La Bête Humaine, by Émile Zola

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Thistle

beteWhen Roubaud discovers his wife, Séverine, was sexually molested in adolescence by her guardian, Grandmorin, he flies into a rage at both of them, beating his wife nearly to death (he’s a real catch, isn’t he?) before forcing her to accompany him as he kills Grandmorin. Meanwhile, an engineer named Jacques has struggled his whole life with an impulse towards murder that he tries to deny. Jacques witnesses the murder of Grandmorin, which excites him and brings a new thought into his head – perhaps he, too, can murder, rather than denying this urge he’s suppressed his whole life.

That synopsis doesn’t give away any spoilers. All that happens in the first two chapters, and the rest of the book is the unraveling of the three stories: Roubaud’s, Séverine’s, and Jacques’. Zola uses this book to explore the idea that man can inherit bloodlust, and he uses both the train system and the French judicial system as vehicles for this exploration.

Unfortunately, this book didn’t work for me, but I think that’s more my fault than the book’s. Initially I was very excited going into it. It is my friend Veronica’s favorite Zola and my copy is translated by Leonard Tancock, who is my favorite Zola translator. I made the mistake of reading the back of the book before I began, though. It doesn’t talk about the plot at all, but instead about the themes in the book, and the idea of reading a whole book from the mindset of a psychopath really turned me off. I know Zola can be extremely graphic (thinking of some of those scenes in Germinal…) and I was worried that I might not be able to handle the violence in here on top of being unable to handle the psychopathic mentality. I went into the book keeping myself extremely aloof, distancing myself from the text, characters, events, etc.

Have you ever watched a scene from a TV show or movie while covering your eyes? So that you’re only peeking out between your fingers and getting partial glimpses of what’s going on? That’s how I read this book. I closed myself off to it, swallowing it in gulps without really tasting it. As it turns out, I was wrong about a lot of what was in this book, and sitting with Jacques and his impulse to murder was not as off-putting as I expected it to be. He didn’t want to have this impulse. He tried to control it and get away from it, and to me, that made him more human and tolerable. There was violence in this book, oh yes, quite a lot of it, but it was tactful and never turned my stomach the way I expected it. But the damage was done from the beginning – I never let the book hook me. I never let myself go, and the book passed me by peripherally.

From the outside, the book seemed a little silly and ridiculous. There was so much murder going on! Everyone was killing each other, for all sorts of reasons! Corruption everywhere! Plus there was the fact that Zola sewed two of his ideas together to make this book, which made it feel odd, as if I was switching novels every few pages. He wanted to explore this hereditary bloodlust, but he also wanted to write about trains. Zola was the sort of person who focused on a particular part of society in each of his books. Germinal was about coal mining. Nana was about the prostitution and theatre scene in Paris. He’s written books focusing on food, on painting, on alcoholism, on farming, etc. But La Bête Humaine was about two different things, and it didn’t work very well for me. I’d be reading about Jacques and what he was going through, only to switch to a five-page long detailed work about a train’s engine. It was jarring.

Despite not liking this novel as much as other Zola novels I’ve read, I can see that I probably would have liked it had I not held myself back from it. I plan to read it again some day, this time more slowly and paying more attention to the language. I hope to get more out of it on second read.

In the meantime, I have actually decided I don’t want to read any more of the Rougon-Macquart series until I can read them in order. There are twenty books in the series, and I began to see how interrelated they are in this book. Jacques, for instance, is the brother of Étienne from Germinal, Nana from Nana, and Claude from The Masterpiece, though Zola admittedly made Jacques up solely for this book. (Originally it was meant to be Étienne as the character having bloodlust problems, but that didn’t end up working out after the path Étienne takes at the end of Germinal.) Now that I’m starting to see how all the family comes together, I really want to read from the beginning. Fortunately, all the books have been translated into English, but unfortunately, seven of the twenty have very old and sometimes censored translations. Sigh. Still, they’re better than nothing, and I plan on starting a Rougon-Macquart project in the next few months where I’ll try to read one book a month or so!

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Lilacs and Other Stories, by Kate Chopin

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Thistle

lilacsThis is the second collection I’ve read in my informal short story project this year. For 24 days, I read one story every morning to complete this collection. Originally, I thought this collection contained all of Chopin’s short stories, but apparently not. Instead it contains selections from two published volumes – Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie – and three uncollected stories.

