This is a difficult book to review, because the author hides a key element of the plot until about a third of the way through the book. If a reviewer mentions this key plot element, the reviewer subverts the author's intention of drawing you into the story in a particular way, and with a specific perspective. But any discussion of the book that doesn't mention the hidden plot point leaves a reviewer....hanging. The review can't mention the issues that make the book so unique and compelling. It's also going to be difficult to draw in the readers who are most likely to be interested in the book.
Most reviews discussed the hidden plot point.
Personally, I thought it was a wonderful book, even though I knew the secret. My book group said that they couldn't imagine reading it without the surprise -- one member even said that the revelation transformed the book from not particularly interesting to one of the most compelling books that we've read.
You can make your own judgement: this book was short-listed for a Man Booker prize in its year of publication, and the internet is lousy with spoilers, if you're interested in tracking down that kind of review.
I'm going to avoid the issue entirely by addressing a relevant but unrelated question: is this book SF?
What makes a book science fiction? Or, 'SF' as I like to think of it, where 'SF' means 'speculative fiction'.
Now that's a question with many answers, and a question that deserves a much longer and more thoughtful analysis than I'm planning to stick in a book review.
One answer is very simple: SF is written by SF authors. Karen Joy Fowler....does she qualify? Maybe. She hangs around with SF authors, like Pat Murphy. Fowler is also one of the founders of the James Tiptree, Jr award, given each year to the SF work that best explores the meaning of gender. So at a minimum, Fowler has tight ties to the SF community.
Another answer: is the book filed in the SF section of your bookstore or library? Hm...second point in favour. I found my copy in the SF section of Munro's bookstore in Victoria.
Third answer: does it read like SF? Again, yes. As is typical with SF, the story explicitly starts in the middle. SF generally launches into the middle of a story, situation, or future that you'd never have imagined for yourself, and it's only as the book progresses that you begin to understand what's going on. Why is SF structured this way? Mostly because starting a novel with a bunch of exposition about the universe you're in, the future you've immersed in, or the technology that the story is discussing would be a very very boring way to start a book.
Fourth answer: is the book about character, is it about events, or is it about ideas? The *best* SF (IMHO), is about ideas, and We are all completely beside ourselves is definitely about ideas. Big ideas, fundamental ideas about our society. Check.
Final possible answer: is the book about science or technology? Contrary to popular opinion, IMHO, this is the weakest test. In fact, this is why I prefer to think of SF as 'speculative fiction' rather than 'science fiction'. Science fiction is, I guess, a fiction that explores science, science futures, or the implications of science on society. In its degenerate form -- as long as you understand that I'm using 'degenerate' in its most positive possible sense -- science fiction is fiction that includes specific scientific innovations like space travel and laser beams. And battles. And very very big bangs. While speculative fiction is simply fiction that asks 'What if'.
We are all completely beside ourselves definitely asks 'What if'. Check again.
So, if you enjoy SF, particularly thoughtful, well-written SF that has compelling characters and asks challenging questions, you'll enjoy We are all completely beside ourselves.
But you are also very likely to enjoy the book even if you would never voluntarily read a book with a space ship on the cover. There are no space ships in this book. It takes place in the present (okay, 2007, but that's when the book was published), not the future. And it does not involve a single piece of uninvented technology.
It only starts in the middle, and takes you to an unexpected place.
Sunday, 9 April 2017
Monday, 13 February 2017
Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
I've joined a book group again! This is the third book that I've read with the new group.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a brief novel told in the second person. The narrator is a Pakistani who meets a stranger on a street in Pakistan, takes him for tea and then supper, all the while telling the anonymous listener the story of his life.
The narrator is a young Pakistani man from a 'good' but impoverished family who travels to the US for University, falls in love with an American woman, and works for an American finance firm for a couple of years before becoming disillusioned and returning home post-911.
This is a book that I didn't enjoy on first reading. I'm all for artificiality -- I read science fiction! I enjoy meta-narratives! I am not opposed to the post-modern -- but the frame story felt contrived, and the ambiguous ending seemed like a gimmick. Overall, it seemed to me that the book was an overly clever attempt to educate post-911 Americans about why they were not necessarily universally loved.
