Be Careful What You Wish For Wednesday
Jun. 7th, 2017 07:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
The Maias isn't shy about being a story made of words, or a satire of Lisbon literary layabouts. The characters – at least the male characters – are bright but not deep, and the female characters are less bright and less deep. It may also be the least gothic incest story of the nineteenth century. We have four hundred-odd pages of bubbly club talk and overeducated emotion while the incest scenario gets set up (Maria and Carlos were raised separately; Carlos thinks his sister is dead and Maria never knew that she had a brother; they meet and are amazed by how well they understand each other! They even have the same middle name, what a cute coincidence! It must be destiny!) When Ega learns the horrible truth about his friend Carlos' mistress (entirely by accident; a friend of the family who knows Maria but hasn't seen Carlos in many years notices them walking together an remarks on it in all innocence) he agonizes over whether to tell his friend, tries to burden the family steward with the information, and finally breaks the news. Carlos is horrified for about fifty pages before he breaks it off with Maria and they go their separate ways. He weeps with bitterness, and the curse of the Maias is acknowledged.
Then, in the final fifty pages of the novel, the world slides back into alignment. A decade passes, and Ega and Carlos are back at the Grémio, gossiping and self-deprecating as if nothing had happened. The horror has lasted a few months at most; the long business of wasting one’s life extends beyond it into the future. Maria has made a perfectly respectable and boring marriage; Carlos has gone back to his relatively harmless wastrel existence, Ega still hasn’t finished that atom book and isn’t going to, but he’s definitely going to buy some clothes and complain that he spends too much on clothes. So the world keeps turning under the cursed and the charmed alike. I’m not completely sure what to make of this, but I think I like it.
I'm sorry to say that I didn't love The Ladies of Missalonghi at all. I disliked it so much that I felt bad about it and went back to try to find some things that I liked. I did find some - the history of the town of Byron (named after the first poet its founder could make heads or tails of), the description of Missy's medical examination, the line drawings) - but eventually I gave up and gave in to my dislike.
I knew it was a ripoff of (or “homage to”) The Blue Castle, L. M. Montgomery’s joyful comedy of, by, and about shameless wish fulfillment – but I wasn’t expecting that knowledge to be as much of a handicap as it turned out to be. In theory, I’m all for ripping off The Blue Castle! In practice, I wasn’t able to give it a fair chance. I found I was unable to read without mentally cataloging the differences: Missy swoons to trashy romances instead of to pompous nature writing; her friend is a perky self-hating librarian rather than a lonely consumptive with A Past; her guardians are more sympathetic and the rest of her family worse; the golden-child cousin is meaner and the narrative cattiness she elicits less subtle, and all the emotional beats are less heightened than in The Blue Castle. Not all of the differences are disappointing, but a lot of them are. In the end, Missy gets her man by deliberately lying about having a terminal illness, and the man she gets can’t shut up about what a bitch his first wife was. It’s not completely clear that the ending is meant to be happy, but it also isn't successfully ominous or satirical as far as I can tell. We never really get to know The Mysterious John Smith, except for some choice monologues about how women are the worst, and I didn't really feel like I knew the nasty relatives well enough to rejoice in their comeuppance.
I was accidentally spoiled for the Big Twist about Una, the librarian who pushes Missy to trick John Smith into marrying her. On the whole I'm glad I was, because if I hadn't seen it coming I would have been extremely mad. Do you want to know what it was? Here is some white text to hide the spoiler.
[Highlight the hidden text for the TERRIBLE TRUTH about UNA! Una is the ghost of John Smith's dead wife! She is so sorry about what a frigid harpy she was in life that she has decided to make up for her crimes of the heart by setting Missy up with John Smith (and encouraging her to NEVER TELL HIM THE TRUTH about her health, because MEN CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH and it's better that way! Honesty is for suckers! Una was honest about not wanting children and LOOK WHERE IT GOT HER). Thanks, ghost? It does make sense that a ghost would project a lot and have priorities not necessarily aligned with those of the living, so maybe this makes the story more interesting? I'm not sure. If I hadn't known it was coming, it would have come way the hell out of nowhere. I knew it was coming, and it still felt totally unearned and nonsensical.]
