evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

Last week I forgot to mention An Error of Judgment by Pamela Hansford Johnson, the last 99 Novels selection for 1962. Johnson is, as the About the Author on the back page informs me, the wife of my perfectly acceptable non-nemesis, C.P. Snow - and An Error of Judgment is constructed a lot like one of Snow's lawyer-memoirs: doggedly sensible literate narrator, loosely interwoven personal and professional concerns with a fateful choice at the center, plenty of earnest conversations and monologues. But it's significantly weirder, a little more lively, and a lot more memorable than anything in the Snowverse. I don't know if ultimately the plot "works" - there's something a little artificial about the way the doctor manuvers himself into the set-piece of his crime - but it was certainly a ride and I was glad to take it.

Just A Normal Marriage is the Harlequin novel by Leigh Michaels that I got out of the free books box down the street. I enjoyed 90% of it even though the business of getting Shauna and Rob into a marriage of convenience was pretty strained. The plot: her narcissistic socialite mother is happy to give wealthy Shauna custody of her young half-sister, but only if Shauna is married! Rob is a friendly pediatrician who is concerned about the half-sister's future. Shauna offers to pay his student loans - if he marries her for a year! I also didn't see the point of making Shauna a twenty-six-year-old virgin, or of half the misunderstandings, and Rob's reaction when he thinks Shauna has fallen into the arms of her toolish ex-fiance (when it's actually attempted rape! Rob, what good are you if you can't just ask what happened?) is unworthy of an otherwise good dude. But all of that is no harm done (and thisbluespirit, I will be sure to add the summary to Unconventional Courtship so it can be livened up with Dalek Sec and others).

There is also Faust, technically a play, by my best new genius friend J.W. Goethe. Faust is nuts. It's magnificently nuts. It starts with a heartbreaking prologue about finishing a book at eighty that you started in youth (which is what happened with Faust) and rolls right into a hilarious second prologue that is a lively discussion among a director, a clown, and an actor about what should go into a play. Then it's time for a board meeting in heaven between God and the Devil about whether the devil can go ahead and try tempting that one guy (God says go ahead because otherwise there wouldn't be a story). Then there's an Easter party in the streets of Universitytowne and the Devil sneaks into Faust's house in the shape of a poodle, and it's all downhill, and uphill, and downhill and back up again from there. The translator's note keeps comparing it to Ulysses, so I spent the whole thing thinking about how apt a comparison that is: it's an obsessively sprawling, wry, wacky, incorrigible human circus. Unlike Ulysses, it is almost entirely written in rhyme.

(It's "technically" a play because it's written as one, but I am skeptical about its stageability, though I guess stranger things have happened).

Before I read Faust, the only thing I knew about Faust (Goethe version) was that in the end, Mephisto loses track of Faust's soul because he's too busy lusting after a pack of boyish angels to drag it to hell properly. I am happy to report that I was not misled, and this is in fact what happens.

What I'm Reading Now

Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer - which hasn't aged that well and most of whose component pieces aren't that great (Mailer keeps saying things like "As you can see if you're not an idiot, this essay I wrote/freshman creative writing story/dumb joke for a friend is pure garbage and you're a sucker if you thought it was any good, but it would be criminally dishonest of me not to include it in this Advertisement for Myself since I did write it after all" and then you read it and wish you were reading a less genre-breaking iconoclastic hammerpiece where selection is made on more traditional grounds) but which I still kind of like because I can't help liking Mailer. There's this one piece that's just Mailer handing out bitchy backhanded compliments to every author of roughly his own age whom anyone ever compared him to, and my heart just goes out to him - just flaps clumsily out to him like a scruffy maternal goose. And this going-out of my heart, with attendant feeling that Mailer and I are brittle, self-protecting sisters under the skin, is its own back-handed compliment, all the sadder for being directed sixty years after the fact at someone who will never read it. Clearly one of us is rubber, and one of us is glue.

Also, Frankensten! It's great. Victor Frankenstein is an idiot. It's also much more of a Romantic travelogue than I expected. More on this next week.

( Kristin Lavransdatter )

What I Plan to Read Next

One night when I was drunkenly describing the plot of Faust to some guys, one of them said that Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain, had also written a Faust. So maybe I'll read that? There are also a couple of 99 Novels from the library, The Spire by William Golding and Late Call by Angus Wilson.