Who Can Say Where the Road Goes Wednesday
Dec. 7th, 2016 07:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
Balthazar by Lawerence Durrell. It's ok! I don't know. At first I thought it was going to be more down-to-earth than Justine and then it got hopelessly tangled up in its own lyricism again. Which is excellent lyricism most of the time. But you still get the feeling that Alexandria, Durrell's Alexandria, is a beautiful paragraph but never quite a city. I am a great believer in paragraphs, but sometimes you have to buy groceries. I'm not sure if this is an actual flaw. It's not really a story about living in a city, but about how difficult it is to write about a city and about other people, not necessarily an impossible task but maybe one requiring more uncertainty than the narrator, Definitely Not Lawrence Durrell, is comfortable with. Only the totally fictional can be fully understood, and since these fictional people are "real" in their own world (in the real city made unreal by an inch-thick patina of philosophical quipping about itself) they are never going to understand each other, and can only pace anxiously around the border fences of the mystery by writing letters about each other and/or having a lot of sex in sad rooms and dismal weather. That's fair! I mean, I can't really argue with the difficulty.
The balance of narrators is different, technically (here Balthazar, a minor character in Justine, has read Justine and shows up on D. N. L. Durrell's island with his own bundle of manuscripts to undermine and amend it), but the rhythms of the prose are similar to Justine, and there are the familiar aphorisms about women ("Truth is a woman," for example; "That is why it is enigmatic," while a walk-on character is "so clever that she hardly seemed to be a woman at all") and a chapped, gritty sensuality - gritty like a lot of cold sand in your bra, not gritty like a gritty crime drama; everyone is constantly being disappointed by the persistence of their bodies as solid objects. Honestly, I think they all need to relax, but there's about as much chance of that as there was of Mark Antony winning a boat fight.
Clea is my favorite character - the artist who falls in love with Justine (like everyone, unhappily, like everyone). She manages to seem like a character, despite everyone else rhapsodizing about her goodness all the time, which is either an achievement or a lucky accident depending on how cynical you are feeling about Lawrence Durrell today. Let's call it an achievement! I am feeling ok about Lawrence Durrell today.
It's all distant guns all the time here in 99 Novels.
Also: Hospital Station, the first novel - really five short stories strung together - in the Sector General series by James White. New doctor Conway, an Earth native, learns the ropes at the SG: this includes getting used to working with colleagues who are ten feet tall or winged and brittle, and dealing with communication and diagnostic problems: how can you tell, in a first contact situation, whether your patient is dying of cancer or undergoing normal metamorphosis? Let's hope you can figure it out in time! This is comfort reading in much the same way All Creatures Great and Small is comfort watching - not just because the diagnostic problems are imaginative and interesting, but because of the way the attention of the story is always being focused on the immediate. Whatever else is happening in the galaxy or in Conway's personal life, there's a patient right now who needs sorting out. It's pleasant to watch people zero in on their jobs and do them. The aliens are really alien - White clearly loves thinking up alternative metabolisms and psychologies and then figuring out how they could go horribly wrong - which makes this vision of a transgalactic Doctors Without Borders all the more charming.
What I'm Reading Now
Mountolive is the third book in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, and surprise! It's a traditional novel, more or less, which is kind of a relief. I mean, I think it's a better showcase for Durrell's strengths in language and image, that the novel isn't leaning so hard on language all the time. I mean it is leaning hard on language, but it's not noisily calling your attention to the fact every three paragraphs, which just makes everything feel like an asthma attack, or what I imagine an asthma attack feels like from reading Proust. David Mountolive has an affair with Nessim's mother Leila as a very young man, and later returns to Egypt with the Foreign Office. What will happen next? Probably the Not Durrells will descend on him with their epigrams, like a flock of pigeons. I'm enjoying it so far.
Star Surgeon, the next Sector General novel, is also more traditionally structured than its predecessor - that is, it appears to have a single long story arc instead of being stitched together from stories originally published in Analog (or equivalent). A patient from a species unknown to the hospital appears to have killed and eaten his fellow crew members. Conway asks his new colleagues from the next galaxy over to help identify it, and it turns out to be one of their gods. Surprise! Trouble is almost certainly around the corner, if it isn't already here.
