Happy Halloween!
I'm definitely feeling more chipper than I was at the end of last month. As usual I'm not going to delve too deeply into the whys and wherefores of my mood. Since I usually talk about the weather, I'll mention that October has been a very dreary month, although the snow that fell at the beginning of the month is mostly melted now. However, I've been making progress on the house projects (I have baseboards in my living room now!) and getting lots of reading done. And here's a list of other stuff.
Listening
I listened to the entirety of the PNWS podcast TANIS and am now getting ready to start the second season of their podcast called The Black Tapes. Both of these are really interesting serialized radio docudramas. I don't know a huge amount about the history of radio storytelling so I'm just making things up when I say we're seeing a renaissance of radio right now, but these are worth a little of your time.
I've also started listening to some French podcasts in an effort to practise my French language skills. I'll see if any of them stick before making recommendations.
Watching
My mom and I watched season 1 of Happy Valley. It was great but a little too real at times. Also my mom couldn't understand what anyone was saying, so we'll have to watch an American show next.
On my own, I've watched (while crocheting a scarf) American Ultra (fun but I wish I hadn't seen a few of the spoilers for this), more Star Trek TNG, Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23 (so good aside from some weird continuity stuff; basically the role that James Van Der Beek was born to play), and a few episodes of Friends one night while I was finishing a few rounds.
Voting
My city has a new mayor! And a majority female city council!!
Updating
I dunno guys, I updated the site layout/template/etc/whatever. There's actually a mobile version now, but I'm very uncertain about all of this. If you have any opinions about it, please let me know.
R44. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Year Published: 1980
Pages: 219
First Sentence: My name is Ruth.
Review:
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is a truly rare type of book that I can happily acknowledge as being beautiful and meaningful and absolutely not for me, without feeling bitter about it. I think that had a lot to do with the book's length or lack thereof, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Housekeeping is about a young woman named Ruth. She begins her story by explaining how her grandfather (most likely) perished in a train accident, and then reveals how she came to live with her sister and a succession of women in the house he built. Their mother drops them off on the front porch and kills herself, then their grandmother dies, their great-aunts give up, and their aunt Sylvie arrives to finish things off, which sounds ominous and is. These women are successively less fit to take care of Ruth and her younger sister Lucille. It's partly a story about the differences between sisters, but also just about the spaces between people and how they deal with those spaces.
At this point in my reviewing career, I think it's obvious that I favour straightforward language above all things. Robinson's writing is poetic in the extreme, but her execution of this is so good that I didn't roll my eyes at a single forced metaphor because there weren't any forced metaphors. She also brings the environment around Ruth's house to life so effectively that I could practically feel the cold and smell the water of the lake. I'd read a travelogue by this woman for sure, and I'd probably even read another one of her novels, just to experience her dexterity with words again.
On the other hand, the amount of dysfunction on display in the family that the book is about was deeply frustrating due to being unexplored, and I didn't find the book especially touching or affecting outside of a few passages. Lucille with her anger and her action is the most relatable character, although I'll admit Sylvie is portrayed believably, too. But I don't feel as if I ever had a handle on Ruth as a character beyond a pair of eyes watching the action, and that's a major problem with a first person narrator. There's probably some information to be teased out about how the life she's lived has made her that way, but with so little going on in the narrative, and so little to interest me in Ruth, I didn't really feel like thinking very carefully about it.
As always, if you want a book about sisters, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the beginning, middle, and end of my recommendations. Honourable mentions to The Old Wives' Tale and Little Women.
Pages: 219
First Sentence: My name is Ruth.
Review:
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is a truly rare type of book that I can happily acknowledge as being beautiful and meaningful and absolutely not for me, without feeling bitter about it. I think that had a lot to do with the book's length or lack thereof, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Housekeeping is about a young woman named Ruth. She begins her story by explaining how her grandfather (most likely) perished in a train accident, and then reveals how she came to live with her sister and a succession of women in the house he built. Their mother drops them off on the front porch and kills herself, then their grandmother dies, their great-aunts give up, and their aunt Sylvie arrives to finish things off, which sounds ominous and is. These women are successively less fit to take care of Ruth and her younger sister Lucille. It's partly a story about the differences between sisters, but also just about the spaces between people and how they deal with those spaces.
At this point in my reviewing career, I think it's obvious that I favour straightforward language above all things. Robinson's writing is poetic in the extreme, but her execution of this is so good that I didn't roll my eyes at a single forced metaphor because there weren't any forced metaphors. She also brings the environment around Ruth's house to life so effectively that I could practically feel the cold and smell the water of the lake. I'd read a travelogue by this woman for sure, and I'd probably even read another one of her novels, just to experience her dexterity with words again.