As far as short story collections go, this one wasn’t bad. None of the stories had the brilliance of The Awakening, sadly, but most of them were interesting in some way. There were some skim-necessary sorts of stories, too. They all took place either in New Orleans or in rural Louisiana. She wrote them much like Zora Neale Hurston writes in the oral tradition, with a dialect that is more spoken-word than dialect (I hope that makes sense!). Sometimes that made the stories hard to read, because I didn’t think her writing was as clear as Hurston’s, but other times I could fall into the rhythm and understand better. Not all characters spoke in dialect – it was generally used to denote race, upbringing, and poverty level.

There were enough stories in here that I liked that I don’t think I can highlight a handful the way I did with Nabokov’s stories. Looking over the titles, though, I think I most enjoyed the selections from Bayou Folk. The ones that worked least for me were the uncollected stories, which includes Lilacs, the title story of the collection, and which I ended up mostly skimming because it bored me. Ah well. But in any case, since I’m not a huge fan of short story collections in general, a solid, middle-of-the-road collection is a good thing for me! Plus it put me in the mood to read more Hurston, so I’m working on her collection next!

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The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde (audio)

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Thistle

fourth bearThe Fourth Bear is the second title in the Nursery Crime series by Jasper Fforde, following The Big Over Easy. Jack Spratt and Mary Mary of the Nursery Crime Division of Reading’s police department are back for another mystery, this time involving Goldilocks (a journalist), a handful of bears, a psychopathic murderous gingerbread man, and exploding cucumbers.

Once again, I have to say that I adore Jasper Fforde. I can’t read his books too often or too close together, but if I spread them out every 6-9 months or so, they’re such a delight! I think I liked The Fourth Bear better than The Big Over Easy. It had me laughing from the moment used car salesman Dorian Gray sold Jack Spratt a pristine car with the “Dorian Guarantee,” complete with painting in the trunk, and I pretty much never stopped the whole way through.

There are two reasons that these books delight me so much. The first is that while they are mysteries, they’re not ones you’re meant to figure out ahead of time. With Fforde, you can just sit back and enjoy the ride. You know it’ll all be cleared up and explained in the end, every lose end tied up and interconnected in some way, and in the meantime, you just have fun watching it all come together. It makes for a very relaxing reading experience. The second is that Fforde is one of those authors that seems to have so much fun with his writing. It’s almost as if I can hear him laughing as he finds ways to weave together all these pieces in a way that is so clever and fun. It’s not just that he’s a master craftsman – which he is – but that he seems to truly enjoy what he’s doing.

And of course, as I’ve said before, there is a deeper side to these books under all the humor. Stuff touched on in The Fourth Bear: the power of corporations, discrimination against a specific group, prohibition, the importance of honesty, corrupt government officials, post traumatic stress disorder (particularly due to war), immigration, and unregulated scientific testing. None of it is in-your-face, but all there lightly to look at if you want to read past the wit and fun. Just another reason why these books are awesome.

Performance: I listened to the audio read by Simon Vance, who did an excellent job! He reminded me a lot of Martin Jarvis as a narrator and I’d be happy to listen to more audiobooks narrated by him. I was particularly impressed with his ability to read out the binary sections. 😀

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If You Follow Me, by Malena Watrous

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Thistle

if you follow meMarina and Carolyn, both twenty-two and just out of college, decide to teach English in Japan for a year. Marina is, in a way, running away from her father’s suicide the previous year, and Carolyn simply doesn’t know what to do with her life yet, and this year off delays thinking about the future. On these very rocky grounds, they get placed together in a rural part of Japan’s snow country, where they encounter vast amounts of culture shock.

I really enjoyed this book! Watrous did a fantastic job of making me feel like I, too, was an outsider visiting Japan and bumbling about while trying to figure out the rules and regulations that made up this new-to-me world. It felt very claustrophobic, with way too many laws to try to memorize, being unable to speak to most people, and even when you can, it’s limited and choppy. It reminded me of my time in France, except that there was a lot less for me to learn there!