And The Count of Monte Cristo of course. Is there anyone on earth, past, present, or future, who loves shouting "Surprise!" at his readers more than Alexandre Dumas? I hope not. I have almost caught up toosprey_archer:
There have been too many shenanigans to adequately sum up, but let's give it a try. In Chapter 61 or so, the Count decides to go have a look at a "telegraph":
I thought, "Is that what a telegraph looks like? What is a telegraph?" Wikipedia brought me the good news that what I think of when I hear the word "telegraph" is not the first time something has been called a telegraph. There is also the optical telegraph, which was invented in 1792 and used giant arms and a semaphore alphabet to send messages across long distances. Thanks, Alexandre Dumas!
Thanks to Wikipedia, I also learned that there is a real Chateau d'If (you can go and be a tourist there) and, more surprisingly, a real Abbe Faria, a Goan Catholic, who may or may not have been imprisoned at the Chateau d'If but in any case came back to Paris later and made a name for himself as a hypnotist.
Anyway, there's a hidden motive in this sudden enthusiasm for telegraphy. Maybe the old Dantes might have just thought it was cool that technology allows people to communicate across long distances, but this is the new Dantes, and the new Dantes bribes telegraph operators to pass on false news reports so that Danglars will lose money on the stock market. I don't know, Dantes, this is kind of a weak revenge plan, if you ask me. I mean, Danglars does lose a ton of money and then his new friend the Count gets to gloat about it a lot and give him advice, but it lacks a certain panache, doesn't it? But maybe the best revenge plan is the one that nobody realizes is a revenge plan. I liked the telegraph guy. He is just a guy who loves his little garden, and now he can have a big garden because being bribed has set him up for life.
What else has happened? Valentine is being pressured to marry Franz, Maximilian threatened to kill himself if she married Franz, and Valentine's paralyzed grandfather, M. de Noirtier., in a scene of breathtakingly suspenseful blinking-to-communicate, has revealed to Franz that he, Noirtier, was the man who killed Franz's father!!! (thus removing Franz's enthusiasm for marrying into the Villefort family).
That's not sarcasm! The blinking really is suspenseful.
Meanwhile, Albert - remember Albert? doesn't want to marry Mlle Danglars, and Mlle Danglars doesn't want to marry anybody. Oh, and Villefort opened up an investigation into the Count's mysterious past. He thought he was finally getting somewhere, but actually he just ended up interviewing both of Dante's non-Count alter egos (who are in strong disagreement about the Count's character, of course). Shenanigans, thy name is Edmond Dantes! Or was, once. :( And - and there's an amazing scene at Mercedes' ball, when the Count very pointedly won't eat any of her food, and she tries to get him to eat something, anything, even grapes from her garden, and he just won't. SO MUCH TENSION YOU COULD BUILD A BRIDGE OUT OF IT. PROBABLY. I'M NOT AN ENGINEER.
Albert has gotten himself into trouble over an anonymous "slander" about his father, even though he's the only one who knows it refers to his father. It was probably planted by the Count, who also knows but isn't letting on. Albert wants to fight a duel about it, a terrible idea that will do no good to anyone. Please, impetuous nineteenth-century youths, stop trying to duel one another! There are more than enough things to die of as it is. And SOMEONE in the Villefort household is poisoning people, but who? Valentine? This seems unlikely. Maybe it's Villefort's wife? Oh, and Dantes has found the secret not-really-dead son of Villefort and Mme Danglars and encouraged him to come to Paris under a false identity; that's probably important somehow.
Who knows where all of this is heading? Is there a master plan, or does the Count just want to make everyone really uncomfortable? Either way, it's a fabulous pre-locomotive crazy train (no steam power, just a team of drama llamas) and I'm glad to be back on board.
What I Plan to Read Next
The library is closed over winter break, so I think I'm going to focus on books I already have in the house until mid-January - except for Proust; I took the rest of Proust out just in case. It's very important to have Proust!
What I've Finished Reading
"Wrong! Wrong! A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love."