On the other hand, the amount of dysfunction on display in the family that the book is about was deeply frustrating due to being unexplored, and I didn't find the book especially touching or affecting outside of a few passages. Lucille with her anger and her action is the most relatable character, although I'll admit Sylvie is portrayed believably, too. But I don't feel as if I ever had a handle on Ruth as a character beyond a pair of eyes watching the action, and that's a major problem with a first person narrator. There's probably some information to be teased out about how the life she's lived has made her that way, but with so little going on in the narrative, and so little to interest me in Ruth, I didn't really feel like thinking very carefully about it.
As always, if you want a book about sisters, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the beginning, middle, and end of my recommendations. Honourable mentions to The Old Wives' Tale and Little Women.
- - - - -
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
- - - - -
57. Parade's End: No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford
Year Published: 1925
Pages: 288
First Sentence: When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)
Review:
Ugh.
I finished reading No More Parades the day before writing this review, and gave it a 2/3 purely because I planned to push ahead into A Man Could Stand Up—, and didn't think I'd be justified in doing so if I gave it a 1/3 rating. In the extremely unlikely event that someone picked up No More Parades without having read Some Do Not... first, though, it would deserve to go straight into the garbage, because it doesn't exist independently of the first novel at all.
No More Parades at least takes us to the front of the First World War, sort of. Our hero from the first novel, Christopher Tietjens, is stationed near some town because his health is bad. He's a captain, in charge of "the draft." Relying entirely on context clues from the novel, because I'm not sure it really provides much in the way of information that a person could use for actual research, I believe that Tietjens' job in this book is to get soldiers coming over from England sent down to their positions on the front lines. Have all of these soldiers been drafted? That I don't know. One of the things I liked best about the novel, though, was the number of Canadians who appear throughout. Here at home we have our perceptions of Canadians at war, and it was interesting to read about them, even briefly, from a British perspective. (I haven't done a comprehensive survey yet, but I don't think a single novel by a Canadian author made it onto The List*, so I have to take my Canadians where I can get them.) I'll note that I also have no idea what exactly "parade" is.
Everything in the novel happens over the course of something like a 24 hour period. A man dies in Tietjens arms at the beginning and he recalls it throughout, and it upsets him and sends him into a spiral, but this barely registered with me because the prose is kind of unbearable, if I'm being honest. Afterward, Tietjens finds out that his wife Sylvia has shown up basically on his doorstep without notice, perhaps purely to torment him, but also because she's jealous of Valentine Wannop and being jealous makes Sylvia want to bone Tietjens. Or something. (Spoiler alert for Some Do Not...: at the end of the book Tietjens asks Valentine, who he loves, to be his mistress, she agrees because she loves him back, and then they ~!* FLASHING NEON SIGN *!~ do not.) As with the previous novel, there's a bit of a time jump that occurs partway through, jumping over a catastrophe which is then related by the characters in dialogue.
I'm trying my utmost not to compare this series to From Here to Eternity but God the comparisons almost demand to be made. Combined, Parade's End is a similar length, and it also includes the copious details that I hated so much in From Here to Eternity. Ford Madox Ford is unquestionably a better writer than James Jones, even if only because he doesn't throw three different adverbs in a row into every other sentence. I'm honestly not sure which one of them treats women better. Sylvia Tietjens is the only woman with a speaking role in this book and she is a strange character. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to hate her or if she's supposed to be symbolic of something, or what. She's cruel, but she's also ignorant about the war in a way that's simultaneously heartbreaking and frustrating.
So maybe this is all cleared up in the next book. But the fact is that as I tried to pick up that next book (or rather, open my compendium edition to the appropriate page), I decided that there was no way that I wanted to spend my time on any such thing. These first two books of the quartet were a slog, and I have no reason to believe that anything will change in the second half.
* And The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, so there's simply no excuse for this.**
** No, I'm not really suggesting that The Handmaid's Tale is the absolute best that CanLit has to offer***, just that it seems like a prime candidate for The List.
*** My representative sample of choice at the moment is As for Me and My House by Sinclair Ross.
Pages: 288
First Sentence: When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)
Review:
Ugh.
I finished reading No More Parades the day before writing this review, and gave it a 2/3 purely because I planned to push ahead into A Man Could Stand Up—, and didn't think I'd be justified in doing so if I gave it a 1/3 rating. In the extremely unlikely event that someone picked up No More Parades without having read Some Do Not... first, though, it would deserve to go straight into the garbage, because it doesn't exist independently of the first novel at all.