Maybe The Mysterious John Smith's misogyny is supposed to make him a more "realistic" character than The Blue Castle's Barney Snaith, whose only major flaws are an embarrassing writing style and a tragic inability to speak in complete sentences. But given that T.M.J.S. is also a rich mastermind who rolls into town and buys a valley just in time to be tricked into a wish-fulfillment marriage by Missy and [SPOILER! the self-hating ghost of his dead wife!!] this superficial nod toward realism seems neither necessary nor sufficient. Besides which, he's no fun. I don't at all mind reading about fictional misogynists if they are in a book about asshole artists or how much being in the army sucks, but I don't like them in my rom-coms. No snappy pillow talk about how your first wife killed herself just to ruin your life, please! And because I already had it in my mind that this book was going to be similar to The Blue Castle, I wasn't able to relax and enjoy my dislike of T. M. John Smith as I might in any number of other books. I kept waiting for the story either to abandon the template or do a better job of following it. Which is, again, totally unfair to poor Colleen McCullough, who was presumably just trying to write a book like anyone else.
I don't know. This book got me thinking about romantic comedies: how pretty much all my life I've been convinced that I love them, because I love them in theory and there are a few that are my favorites, but if you pick a rom-com at random and show it to me, I'm overwhelmingly more likely to hate it than not. Why I should have such an easily outraged Rom-Com Ideal when I have no problem enjoying mediocre sci-fi and bad murder mysteries is not clear to me.
I was disappointed in myself for not being able to enjoy this book on its own merits (or if not "enjoy," at least separate it from The Blue Castle enough so that I feel like I'm being fair), but I'm also not convinced that it's worth the effort to try again. Oh, well! Better luck next time, Australia.
What I'm Reading Now
I've started The Complete Works of Hadewijch, a present from several years ago, but I don't expect to get through it very quickly. Hadewijch is a thirteenth-century mystic whose works are letters exhorting friends to live in Christ, and poems about personal revelations - all well out of my comfort zone.
Also started: Chicks in Chainmail, a very 90s, very tongue-in-cheek comedy-fantasy anthology with a "warrior women" theme. There is a silly story about a man who dresses as a woman in order to be allowed to fight, and a silly story about the unforeseen consequences of a tax on metal bras. There is an extremely silly story about Hillary Clinton in Valhalla that made me so sad I couldn't follow what was happening, through no fault of 1994.
What I Plan to Read Next
Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary, probably some other things.
The Maias isn't shy about being a story made of words, or a satire of Lisbon literary layabouts. The characters – at least the male characters – are bright but not deep, and the female characters are less bright and less deep. It may also be the least gothic incest story of the nineteenth century. We have four hundred-odd pages of bubbly club talk and overeducated emotion while the incest scenario gets set up (Maria and Carlos were raised separately; Carlos thinks his sister is dead and Maria never knew that she had a brother; they meet and are amazed by how well they understand each other! They even have the same middle name, what a cute coincidence! It must be destiny!) When Ega learns the horrible truth about his friend Carlos' mistress (entirely by accident; a friend of the family who knows Maria but hasn't seen Carlos in many years notices them walking together an remarks on it in all innocence) he agonizes over whether to tell his friend, tries to burden the family steward with the information, and finally breaks the news. Carlos is horrified for about fifty pages before he breaks it off with Maria and they go their separate ways. He weeps with bitterness, and the curse of the Maias is acknowledged.
Then, in the final fifty pages of the novel, the world slides back into alignment. A decade passes, and Ega and Carlos are back at the Grémio, gossiping and self-deprecating as if nothing had happened. The horror has lasted a few months at most; the long business of wasting one’s life extends beyond it into the future. Maria has made a perfectly respectable and boring marriage; Carlos has gone back to his relatively harmless wastrel existence, Ega still hasn’t finished that atom book and isn’t going to, but he’s definitely going to buy some clothes and complain that he spends too much on clothes. So the world keeps turning under the cursed and the charmed alike. I’m not completely sure what to make of this, but I think I like it.