Balthazar by Lawerence Durrell. It's ok! I don't know. At first I thought it was going to be more down-to-earth than Justine and then it got hopelessly tangled up in its own lyricism again. Which is excellent lyricism most of the time. But you still get the feeling that Alexandria, Durrell's Alexandria, is a beautiful paragraph but never quite a city. I am a great believer in paragraphs, but sometimes you have to buy groceries. I'm not sure if this is an actual flaw. It's not really a story about living in a city, but about how difficult it is to write about a city and about other people, not necessarily an impossible task but maybe one requiring more uncertainty than the narrator, Definitely Not Lawrence Durrell, is comfortable with. Only the totally fictional can be fully understood, and since these fictional people are "real" in their own world (in the real city made unreal by an inch-thick patina of philosophical quipping about itself) they are never going to understand each other, and can only pace anxiously around the border fences of the mystery by writing letters about each other and/or having a lot of sex in sad rooms and dismal weather. That's fair! I mean, I can't really argue with the difficulty.
The balance of narrators is different, technically (here Balthazar, a minor character in Justine, has read Justine and shows up on D. N. L. Durrell's island with his own bundle of manuscripts to undermine and amend it), but the rhythms of the prose are similar to Justine, and there are the familiar aphorisms about women ("Truth is a woman," for example; "That is why it is enigmatic," while a walk-on character is "so clever that she hardly seemed to be a woman at all") and a chapped, gritty sensuality - gritty like a lot of cold sand in your bra, not gritty like a gritty crime drama; everyone is constantly being disappointed by the persistence of their bodies as solid objects. Honestly, I think they all need to relax, but there's about as much chance of that as there was of Mark Antony winning a boat fight.
Clea is my favorite character - the artist who falls in love with Justine (like everyone, unhappily, like everyone). She manages to seem like a character, despite everyone else rhapsodizing about her goodness all the time, which is either an achievement or a lucky accident depending on how cynical you are feeling about Lawrence Durrell today. Let's call it an achievement! I am feeling ok about Lawrence Durrell today.
"There is so little time; with the news from Europe becoming worse every day I feel an autumnal quality in the days -- as if they were settling towards an unpredictable future."
It's all distant guns all the time here in 99 Novels.
Also: Hospital Station, the first novel - really five short stories strung together - in the Sector General series by James White. New doctor Conway, an Earth native, learns the ropes at the SG: this includes getting used to working with colleagues who are ten feet tall or winged and brittle, and dealing with communication and diagnostic problems: how can you tell, in a first contact situation, whether your patient is dying of cancer or undergoing normal metamorphosis? Let's hope you can figure it out in time! This is comfort reading in much the same way All Creatures Great and Small is comfort watching - not just because the diagnostic problems are imaginative and interesting, but because of the way the attention of the story is always being focused on the immediate. Whatever else is happening in the galaxy or in Conway's personal life, there's a patient right now who needs sorting out. It's pleasant to watch people zero in on their jobs and do them. The aliens are really alien - White clearly loves thinking up alternative metabolisms and psychologies and then figuring out how they could go horribly wrong - which makes this vision of a transgalactic Doctors Without Borders all the more charming.
What I'm Reading Now
Mountolive is the third book in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, and surprise! It's a traditional novel, more or less, which is kind of a relief. I mean, I think it's a better showcase for Durrell's strengths in language and image, that the novel isn't leaning so hard on language all the time. I mean it is leaning hard on language, but it's not noisily calling your attention to the fact every three paragraphs, which just makes everything feel like an asthma attack, or what I imagine an asthma attack feels like from reading Proust. David Mountolive has an affair with Nessim's mother Leila as a very young man, and later returns to Egypt with the Foreign Office. What will happen next? Probably the Not Durrells will descend on him with their epigrams, like a flock of pigeons. I'm enjoying it so far.
Star Surgeon, the next Sector General novel, is also more traditionally structured than its predecessor - that is, it appears to have a single long story arc instead of being stitched together from stories originally published in Analog (or equivalent). A patient from a species unknown to the hospital appears to have killed and eaten his fellow crew members. Conway asks his new colleagues from the next galaxy over to help identify it, and it turns out to be one of their gods. Surprise! Trouble is almost certainly around the corner, if it isn't already here.
