The Literary Link List

Links to pieces, old and new, on literature: 

• Classics and cocktails?  Yes, please!  Classic literature and the cocktails they inspired over at Flavorwire
• Pie chart!  The most popular Kurt Vonnegut tomes over at PWxyz
• BookRiot rounds up the best literary TED talks.  Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity was simply delightful!
• Ezra Pound on literary criticism over at Brain Pickings.
• I want to read this book!  Alexandra Popoff discusses her new book  The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants over at Publishers Weekly.

Review: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

title: Mrs. Dalloway [purchase here]

author: Virginia Woolf

published: originally 1925; my edition 1953

genre: literary fiction

pages: 296

source: my parent's bookshelf and now mine :)

GENERAL SPOILER ALERT:  If you've never read Mrs. Dalloway, and would like to discover it with no previous knowledge of the plot, I suggest you stop here.  Since it was published in 1925, I'm writing with the assumption that I'm the one late to the party (which is usually the case with the classics) and many of you lovers of literary fiction have probably either read it already or are super familiar with the plot.  So, if not, stop.  Now.  You've been warned. 

"So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying 'that is all' more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all.  Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking." (page 58-59)

My parents are in the midst of a remodeling project (they're adding french doors that open onto a deck off of the dining room), and a crucial part of any home project is the purge, the figuring out of what to get rid of and what to keep.  On the chopping block was a bookshelf full of vintage books, mostly classics, that they'd acquired over the years.  With the exception of my recent splurge at Strand, I've been willfully resisting bookstores, so I'm excited for the shopping bag full of books that I'll be taking home to NYC bit by bit over my next several visits.

The first book from my haul I dove into was Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, chosen because it was referenced multiple times in Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest, and I wanted in on the references.

This copy was my mom's, evidently for a class in college.  I LOVED reading her notes in the front and back of the book (doesn't she have neat handwriting!?!), and it was pretty fascinating to see how they were teaching the tome when she was in college, though I wish I had read the notes after I read the book.  I kept looking for evidence of Clarissa's latent lesbianism and kept waiting for Septimus to finally crack.

I really enjoyed Woolf's narrative style.  It reminded me of a clean, steady continuous shot in a film, where the director is able to jump from one character's perspective to another seamlessly.  The shift between each characters' perspective seemed effortless and Woolf was able to weave the central characters' story lines together in a way that made sense and didn't seem forced (which is an issue many authors have when they try to compose a coherent novel comprised of multiple interconnecting stories).  

Like Joyce's Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway takes place on a Wednesday in June (the entire 700+ pages of Ulysses takes place on June 16th, 1904), and like Joyce, Woolf is incredibly focused on the interior life of her characters, on the innumerable thoughts, experiences and impressions that collectively make up how an individual experiences the world. However, Woolf succeeds where I've often felt Joyce fails, in that her purpose seems to be communication whereas Joyce many times seems content with incomprehension and inaccessibility for the common reader (ex:  Finnegan's Wake).  To be fair, I haven't read Ulysses yet (I will!  It's on the list and is coming, along with a Bloomsday Reader, in that same shopping bag full of books from my parents!), but reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school left a bad taste in my mouth.  Even though both Woolf and Joyce are exploring the interior lives of characters, Joyce's exploration seems masturbatory and personal whereas Woolf's feels open and communicative.  Maybe I'll change my mind after spending more time with Joyce...

Balance and counterbalance seem to factor heavily into Mrs. Dalloway.  Woolf is constantly balancing two oppositional forces (desire v. duty, coming together v. falling apart, masculine v. feminine) and these conflicts serve to unify all the disparate action occurring over the course of the story: Clarissa pulling herself together at her dressing table in preparation for the evening's party balanced against Septimus' slow descent and unraveling to the point of suicide; her desire for Peter Walsh balanced against her dutiful marriage to Richard Dalloway; the vibrant Sally Seton of Clarissa's youth (with whom she shared a passionate kiss) balanced against the woman Sally becomes post-marriage to Lord Rosseter; women who feel deeply yet pull themselves together and press on balanced against the men, acculturated to feel nothing, who give up and fall apart.  There is just so much going on in terms of detail and imagery but it was all essential and working toward the common unifying themes.  Such a tight piece of writing!  Mrs. Dalloway is a master class in revision and paring down a lengthy piece to just the purely essential.