The night before the book group meeting I picked it up again in an attempt to figure out something more to say about the book during our discussion. This was a useful exercise. The book was actually more cleverly structured and written than I had originally noticed. The narrator's American love....was actually a metaphor for America. The title of the book was actually significant, and rather different than I had assumed. No matter where I opened it, I found quotable text that not only moved the plot along, but illustrated the underlying themes of the book in ways that I hadn't noticed when I was concentrating on the plot.
The discussion during out meeting last night was also useful. It reminded me of how immediately engaging the book was, and how the second person narration pulled you in to the story. It pulled out details of the book, its plot, and its characters in ways that I hadn't thought of myself.
In summary, reading this book as part of a book club made me appreciate it much more than I would have had I encountered it on my own. I still think that its topicality is one of the reasons that it was short-listed for a Man Booker when it was published in the mid-2000s. But is that such a bad thing? And the book is better-written and more complex than I initially gave it credit for.
Sunday, 29 November 2015
Paris 1919
Read: November 2015
Pages: 496
Sometimes a book comes to right at the time it is most relevant to your life or to your understanding of the world. Sometimes a book comes to you before you're ready for it, and you only realize later that you should have paid more attention. And sometimes a book comes into your life too late.
I've been meaning to read Paris 1919 ever since it came out in 2000 to stunningly good reviews. A copy even entered my house as a loan to Harvey in the intervening years....but I didn't get around to reading it before it departed back to its owner. I finally read it this year and thought: this would have seemed more relevant in the '90s or the Naughties, when the Wall had more recently come down, and the Bosnian war was fresh in everyone's minds. The book has a lot to say about the ethnic and political divisions in the Balkans in particular, and understanding the post-WWI history of the region is quite illuminating in terms of understanding the events of the 90s.
But saying that I read Paris 1919 too late is too glib. I'm sure it made a much bigger splash at the time of its release because of its discussion of the Balkans, and the immediate relevance of that history to then-current events. But the book doesn't just talk about the Balkans. World War I really was a global war. It touched everywhere from Europe to the Middle East to the Far East, and understanding that war and its impact can help one better understand those regions and their history. In fact, reading Paris 1919 even helped me better understand The Windup Bird Chronicle! not to mention Lawrence of Arabia (the movie, that is). It also gave me some fascinating insights into the political background to the founding of the state of Israel.
The book itself delves into detail about the discussions at the Paris Peace Conference, and discusses in depth the personality, motivations, and political manueverings of all of the major players. It's hard not to come away with an acute understanding of just how doomed that intensive 6 month period of "peace-making" was. Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau between them tried to settle the concerns of many of the peoples of the world. It was a task beyond any such group of men.
Pages: 496
Sometimes a book comes to right at the time it is most relevant to your life or to your understanding of the world. Sometimes a book comes to you before you're ready for it, and you only realize later that you should have paid more attention. And sometimes a book comes into your life too late.
I've been meaning to read Paris 1919 ever since it came out in 2000 to stunningly good reviews. A copy even entered my house as a loan to Harvey in the intervening years....but I didn't get around to reading it before it departed back to its owner. I finally read it this year and thought: this would have seemed more relevant in the '90s or the Naughties, when the Wall had more recently come down, and the Bosnian war was fresh in everyone's minds. The book has a lot to say about the ethnic and political divisions in the Balkans in particular, and understanding the post-WWI history of the region is quite illuminating in terms of understanding the events of the 90s.
But saying that I read Paris 1919 too late is too glib. I'm sure it made a much bigger splash at the time of its release because of its discussion of the Balkans, and the immediate relevance of that history to then-current events. But the book doesn't just talk about the Balkans. World War I really was a global war. It touched everywhere from Europe to the Middle East to the Far East, and understanding that war and its impact can help one better understand those regions and their history. In fact, reading Paris 1919 even helped me better understand The Windup Bird Chronicle! not to mention Lawrence of Arabia (the movie, that is). It also gave me some fascinating insights into the political background to the founding of the state of Israel.