No More Parades at least takes us to the front of the First World War, sort of. Our hero from the first novel, Christopher Tietjens, is stationed near some town because his health is bad. He's a captain, in charge of "the draft." Relying entirely on context clues from the novel, because I'm not sure it really provides much in the way of information that a person could use for actual research, I believe that Tietjens' job in this book is to get soldiers coming over from England sent down to their positions on the front lines. Have all of these soldiers been drafted? That I don't know. One of the things I liked best about the novel, though, was the number of Canadians who appear throughout. Here at home we have our perceptions of Canadians at war, and it was interesting to read about them, even briefly, from a British perspective. (I haven't done a comprehensive survey yet, but I don't think a single novel by a Canadian author made it onto The List*, so I have to take my Canadians where I can get them.) I'll note that I also have no idea what exactly "parade" is.
Everything in the novel happens over the course of something like a 24 hour period. A man dies in Tietjens arms at the beginning and he recalls it throughout, and it upsets him and sends him into a spiral, but this barely registered with me because the prose is kind of unbearable, if I'm being honest. Afterward, Tietjens finds out that his wife Sylvia has shown up basically on his doorstep without notice, perhaps purely to torment him, but also because she's jealous of Valentine Wannop and being jealous makes Sylvia want to bone Tietjens. Or something. (Spoiler alert for Some Do Not...: at the end of the book Tietjens asks Valentine, who he loves, to be his mistress, she agrees because she loves him back, and then they ~!* FLASHING NEON SIGN *!~ do not.) As with the previous novel, there's a bit of a time jump that occurs partway through, jumping over a catastrophe which is then related by the characters in dialogue.
I'm trying my utmost not to compare this series to From Here to Eternity but God the comparisons almost demand to be made. Combined, Parade's End is a similar length, and it also includes the copious details that I hated so much in From Here to Eternity. Ford Madox Ford is unquestionably a better writer than James Jones, even if only because he doesn't throw three different adverbs in a row into every other sentence. I'm honestly not sure which one of them treats women better. Sylvia Tietjens is the only woman with a speaking role in this book and she is a strange character. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to hate her or if she's supposed to be symbolic of something, or what. She's cruel, but she's also ignorant about the war in a way that's simultaneously heartbreaking and frustrating.
So maybe this is all cleared up in the next book. But the fact is that as I tried to pick up that next book (or rather, open my compendium edition to the appropriate page), I decided that there was no way that I wanted to spend my time on any such thing. These first two books of the quartet were a slog, and I have no reason to believe that anything will change in the second half.
* And The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, so there's simply no excuse for this.**
** No, I'm not really suggesting that The Handmaid's Tale is the absolute best that CanLit has to offer***, just that it seems like a prime candidate for The List.
*** My representative sample of choice at the moment is As for Me and My House by Sinclair Ross.
- - - - -
Sylvia had refused to swear by St. Anthony. She definitely was not going to introduce the saint into her amorous affairs, and she definitely was not going to take on any relic an oath that she meant to break at an early opportunity. There was such a thing as playing it too low down; there are dishonours to which death is preferable. So getting hold of his revolver at a time when he was wringing his hands, she dropped it into the water-jug and then felt reasonably safe.
- - - - -
Men, at any rate, never fulfilled expectations. They might, upon acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with any man before you said: "But I've read all this before...." You knew the opening, you were already bored by the middle, and, especially, you knew the end....
- - - - -
Five Years Ago This Month: October 2011
Five years ago this month...
...I was very belatedly distracted. I mentioned being done the project "five years from now" in this post, oops.
...I reviewed Persuasion. It's still the only Jane Austen novel that I've ever read, and I liked it but ultimately haven't found it extremely memorable.
...I reviewed A Room with a View. I'm surprised by how lukewarm I was in this initial review, because I've been talking about this book on a regular basis ever since.
...I was distracted.
...I was very belatedly distracted. I mentioned being done the project "five years from now" in this post, oops.
...I reviewed Persuasion. It's still the only Jane Austen novel that I've ever read, and I liked it but ultimately haven't found it extremely memorable.
...I reviewed A Room with a View. I'm surprised by how lukewarm I was in this initial review, because I've been talking about this book on a regular basis ever since.
...I was distracted.
 |
| A time when my car was much newer. |
57. Parade's End: Some Do Not... by Ford Madox Ford
Year Published: 1924
Pages: 288
First Sentence: The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)
Review:
I've been looking forward to getting into Parade's End for quite a while. As I write this, I've read the first novel, Some Do Not..., and haven't started on the second, although I will tomorrow. I've been looking forward to this because somehow I found out that Parade's End is about World War I, and I feel as if I've read almost no fiction about that war. Also Ford Madox Ford is a fabulous pen name, and the use of punctuation in the titles of half of the books in this series is delicious.