And the semi-colons!  Recently, I listened to UC Berkeley Professor John Bishop via iTunesU discuss Mrs. Dalloway, and he pointed out that her use of semi-colons were another example of coming together v. falling apart:  semi-colons take two sentences/ideas and bring them together, making them one sentence.  Pretty damn clever, Mrs. Woolf.  

Bishop also pointed out some interesting parallels between Woolf's life and that of her central characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, which I hadn't realized because I haven't read much on Woolf's biography.  Woolf was a central member of the Bloomsbury Group, and often hosted parties and gatherings for those involved, so, like Mrs. Dalloway, a part of her life concerned the bringing of people together.  Woolf later committed suicide by filling her pockets with stones and drowning herself, allowing herself to come apart like Septimus.  Crazy how life imitates art.

Rubric rating: 9. I loved it and I'm excited to explore more by Woolf.  In fact, To The Lighthouse is on my nightstand...

EVERYBODY loves LISTS: 10 Classic Books I Feel Like I Need to Read

I am a list lover.  I actually keep a running master list in a notebook of books I want to read. (Prior to that, book recommendations lived in the margins of my planner...and in my phone...and on tons of random post-it notes...I needed to consolidate!).  Over the course of my literary self-education, I feel like there are several classic tomes that keep coming up as essential reading.  I've narrowed my list down to ten for the next year or so...or more... (in the spirit of manageability):

 

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot    I feel like I keep coming across this title, and I've never read anything by Ms. Evans, so the time has come to see what all the fuss is about.
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Foydor Dostoevsky   Crime and Punishment was required reading back in high school, and I think enough time has gone by that I've sufficiently recovered enough to give him another go.
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf     Last time I was in Baltimore, I rescued some books my parents were ready to part with that were originally published in the 50s and 60s.  Among them was Mrs. Dalloway, which has been on my "must read" list since reading Bouillier's The Mystery Guest.  I'm about 2/3 of the way through.
4. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray   His middlename is "Makepeace."  'Nuff said.
5. Persuasion by Jane Austen   I'm an Austen lover, and was given her complete works for my 18th birthday by my Aunt Aimee, but as of yet haven't made it past Emma and Pride and Prejudice.
6. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens    Similar to Dostoevsky, I read Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities in 6th grade and haven't revisited his work since.  It's time.
7. Ulysses by James Joyce      I hated Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I read it in high school, but I feel like maybe with the benefit of age and perspective, I'll come to feel differently about Joyce...
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust     I accidentally bought Sodom and Gomorrah a few years ago not realizing (until I started the introduction) that it was 4 novels into a 6 novel set...so I'd like to start at the beginning and work my way through...or at least try...
9. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee     I know.  I know.  It's time.  Past time, actually.
10. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence    I LOVED reading about Geoff Dyer trying to write about reading D.H. Lawrence.  So maybe reading D.H. Lawrence will be equally as enjoyable?

What do you think?  What should I add?  Omit?  

OMG I'M PSYCHIC!!! Either that, or MY SNARK MAKES THINGS HAPPEN!!!!!

On June 19th, I posted a link to an article about the new book Jane Eyre Laid Bare, an erotic retelling of Jane Eyre, and made the crack: "What's next? Pride, Prejudice, and Penetration???"  


Well, apparently the universe was listening a touch too closely.


According to The Independent, this is a real thing!!!!  And there are more to come!!!  In my opinion, we can absolutely blame Fifty Shades of Grey for this surge of poorly written BDSM.  Other classics that are getting all sexed up by the Clandestine Classics Collection:  Northanger Abbey, Wuthering Heights and the Sherlock Holmes series.


I hope you're reading this on an empty stomach, or what you'll find below will seriously put you in danger of losing your lunch.  Here's an excerpt from the new erotic retelling of Austen's classic:

"Elizabeth trailed kisses along his throat and neck until she reached his earlobe and took it between her teeth. “Please take me,” she whispered. “I need it. I ache for it.” Her words were met with only a grunt of approval by Darcy.

He pulled back from her and checked their surroundings, partly to assure they were alone, but also to discover a hiding place for them that was away from the road. He took hold of Elizabeth’s hand and pulled her away from the lane to the trees beyond. They walked on for a short time until they came to a small clearing and without another word, he pulled her to the ground, laying her down on the grass and covering her body with his."