The book itself delves into detail about the discussions at the Paris Peace Conference, and discusses in depth the personality, motivations, and political manueverings of all of the major players. It's hard not to come away with an acute understanding of just how doomed that intensive 6 month period of "peace-making" was. Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau between them tried to settle the concerns of many of the peoples of the world. It was a task beyond any such group of men.
Monday, 2 November 2015
The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Read: Sept 1 to Oct. 2
Pages:
All of Murakami's books say "author of The Windup Bird Chronicle" on their covers. My sister tells me that The Windup Bird Chronicle is on a list of "100 books to read before you die" that she downloaded from the internet. The book was highly recommended to me by a friend.
So I read it this fall, after an abortive attempt to read the e-book version.
What is the book about? Did I enjoy it? What insights did the book give me? What thoughts did it spark?
Those are the kinds of questions that I think about as I'm reading a book that I'm about to review on this blog. But as it turns out, for The Windup Bird Chronicle, those are all difficult questions.
The first question was the most difficult, oddly.
I could start by summarizing the contents of the book. It's a novel set in contemporary Japan that follows about a year in the life of an unemployed legal assistant who lives in the suburbs of Tokyo. It's told in the first person, and has fantastic and absurd elements.
But ....what is it "about"?
One of the blurbs on the cover claims that it's about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria that preceded the Second World War.
There are several characters in the book whose lives were fundamentally affected by Japan's wartime occupation of mainland China: an elderly fortuneteller who appears only in flashback, an elderly retired schoolteacher who brings our protagonist a puzzling legacy and recounts his wartime experiences at some length, and Malta and Creta Kano, pivotal characters who as children fled the recapture of Nanking by the Chinese.
But if the book is about this invasion and occupation, why are only secondary characters affected by these events? Why does the story follow the life of an aimless former salaryman, and why is the plot driven by his relationship with his wife, his lost cat, his teenage neighbour, his annoying brother-in-law, and the woman he meets while sitting in a square in downtown Tokyo? And why is the book called The Windup Bird Chronicle, after the bird who briefly perches in his backyard tree and makes a noise like it is winding up the world?
Not to mention that I'm not convinced that the stories of wartime Manchuria are meant to be taken literally. The story of the dry well reeks of metaphor, and the odour only increases when the protagonist himself finds a dry well, and enters it seeking (literally?) enlightenment.
In fact, the whole book is shot through with metaphor, dreams, dream-like experiences, coincidences, and obviously meaningful items and events that somehow never cohere into meaningfulness.
In other words -- no, I don't know what the book is about. But the hints seem so numerous and so obviously planted that my failure to understand seems like a personal failing -- or conversely, beside the point? I can't decide which.
Did I like the book?
Again, this is an oddly difficult question. I read the first half in dutiful portions, more because I meant to finish it than because I couldn't put it down. But at the same time it was oddly compelling. The story is told in the first person, in straightforward prose, in a very matter-of-fact tone. Not a lot happens. His wife goes to work, returns late, and doesn't want to eat the supper he's prepared. He searches for the lost cat in the dead-end alley behind his house, and discovers instead an abandoned house with an overgrown yard that doesn't contain his cat -- though the bored teenager across the alley claims that she sees a lot of cats there. An anonymous woman caller with a very familiar voice calls mid day and initiates phone sex without warning. He meets a psychic by appointment in a downtown restaurant, who recognizes him even though he can't find and therefore doesn't wear the polka dot tie he was supposed to put on so that she will be able to identify him. He dreams about a sexual encounter with a woman wearing his wife's dress, and then later discovers that the woman he dreamt about also remembers the dream.
Eventually I realized that I was allowed to enjoy the experience, even if I didn't really understand what was going on, and my reading accelerated. Perhaps because it seemed that if I only read a bit more, things would start to come together and the whole book would make sense....
What insights did the book give me? What thoughts did it spark?
There was a great quote from the protagonist that I meant to pull out and include here, before my copy of the book vanished into the chaos of my current home reno. It went something like "I don't enjoy going to modern art movies, because as you watch them, things just happen." It seemed as if the author was making an ironic nod to his audience.