I'm sorry to say that I didn't love The Ladies of Missalonghi at all. I disliked it so much that I felt bad about it and went back to try to find some things that I liked. I did find some - the history of the town of Byron (named after the first poet its founder could make heads or tails of), the description of Missy's medical examination, the line drawings) - but eventually I gave up and gave in to my dislike.
I knew it was a ripoff of (or “homage to”) The Blue Castle, L. M. Montgomery’s joyful comedy of, by, and about shameless wish fulfillment – but I wasn’t expecting that knowledge to be as much of a handicap as it turned out to be. In theory, I’m all for ripping off The Blue Castle! In practice, I wasn’t able to give it a fair chance. I found I was unable to read without mentally cataloging the differences: Missy swoons to trashy romances instead of to pompous nature writing; her friend is a perky self-hating librarian rather than a lonely consumptive with A Past; her guardians are more sympathetic and the rest of her family worse; the golden-child cousin is meaner and the narrative cattiness she elicits less subtle, and all the emotional beats are less heightened than in The Blue Castle. Not all of the differences are disappointing, but a lot of them are. In the end, Missy gets her man by deliberately lying about having a terminal illness, and the man she gets can’t shut up about what a bitch his first wife was. It’s not completely clear that the ending is meant to be happy, but it also isn't successfully ominous or satirical as far as I can tell. We never really get to know The Mysterious John Smith, except for some choice monologues about how women are the worst, and I didn't really feel like I knew the nasty relatives well enough to rejoice in their comeuppance.
I was accidentally spoiled for the Big Twist about Una, the librarian who pushes Missy to trick John Smith into marrying her. On the whole I'm glad I was, because if I hadn't seen it coming I would have been extremely mad. Do you want to know what it was? Here is some white text to hide the spoiler.
[Highlight the hidden text for the TERRIBLE TRUTH about UNA! Una is the ghost of John Smith's dead wife! She is so sorry about what a frigid harpy she was in life that she has decided to make up for her crimes of the heart by setting Missy up with John Smith (and encouraging her to NEVER TELL HIM THE TRUTH about her health, because MEN CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH and it's better that way! Honesty is for suckers! Una was honest about not wanting children and LOOK WHERE IT GOT HER). Thanks, ghost? It does make sense that a ghost would project a lot and have priorities not necessarily aligned with those of the living, so maybe this makes the story more interesting? I'm not sure. If I hadn't known it was coming, it would have come way the hell out of nowhere. I knew it was coming, and it still felt totally unearned and nonsensical.]
Maybe The Mysterious John Smith's misogyny is supposed to make him a more "realistic" character than The Blue Castle's Barney Snaith, whose only major flaws are an embarrassing writing style and a tragic inability to speak in complete sentences. But given that T.M.J.S. is also a rich mastermind who rolls into town and buys a valley just in time to be tricked into a wish-fulfillment marriage by Missy and [SPOILER! the self-hating ghost of his dead wife!!] this superficial nod toward realism seems neither necessary nor sufficient. Besides which, he's no fun. I don't at all mind reading about fictional misogynists if they are in a book about asshole artists or how much being in the army sucks, but I don't like them in my rom-coms. No snappy pillow talk about how your first wife killed herself just to ruin your life, please! And because I already had it in my mind that this book was going to be similar to The Blue Castle, I wasn't able to relax and enjoy my dislike of T. M. John Smith as I might in any number of other books. I kept waiting for the story either to abandon the template or do a better job of following it. Which is, again, totally unfair to poor Colleen McCullough, who was presumably just trying to write a book like anyone else.
I don't know. This book got me thinking about romantic comedies: how pretty much all my life I've been convinced that I love them, because I love them in theory and there are a few that are my favorites, but if you pick a rom-com at random and show it to me, I'm overwhelmingly more likely to hate it than not. Why I should have such an easily outraged Rom-Com Ideal when I have no problem enjoying mediocre sci-fi and bad murder mysteries is not clear to me.
