evelyn_b

Crossposted from Livejournal

What I’ve Finished Reading

( Clea )

( The Count of Monte Cristo )

Alas,

What I’m Reading Now

She said to me today as I was leaving: ‘And now my dear, when are you going to start writing again?’ I might have said, of course, that all this time I’ve been scribbling off and on in the notebooks but that is not what she meant. I said: ‘Very likely never.’ She made an impatient, almost irritable gesture; she looked vexed, like a housewife whose plans have gone wrong – the gesture was genuine, not one of the smiles, or nods, or shakes of the head, or impatient clicks of the tongue that she used to conduct a session. ‘Why can’t you understand that,’ I said, really wanting to make her understand, ‘that I can’t pick up a newspaper without what’s in it seeming so overwhelmingly terrible that nothing I could write would seem to have any point at all?’ ‘Then you shouldn’t read the newspapers.’ I laughed. After a while she smiled with me.

The Golden Notebook is a little like the Alexandria Quartet, but readable. That's not fair or accurate to either, but it is a breath of fresh air after the convolutions of the Not Durrells. I don’t know where I got the idea that The Golden Notebook was intimidating and “difficult” - it wasn’t from Burgess, who only hints that the project is imperfect and regrets that Anna is too critical and humorless. I don't think it's the back cover copy, which is straightforward enough. Maybe it's just that it's a big book with an abstract cover? Anyway, this impression of difficulty was totally wrong. Anna is a writer who keeps four notebooks on four different themes; one day her best friend's troubled son, who is being inappropriately nosy here, challenges her on whether it's honest to keep different parts of herself separated in this way. Meanwhile, there is lots of earnest dialogue about the breakup, imminent and ongoing, of the Communist Party in Britain (the book begins in 1956 but extends backward and forward in time) and lots of unhappy affairs extensively analyzed.

What I Plan to Read Next

Books from my bookshelves. The Story of the Lost Child. I found The Hidden Land at a used bookstore (the sequel to The Secret Country), so that too, eventually.

Crossposted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

How Dear is Life - war comes to Europe, Philip joins the local Territorials, suffers embarrassment and shame, and is marched all over France and Belgium. At home, a familiar situation: the number of news sources has exploded, but no one knows what's true and what's false, and hardly anyone has the time to wonder in the first place. There are stories of atrocities in Belgium, fact mixed with half-truth mixed with pure garbage, all luridly illustrated. There are rumors of children poisoned at random by German bakers. The country is choked with information, while over in Europe no one tells the soldiers anything. Nothing very new here if you've read more than one WWI novel, but Philip and his family continue to be interesting and sympathetic.

What I’m Reading Now

So far in Clea: Justine has recounted how Pursewarden cured her of her “neurosis” about being raped as a child by telling her she enjoyed it and probably asked for it, and we have had this wonderful Durrellism:

She was, like every woman, everything that the mind of a man (let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself) – that the mind of man wished to imagine. She was there forever, and she had never existed! Under all these masks there was only another woman, every woman, like a lay figure in a dressmaker's shop, waiting for the poet to clothe her, breathe life into her. In understanding all this for the first time I began to realise with awe the enormous reflexive power of woman – the fecund passivity with which, like the moon, she borrows her second-hand light from the male sun. How could I help but be anything but grateful for such vital information? What did they matter, the lies, deceptions, follies, in comparison to this truth?

There's probably a sense in which this is more or less accurate, if you're Not Lawrence Durrell.

There's more to it than that, of course. Our dogged narrator Not Lawrence Durrell has dropped down out of the cloud cover of the past into a mangled, alien, and anxious wartime future. Justine and Nessim's plan to run guns to Palestine has led to them being trapped together under house arrest, and Justine is crackling with boredom and philosophy like a lot of frayed wires. It's very Durrell. My feelings about Durrell are still mixed.

Is anyone going to care about Clea when there is THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO on the same page? Maybe not, but I care about Clea.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, things fall apart; the center cannot hold. ( SPOILERS through Chapter 95 )

Next up: a conference between Danglars and his daughter Eugenie! I'm a little behind on Monte Cristo this week due to work, but should catch up again next Wednesday. We're almost to the end of the book! And we're down to the two least sympathetic of Dantes' original antagonists, which may or may not mean anything for how the next few chapters play out.


What I Plan to Read Next

The Golden Notebook? For 99 Novels, and it's already in my house. Probably The Secret Country, which I've been meaning to finish for a while.

Archived from Livejournal

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. ( Truth and I are burrowing animals, which is why we have dirt in our hair )

"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: ( SPOILERS through about Chapter 81! )

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!

Archived from Livejournal

Wednesday Reading Meme readers, I wanted so badly to tell you all about JUSTINE by LAWRENCE DURRELL, but it isn't going to happen this week. I have hardly had time to blather about JUSTINE in real life.

Well, no. I am going to post one thing from JUSTINE:

Women must attack writers -- and from the moment she learned I as a writer she felt disposed to make herself interesting by dissecting me. All this would have been most flattering to my amour propre had some of her observations been further from the mark, but she was acute and I was too feeble to resist this sort of game -- the mental ambuscades which constitute the opening gambits of a flirtation.

This is a pretty nice paragraph, actually. But no one ever thinks to warn you about the never-ending attacks from women, possibly the worst of the many hazards of being a writer. Worst of all is when the writer is also a woman: good luck getting anything done in that 24/7 war zone. :(

Next week, a real post! Probably!