I'm not sure what else to say. I did enjoy reading it. More than a month later, the book has stuck with me, and as I write about it I continue the effort to pull everything together in my head. (Was the anonymous woman on the phone actually Kumiko, his wife? Why are all of our protagonist's emotional reactions so muted? He treats the teenaged neighbour no differently after she takes actions that could easily have lead to his death. What's the significance of that particular brand of whisky, and why does it keep reappearing throughout the book?)
I might recommend it to a friend myself. But I'm not sure. What would I say if they came back to me and asked me what I thought about it myself? Or if they asked me to explain the book to them? Or perhaps worse, what if they explained the book to me? :-)
Hm...following the ideal that excellence only follows egoless effort, I suppose I'd have to recommend the book. It was novel. It held my attention. It entertained me. It made me think. And maybe, just maybe, the person to whom I recommended it would explain it to me afterwards, and I'd learn something.
So recommended, at least to readers who are willing to work at their fiction.
Pages:
All of Murakami's books say "author of The Windup Bird Chronicle" on their covers. My sister tells me that The Windup Bird Chronicle is on a list of "100 books to read before you die" that she downloaded from the internet. The book was highly recommended to me by a friend.
So I read it this fall, after an abortive attempt to read the e-book version.
What is the book about? Did I enjoy it? What insights did the book give me? What thoughts did it spark?
Those are the kinds of questions that I think about as I'm reading a book that I'm about to review on this blog. But as it turns out, for The Windup Bird Chronicle, those are all difficult questions.
The first question was the most difficult, oddly.
I could start by summarizing the contents of the book. It's a novel set in contemporary Japan that follows about a year in the life of an unemployed legal assistant who lives in the suburbs of Tokyo. It's told in the first person, and has fantastic and absurd elements.
But ....what is it "about"?
One of the blurbs on the cover claims that it's about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria that preceded the Second World War.
There are several characters in the book whose lives were fundamentally affected by Japan's wartime occupation of mainland China: an elderly fortuneteller who appears only in flashback, an elderly retired schoolteacher who brings our protagonist a puzzling legacy and recounts his wartime experiences at some length, and Malta and Creta Kano, pivotal characters who as children fled the recapture of Nanking by the Chinese.
But if the book is about this invasion and occupation, why are only secondary characters affected by these events? Why does the story follow the life of an aimless former salaryman, and why is the plot driven by his relationship with his wife, his lost cat, his teenage neighbour, his annoying brother-in-law, and the woman he meets while sitting in a square in downtown Tokyo? And why is the book called The Windup Bird Chronicle, after the bird who briefly perches in his backyard tree and makes a noise like it is winding up the world?
Not to mention that I'm not convinced that the stories of wartime Manchuria are meant to be taken literally. The story of the dry well reeks of metaphor, and the odour only increases when the protagonist himself finds a dry well, and enters it seeking (literally?) enlightenment.
In fact, the whole book is shot through with metaphor, dreams, dream-like experiences, coincidences, and obviously meaningful items and events that somehow never cohere into meaningfulness.
In other words -- no, I don't know what the book is about. But the hints seem so numerous and so obviously planted that my failure to understand seems like a personal failing -- or conversely, beside the point? I can't decide which.
Did I like the book?
Again, this is an oddly difficult question. I read the first half in dutiful portions, more because I meant to finish it than because I couldn't put it down. But at the same time it was oddly compelling. The story is told in the first person, in straightforward prose, in a very matter-of-fact tone. Not a lot happens. His wife goes to work, returns late, and doesn't want to eat the supper he's prepared. He searches for the lost cat in the dead-end alley behind his house, and discovers instead an abandoned house with an overgrown yard that doesn't contain his cat -- though the bored teenager across the alley claims that she sees a lot of cats there. An anonymous woman caller with a very familiar voice calls mid day and initiates phone sex without warning. He meets a psychic by appointment in a downtown restaurant, who recognizes him even though he can't find and therefore doesn't wear the polka dot tie he was supposed to put on so that she will be able to identify him. He dreams about a sexual encounter with a woman wearing his wife's dress, and then later discovers that the woman he dreamt about also remembers the dream.