I was disappointed in myself for not being able to enjoy this book on its own merits (or if not "enjoy," at least separate it from The Blue Castle enough so that I feel like I'm being fair), but I'm also not convinced that it's worth the effort to try again. Oh, well! Better luck next time, Australia.
What I'm Reading Now
I've started The Complete Works of Hadewijch, a present from several years ago, but I don't expect to get through it very quickly. Hadewijch is a thirteenth-century mystic whose works are letters exhorting friends to live in Christ, and poems about personal revelations - all well out of my comfort zone.
Also started: Chicks in Chainmail, a very 90s, very tongue-in-cheek comedy-fantasy anthology with a "warrior women" theme. There is a silly story about a man who dresses as a woman in order to be allowed to fight, and a silly story about the unforeseen consequences of a tax on metal bras. There is an extremely silly story about Hillary Clinton in Valhalla that made me so sad I couldn't follow what was happening, through no fault of 1994.
What I Plan to Read Next
Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary, probably some other things.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-07 02:35 pm (UTC)(I do have a problem of walking by the Heyer shelf at the library and completely forgetting which book it was I wanted to read next, and so not getting any one of them, but that is a different issue).
Anyway, plenty of the rom-coms I do like are full of strange priorities and ethical issues and sometimes terrible people; it's just that I like them. The heart has its reasons, etc.. None of my opinions here are very rational, and most of them are barely even opinions - just off-the-cuff reactions, highly personal and usually subject to change. I'm sorry if they come off too harsh at times.
Is it wrong that I feel almost tempted to read the book just because of the ghost wife with strange priorities?
Absolutely not! I encourage you to fly directly into that flame and let me know what you think. osprey_archer enjoyed the book a lot, so there's a good chance it's just me and my Blue Castle hangup anyway.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-07 07:27 pm (UTC)Oh, yes! I just am probably more sensitive to criticism of them just because they've been my comfort reads for twenty years now & have cheered me up on trains, through sickness, boredom, and just when I needed something to read that made me smile and didn't need a review. And, of course, they are mid-20th C thing, Heyer certainly had her faults & fandom these days does seem prone to not being willing to cope with anything like that, no matter the era, so I probably was just worrying more about those than even Alleyn.
(And you should get The Talisman Ring next. It has a side-order of murder and smuggling to go with it.)
plenty of the rom-coms I do like are full of strange priorities and ethical issues and sometimes terrible people; it's just that I like them. The heart has its reasons, etc..
Indeed.
I don't have much brain, so I had probably better just get on with reading the books I'm trying to read now anyway! I am not sure how entertaining the ghost wife would be in practice, but the idea pleases me a lot. :-)
no subject
Date: 2017-06-07 09:01 pm (UTC)That makes sense! I think everyone has a few things like that.
I like a lot of things with a lot of flaws, and I'm afraid one thing I get tempted to do a lot is to enumerate all the flaws I can think of right off the bat, to assure the reader that my love isn't completely uncritical. This is almost certainly more annoying than I think it is, so I try to keep it in check, but the temptation is always there.
I don't think the ghost wife element lives up to its potential. But it is a very short book, so there's no harm done either way. I hope you enjoy your new free books! <3
no subject
Date: 2017-06-08 04:41 pm (UTC)I get that. I think I do it too! Or at least, I watch so much old TV and I mean there is a lot of sexism and racism and things here and about, and so I just say it is TERRIBLE but I like it and then no one can come along and tell me I shouldn't like it because it's terrible and I must be evil. In fact, no one ever does even if I sometimes see it happen on tumblr, and so I'm just probably being meanly unfair to things that were often actually progressive at the time (/o\) or sadly typical (also /o\). It is an understandable way to feel safe while reviewing out loud on the internet in front of theoretically the world, I suppose!
This is also why I often can't read anyone's reviews of Doctor Who, because it is the highlight of my week and I don't want to read about all its faults. Unless I do. Sometimes I do!