And The Count of Monte Cristo of course. Is there anyone on earth, past, present, or future, who loves shouting "Surprise!" at his readers more than Alexandre Dumas? I hope not. I have almost caught up to
osprey_archer: There have been too many shenanigans to adequately sum up, but let's give it a try. In Chapter 61 or so, the Count decides to go have a look at a "telegraph":
"Yes, a telegraph. I had often seen one placed at the end of a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas and wishes of a man sitting at a table at one end of the line to another man similarly placed at the opposite extremity, and all this effected by a simple act of volition on the part of the sender of the message."
I thought, "Is that what a telegraph looks like? What is a telegraph?" Wikipedia brought me the good news that what I think of when I hear the word "telegraph" is not the first time something has been called a telegraph. There is also the optical telegraph, which was invented in 1792 and used giant arms and a semaphore alphabet to send messages across long distances. Thanks, Alexandre Dumas!
Thanks to Wikipedia, I also learned that there is a real Chateau d'If (you can go and be a tourist there) and, more surprisingly, a real Abbe Faria, a Goan Catholic, who may or may not have been imprisoned at the Chateau d'If but in any case came back to Paris later and made a name for himself as a hypnotist.
Anyway, there's a hidden motive in this sudden enthusiasm for telegraphy. Maybe the old Dantes might have just thought it was cool that technology allows people to communicate across long distances, but this is the new Dantes, and the new Dantes bribes telegraph operators to pass on false news reports so that Danglars will lose money on the stock market. I don't know, Dantes, this is kind of a weak revenge plan, if you ask me. I mean, Danglars does lose a ton of money and then his new friend the Count gets to gloat about it a lot and give him advice, but it lacks a certain panache, doesn't it? But maybe the best revenge plan is the one that nobody realizes is a revenge plan. I liked the telegraph guy. He is just a guy who loves his little garden, and now he can have a big garden because being bribed has set him up for life.
What else has happened? Valentine is being pressured to marry Franz, Maximilian threatened to kill himself if she married Franz, and Valentine's paralyzed grandfather, M. de Noirtier., in a scene of breathtakingly suspenseful blinking-to-communicate, has revealed to Franz that he, Noirtier, was the man who killed Franz's father!!! (thus removing Franz's enthusiasm for marrying into the Villefort family).
That's not sarcasm! The blinking really is suspenseful.
Meanwhile, Albert - remember Albert? doesn't want to marry Mlle Danglars, and Mlle Danglars doesn't want to marry anybody. Oh, and Villefort opened up an investigation into the Count's mysterious past. He thought he was finally getting somewhere, but actually he just ended up interviewing both of Dante's non-Count alter egos (who are in strong disagreement about the Count's character, of course). Shenanigans, thy name is Edmond Dantes! Or was, once. :( And - and there's an amazing scene at Mercedes' ball, when the Count very pointedly won't eat any of her food, and she tries to get him to eat something, anything, even grapes from her garden, and he just won't. SO MUCH TENSION YOU COULD BUILD A BRIDGE OUT OF IT. PROBABLY. I'M NOT AN ENGINEER.
Albert has gotten himself into trouble over an anonymous "slander" about his father, even though he's the only one who knows it refers to his father. It was probably planted by the Count, who also knows but isn't letting on. Albert wants to fight a duel about it, a terrible idea that will do no good to anyone. Please, impetuous nineteenth-century youths, stop trying to duel one another! There are more than enough things to die of as it is. And SOMEONE in the Villefort household is poisoning people, but who? Valentine? This seems unlikely. Maybe it's Villefort's wife? Oh, and Dantes has found the secret not-really-dead son of Villefort and Mme Danglars and encouraged him to come to Paris under a false identity; that's probably important somehow.
Who knows where all of this is heading? Is there a master plan, or does the Count just want to make everyone really uncomfortable? Either way, it's a fabulous pre-locomotive crazy train (no steam power, just a team of drama llamas) and I'm glad to be back on board.
What I Plan to Read Next
The library is closed over winter break, so I think I'm going to focus on books I already have in the house until mid-January - except for Proust; I took the rest of Proust out just in case. It's very important to have Proust!