***headdesk***

Review: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

title:  The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books 

and the People Who Read Them [purchase here]

author:  Elif Batuman

genre: literary nonfiction essays

pages: 296

published: 2010

source:  New York Public Library

"In fact I had no historical consciousness in those days, and no interest in acquiring one.  It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way. Why be a slave to the arbitrary truth? I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty.  It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they are really the same thing."  (page 10)

I added Batuman's The Possessed to my 30 Before 30 Literary Bucket List for several reasons: 

1) I follow her on Twitter and find her tweets hilarious and endearing (and her twitter handle is nothing short of amazing).

2) I LOVE narrative nonfiction.  I personally feel like I absorb more information when it's contextualized within the author's personal experience.

3) I've read her work for The New Yorker before (I especially liked her piece on the Davilov bells).

4)  I'm rereading Anna Karenina this summer, and figured a refresher course of sorts on Russian literature was probably in order.  I read Crime and Punishment in high school and a few Chekhov plays in college, so my Russian lit experience is fairly limited.  Any additional historical/biographical content/context can be nothing but helpful.

I was not disappointed.  Batuman is nothing short of delightful!  The Possessed was perfectly balanced between incredibly interesting information (from Babel to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and back again) and Batuman's anecdotes, and was completely accessible.  The flow, the pace, the style...it just worked.

My favorite chapter:  "Who Killed Tolstoy?", in which Batuman shares her experience staying at Yasnaya Polyana (which is the estate where Tolstoy was born, spent most of his life, and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina) for the International Tolstoy Conference and weaves in research to support her hypothesis that Tolstoy could have potentially been murdered.  Very funny.  Absolutely fascinating.

Fun fact:  

Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana estate : snakes :: Earnest Hemingway's Key West house : three toed cats.  

"'There are no cats at the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana,' begins Amy Mandelker's well-known study, Framing Anna Karenina:

'Curled, or rather, coiled in the sunny patches in the Tolstoy house, protecting it from pestilential infestations, instead of the expected feline emblems of domesticity...[are] snakes...The ancestors of these ophibian house pets were adopted by Tolstoy's ailurophobic wife, Sofia Andreyevna [Sonya], to rid the house of rodents.'

I was contemplating these lines on the second morning of talks, when I counted a total of four cats actually inside of the conference room.  That said, in fairness to Amy Mandelker, you couldn't accuse Yasnaya Polyana of a shortage of snakes.  At breakfast, one historian had described his experience researching the marginalia in Tolstoy's editions of Kant: he had seen a snake right there in the archive." (page 117)

Rubric rating: 8.5.  I really hope she's working on another book!!!  Or revives her blog.

Update:  I've now finished 6 of the 30 titles on my 30-before-30 literary bucket list, with a few more in progress.  I need to pick up the pace!!!

Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff  (in progress)
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta    (in progress)  
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **   (in progress) 
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck 

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell 
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading

From page to film: thoughts?

Two new trailers have hit the web over the past couple weeks, one for Baz Lurhmann's re-imagining (??) of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and the other for Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.  My thoughts, and each trailer, just in case you haven't seen them yet:

Even if you watch the trailer with no sound, it's clearly textbook Lurhmann:  the man knows how to shoot a gorgeous looking party.  But dear lord, autotune????  Seriously???  So we couldn't procure the rights to any era-appropriate music???  I love Gatsby.  It's one of my favorite of Fitzgerald's works and the thought of it being turned into a coke/ecstasy-fueled debauched romp just breaks my heart a bit.  Luhrmann tends to favor spectacle over story, and if what he did to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is any indication of how he'll treat Gatsby...count me out.  

Gah.  I *hate* this new trend of letting celebrities sing for themselves.  If Anne Hathaway wasn't Anne Hathaway, would anyone really want to hear her warble?  I mean, she's not terrible, and I love Anne Hathaway (she's come a long way since The Princess Diaries and girl can act!) and I get that casting big name actors and actresses fills seats in the theater...but man.  There have been so many super talented women who've played Fantine over the years who can SING.  Visually, the movie looks stunning, but since the last time I read Les Mis was in, oh, fourth grade, I'll have to revisit it before seeing it...which will probably be On Demand...next summer... 

So what are your thoughts on these two trailers?  Excited?  Terrified?  Will you see either of the movies?