What really made this book special for me, though, what raised it above a traditional culture-clash sort of novel, was the relationship between Marina and Carolyn and how it was handled. Both women, if you wanted to label them, could technically be called bisexual, but the label seems so boxed-in and doesn’t really fit either of them. Marina has always dated men before in her life, but she becomes attracted to Carolyn when they meet in grief counseling. Carolyn has mostly dated women, but has been with men from time to time, and has a lot of issues with commitment. She doesn’t want the two of them to share an apartment when they move to Japan, feeling like it will put too much pressure on their fairly new relationship, and she wants an open relationship so that she’s free to let her desire out on anyone. Marina is used to a more traditional way of thinking about relationships, so she tries to do everything she can to keep Carolyn to herself, including tricking her into sharing the apartment with her.

The fact that these two women are in a relationship is not the central focus of the book, which is what really interested me. Yes, they’re together, but this isn’t a book about a lesbian relationship. It’s about a woman dealing with grief, and two women trying to hold themselves together as they suffer through massive change in their lives. Their relationship is obviously doomed from the beginning, for many reasons: their age, the very short time they’d been together before being thrown into this stressful situation, the conflict of their personalities, the shared apartment, each of their personal issues. Like any other couple, same-sex or not, they grow apart, have communication issues, and eventually fragment. Carolyn says at one point that most relationships die, and this is one of them. I like that it wasn’t the main focus, that Marina and Carolyn and their relationship with each other was treated as a normal, human thing, and not like something we have to stare at and pick apart because of it’s GLBT-ness. It’s the sort of GLBT book I’ve been seeking out lately – one that involves GLBT characters but not necessarily GLBT themes. One that states the obvious: people in same-sex relationships lead normal lives that don’t revolve around their sexuality, just like people in straight relationships.

The book instead focuses primarily on Marina’s inability to cope with her father’s death, and all the mistakes she makes as she’s trying to integrate herself into rural Japanese society. It explores the lives of many of the people she meets, from the mother with an autistic son, to the Korean girl who cares so much about a sick rabbit, to the teenage girl forced to have an abortion because sex education isn’t taught in schools and she doesn’t know how to prevent pregnancy. There is so much in here and Watrous weaves it together so well!

I’m really glad I decided to read this one, particularly because I was unsure of it before I picked it up. Amy said in her review that she wasn’t sure if the book was GLBT-friendly, particularly because Marina says something near the end that can be interpreted as saying she only dated Carolyn out of grief. I didn’t interpret it that way, though. Coming from the point of view of someone who is bisexual, I thought Marina’s attraction to Carolyn was genuine. Will she probably prefer to be with men for most of her relationships? Probably, yes. She always had before, just like Carolyn will probably mostly be with women, rarely dating men, though she will sometimes. But I see sexuality as existing on a more fluid scale than just straight, gay, and half-and-half bisexual. There is so much more to it than that, and I thought this book really brought many of those elements to life. It felt more real to me, therefore, than most books about GLBT characters, and I really appreciated and loved it for that.

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A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Thistle

COVERFULL_raisininThe Younger family lives in a tiny, cockroach-infested apartment with a shared bathroom in the hall. They split two rooms between the five of them: Mama, her two children Walter and Beneatha, Walter’s wife Ruth, and Walter and Ruth’s son, Travis. With the exception of Beneatha and Travis, they all work long, hard menial jobs just to get by, while the other two are going to school. All of them have based their dreams on an insurance check for $10,000 coming to Mama for the death of her husband.

This was such a fantastic play! It’s set in southside Chicago sometime between WWII and the 50s. The black community was suffering under massive amounts of injustice, many of which I recognized from reading Native Son last year. For instance, the rent and mortgage rates on houses in the black districts were much higher than white districts even though the housing was much worse, just because white owners could get away with charging ridiculously high prices when the black people had no where else they were allowed to live. They also were forced into the worst kinds of jobs, the jobs no one else wanted to do, and paid almost nothing for it. This kept them in terrible poverty, the sort that smothers dreams and kills the spirit.

That’s what’s happening to Walter, who dreams of becoming one of the rare rich black people, an important and wealthy business owner. He always has these schemes he wants to try out, but none of his family will support him on them. Of course, they’re right not to support him, because Walter is the sort of person who doesn’t see truth very clearly. He gets himself into trouble by being too naive and trusting. The women in the family see things more realistically, and this causes a rift in the family. Ruth and Mama dream of having a house, and of helping the younger generation get an education so that they can work better jobs for higher pay, but Walter wants to win the business lottery, so to speak, with schemes and get-rich-quick scams that he sadly doesn’t realize are scams. As for the two younger characters, Travis is oblivious to everything except that he wants money whenever he asks for it, and Beneatha is stuck in that late-YA/early-adulthood stage where she’s unsure of her identity and experiments with everything from atheism to ancestral heritage. Travis is too young for dreams. Beneatha wants to become a doctor, following Mama and Ruth’s plan of education to lead toward a better life, but also refuses to marry for money – an opportunity she has and which everyone encourages her to take.

