evelyn_b

Crossposted to Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

"Women are strange little beasts," he said to Dr. Coutras. "You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you." He shrugged his shoulders. "Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls."

A version of this quote from The Moon and Sixpence was used in the movie poster - but instead of the remark about souls, it concludes that "in the end they get you and you are helpless in their hands," which is all wrong - no one ever "gets" Charles Strickland. After twenty years of perfectly ordinary life as a mediocre stockbroker, he decides to become a painter and to forgo all sense of social obligation forever. He leaves his family for Paris and never thinks of them again. In Paris he makes some paintings, is rude to his benefactors, breaks up a marriage, and flatly refuses to consider anyone but himself. Eventually he moves to Tahiti, settles down, paints a lot, and dies of leprosy - but not before making sure his mural-covered house is burned down, as a final "fuck you" to all those annoying sheeple who kept trying to buy his paintings, like idiots. Screw those guys!

( Other people are the worst! )

I enjoyed this book a lot. It's hard not to compare it to The Horse's Mouth, also about an asshole who paints pictures, and I don't think it's at all a great book in the same way, but it moves quickly and is full of quiet earnest epigrams, and it has that appealing ambiguity of intent that the good Maugham books have - that is, I never feel like I know exactly what the author thinks of all this, in spite of the best efforts of a frank and forthcoming narrator.

What I'm Reading Now

I don't know if Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear is any good or not. I'm leaning a little toward "not," but I'm interested to see where it'll go, and I think the attempt is admirable even if the execution is a little clumsy and heavy on the infodumps. Somewhere in the very distant past, a small child is separated from her family by an earthquake. She follows the river in search of help or food, gets mauled by a mountain lion or similar, and is eventually nursed back to health by the Clan, who are either Neanderthals or not Neanderthals - or maybe the child is a Neanderthal and they're the other one. Anyway, they're shorter and darker than her own people, suspicious of the odd-looking outsider but willing to help.

The infodumping is sometimes very jarring. I don't expect a book about cave people to use only language reflecting the knowledge and beliefs of cave people - we don't have any examples, for one thing, and this is a book written in 1980, for 1980. But when our new clan arrives on the scene, we get a lot of talk about "supraorbital ridges" and other skull-shape jargon. This is both too much and not enough. The transition between the POV of the characters and the POV of an author who has just got back from the natural history museum with an armful of new books is not always graceful. But it's possible that either Auel or I will get used to it eventually.

What I Plan to Read Next

I now have Picnic at Hanging Rock, a book from Australia! and also The Maias by Eça de Queiroz, which can be one of my books from Europe. I haven't forgotten my continents challenge, even if it seems like I have.

Regular posting has not resumed! I didn't finish anything this week but Catullus (Frank O. Copley's hip-and-with-it translation style couldn't cope with the Roman marriage song; Peter Green fared a little better) and I've begun The Making of a Saint, a historical romance by the young W. Somerset Maugham that Maugham later pretended not to have published. My feeling so far is that Maugham was right to be embarrassed. It isn't lurid or cheesy, just a little boring. Some Renaissance Italians have ill-advised intrigues and affairs, in what is supposed to be a memoir but doesn't read like one at all. Maybe it'll pick up!

I'm also reading A Girl of the Limberlost, which is still wonderfully weird, and about which I owe osprey_archer another post. A young man friend has been produced for Elnora, along with his straw fiancee. The fiancee's deficiencies are so heavy-handedly foregrounded every time she's mentioned that she has become my second favorite character out of pure spite. My favorite is still Kate Comstock, who could have instantly become less awful at any time, as it turns out, if not for one thing. . .but there will be more about that soon.