could be a dream, a vision, or a hallucination, but however you interpret it, the imagery was the most beautiful of all the stories I read.

I wish there had been more here that I loved, but I’m content with four.

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