Some Do Not... begins in a train on the way to somewhere or other. Christopher Tietjens (I have no idea how to say this correctly but have been reading it as "TEE-et-yens") and his friend Vincent Macmaster are heading out of town on a bit of a holiday, where they encounter various members of the government, the woman who will very quickly become Macmaster's mistress, a couple of suffragettes, and some others. Tietjens is contemplating a letter that he received from his wife, who had run off with another man, and is now asking to return. Various interactions between all of these characters last for more than the first third of the book, at which point it jumps forward to partway through World War I, with Tietjens at home with his wife Sylvia, about to go back out to the front lines. It's obvious that he has pretty severe PTSD, and that everything has changed.
I have to say, this was a challenging read. The prose is sparse and full of dialogue, plus the kinds of hints and clues that would have been obvious to readers of the 1920s but are completely opaque to me, ninety years later. I didn't hate it, but it hasn't delivered the goods yet. Mainly I found myself reading in order to find out what would happen next, but not in a particularly breathless way. The novel is structured so that it has frequent chronological leaps, only some of which are filled in by context clues and flashbacks. Except for one scene where Tietjens explains to Sylvia what happened to him on the front line, the whole thing takes place in England.
At this point in the series, I'm having a hard time forming any sort of judgement about it at all. It's dealt with romantic relationships primarily: Tietjens and his wife, Tietjens and the suffragette Valentine Wannop, Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin (the woman who becomes his mistress), with the war forming a backdrop that's often really hard to decipher. The idea of "some do and some do not..." (hey, that's the title of the book!) is also woven through things. Some do cheat on their spouses, some do conduct their affairs or their work dishonestly, some do stay home when the country is at war—and some do not.
I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that the book ends with Tietjens heading back out to the front lines, and while I wasn't completely blown away by it, I'm at least really interested in finding out what happens next.
Pages: 288
First Sentence: The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)
Review:
I've been looking forward to getting into Parade's End for quite a while. As I write this, I've read the first novel, Some Do Not..., and haven't started on the second, although I will tomorrow. I've been looking forward to this because somehow I found out that Parade's End is about World War I, and I feel as if I've read almost no fiction about that war. Also Ford Madox Ford is a fabulous pen name, and the use of punctuation in the titles of half of the books in this series is delicious.
Some Do Not... begins in a train on the way to somewhere or other. Christopher Tietjens (I have no idea how to say this correctly but have been reading it as "TEE-et-yens") and his friend Vincent Macmaster are heading out of town on a bit of a holiday, where they encounter various members of the government, the woman who will very quickly become Macmaster's mistress, a couple of suffragettes, and some others. Tietjens is contemplating a letter that he received from his wife, who had run off with another man, and is now asking to return. Various interactions between all of these characters last for more than the first third of the book, at which point it jumps forward to partway through World War I, with Tietjens at home with his wife Sylvia, about to go back out to the front lines. It's obvious that he has pretty severe PTSD, and that everything has changed.
I have to say, this was a challenging read. The prose is sparse and full of dialogue, plus the kinds of hints and clues that would have been obvious to readers of the 1920s but are completely opaque to me, ninety years later. I didn't hate it, but it hasn't delivered the goods yet. Mainly I found myself reading in order to find out what would happen next, but not in a particularly breathless way. The novel is structured so that it has frequent chronological leaps, only some of which are filled in by context clues and flashbacks. Except for one scene where Tietjens explains to Sylvia what happened to him on the front line, the whole thing takes place in England.
At this point in the series, I'm having a hard time forming any sort of judgement about it at all. It's dealt with romantic relationships primarily: Tietjens and his wife, Tietjens and the suffragette Valentine Wannop, Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin (the woman who becomes his mistress), with the war forming a backdrop that's often really hard to decipher. The idea of "some do and some do not..." (hey, that's the title of the book!) is also woven through things. Some do cheat on their spouses, some do conduct their affairs or their work dishonestly, some do stay home when the country is at war—and some do not.
I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that the book ends with Tietjens heading back out to the front lines, and while I wasn't completely blown away by it, I'm at least really interested in finding out what happens next.
- - - - -
The brandy made no difference to his mentality, but it seemed to keep him from shivering.
- - - - -
"For the sake of Christ," she cried out, "as you believe that Christ died for you, try to understand that millions of men's lives are at stake...."
Mrs. Duchemin smiled.
"My poor child," she said, "if you moved in the higher circles you would look at these things with more aloofness...."
Valentine leant on the back of a high chair for support.
"You don't move in the higher circles," she said. "For Heaven's sake—for your own—remember that you are a woman, not for ever and for always a snob. You were a good woman once. You stuck to your husband for quite a long time...."
Mrs. Duchemin, in her chair, had thrown herself back.
"My good girl," she said, "have you gone mad?"
- - - - -
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