This play really shows the disillusionment of all characters, and the way life never works out the way you want, even when you suddenly possess the money that should make it behave. Mama has her check coming, the wonderful $10,000 check that is all that’s left from her husband’s death insurance. That check gives them enough to get a house and to pay for Beneatha’s education, but everyone wants the money for their own purposes, and again, the family is divided, splintering off in too many directions. All these cracks tear into their fragile equilibrium, until a couple mistakes, some dishonesty, and circumstances outside everyone’s control come in to claw every member of the family down from their momentary high, until they must pick themselves up again however they can.

It was a very powerful play. There’s so much more I could talk about, but I don’t want to give away spoilers. In fact, Allie from A Literary Odyssey and I decided to read this one and post reviews on the same day after discussing the play with each other, and I think nearly everything we talked about would include spoilers. I can’t really even discuss all the stuff we talked about! In any case, I do recommend the play, and it’s both very short and easy to read. It’s really worth it.

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West With the Night, by Beryl Markham (audio)

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Thistle

berylBeryl Markham grew up in Kenya. In her adulthood, she first worked with race horses and later became a pilot. At one point, she crossed the Atlantic from Europe to North America solo, one of the first people to do so. This is her memoir.

I was sort of middle-of-the-road on this book. Back in 2008, I read two other memoirs from that part of Africa. The first was Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), who was actually a friend of Beryl Markham’s and referred to her in Out of Africa as a horse-riding tomboy named Felicity. I adored Out of Africa despite it being a very slow book, and I felt like I learned a lot from it. The second is a more recent book, written for a middle-grade audience: Facing the Lion by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton. It was a little too young for me but I still remember certain scenes from it. Unfortunately, coming to West With the Night third, a lot of what Beryl Markham talks about with regards to Africa and Kenya felt repetitious to me. It wasn’t repetitious within itself, so I’m sure a reader who hadn’t already read several memoirs from that region wouldn’t have this impression, but that made it less interesting for me than it should have been. I still enjoyed it more than Facing the Lion, but no where near as much as Out of Africa.

My favorite part of this memoir was Part 1, where she talks a lot about flying and the conditions involved in very early flying over much uncharted territory. That was all new to me, so there was none of that repetitious feel. Once it get into Part 2 and beyond, where it talked about her childhood and about Africa in general, my interest started to fade. Eventually it came back to flight, and my interest was caught again. The only bad thing about that part of the book was all the talk about hunting elephants for their tusks. Sob! I adore elephants and was a little put out by statements like it’s okay to hunt elephants because they’re smart enough to evade humans, and that makes the two sides “equal.” Yeah? Does that elephant have an airplane to hunt you and a gun to shoot at you? Are they ripping off parts of your body and leaving you to die? I have issues with sport hunting in general, and elephant hunting in particular really disturbs me. I was glad when Markham returned to England to work on her cross-Atlantic flight and left the poor elephants alone!

I feel like all I’m doing is complaining about this book and I really don’t mean to sound like that. I did enjoy it and I don’t regret reading it. It was much faster and easier to read than Out of Africa, but far more informative for adults than a middle-grade book like Facing the Lion, so I think it’s a good alternative if you can’t make it through Out of Africa. You of course have to keep in mind the time period. Markham definitely has a “white man’s burden” mentality, where she respects the Africans and Indians she’s grown up with, but views them much the same way as people view children. She thinks of them fondly as naive almost-people, which was very common in the British at the time. For a modern reader, I know this can be grating, but I always try to read things in the context of when they were written. She isn’t disdainful and she clearly loves Africa and the people in it, even if she thinks of them as childlike and/or more primitive. I just wanted to throw this out in case it’s an attitude that you can’t get past, even in context of its time period.

Performance: I listened to the audio version of this, read by Anna Fields, and she was a wonderful narrator. She read a lot like Kate Reading (who read The Host) and I think her narration made this book more enjoyable to me than it would have been in print.

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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