Eventually I realized that I was allowed to enjoy the experience, even if I didn't really understand what was going on, and my reading accelerated. Perhaps because it seemed that if I only read a bit more, things would start to come together and the whole book would make sense....
What insights did the book give me? What thoughts did it spark?
There was a great quote from the protagonist that I meant to pull out and include here, before my copy of the book vanished into the chaos of my current home reno. It went something like "I don't enjoy going to modern art movies, because as you watch them, things just happen." It seemed as if the author was making an ironic nod to his audience.
I'm not sure what else to say. I did enjoy reading it. More than a month later, the book has stuck with me, and as I write about it I continue the effort to pull everything together in my head. (Was the anonymous woman on the phone actually Kumiko, his wife? Why are all of our protagonist's emotional reactions so muted? He treats the teenaged neighbour no differently after she takes actions that could easily have lead to his death. What's the significance of that particular brand of whisky, and why does it keep reappearing throughout the book?)
I might recommend it to a friend myself. But I'm not sure. What would I say if they came back to me and asked me what I thought about it myself? Or if they asked me to explain the book to them? Or perhaps worse, what if they explained the book to me? :-)
Hm...following the ideal that excellence only follows egoless effort, I suppose I'd have to recommend the book. It was novel. It held my attention. It entertained me. It made me think. And maybe, just maybe, the person to whom I recommended it would explain it to me afterwards, and I'd learn something.
So recommended, at least to readers who are willing to work at their fiction.
Sunday, 13 September 2015
A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollestonecraft
Published: 1792
Mary Wollestonecraft was one of the historical heroines of"Second Wave" feminism, identified as "the first feminist", and her defining book A Vindication of the Rights of Women lauded as "the first" published work of feminist writing. The "firsts" weren't true, of course, but in the early days of academic feminism the claims drew a lot of attention to Wollestonecraft. Wollestonecraft was certainly an early feminist in the Western tradition, and was unique in her era as a woman who supported herself by her writing. She was also the mother of Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and Wollestonecrafts' own works presage Romanticism.
As you might imagine, Wollestonecraft has been the subject of many biographies.
I'm no longer sure why she initially drew my attention, but at this point I've read something like four of those biographies. Wollestonecraft was a fascinating -- and difficult -- person. No surprise. The ordinary, less-stubborn, and more practical middle-class woman of the late eighteenth century became wives. Failing marriage, they became dependents of their married siblings, or perhaps governesses or paid companions. The truly unfortunate presumably became prostitutes and/or died in penury. All of those fates were intolerable to Wollestonecraft. Some combination of determination and luck allowed her to transcend her failed career as a governess and her failed career as a school proprietress, and allowed her to become a professional writer.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is by far her most famous work. Despite its title, it's not really a general justification of rights for women. It's a treatise on education, and in particular, women's education. Its title is a product of its time, and a product of marketing. Wollestonecraft was writing in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution of 1789, and its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. More particularly, her title echoes that of her own earlier work, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, which was written as a hot rebuttal of the conservative Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. That book made her reputation and gave her a public profile. It was natural to title her next book in such a way as to remind readers of that fact.
Is the book relevant today? I bookmarked a few quotes that could have been written yesterday. But overall, its arguments aren't ones that one would make today, at least in the Western world. In Vindication, Wollestonecraft argues that women's intellectual and moral inferiority is a result of their ignorance. When girls were educated at all, their education focused on domestic skills and pleasing men. The result: ignorant, petty, and vain women who were unfit for their natural roles as mothers, teachers of children, and companions to men. Worst of all, women were unfit to live moral lives. The cure that Wollestonecraft advocated was to educate girls alongside boys, teaching all children the same range of historical, philosophical, and religious subjects.
Is there any reason to read Vindications today? It's certainly an important historical work. If you're interested in Mary Wollestonecraft, it is an essential complement to reading about her life. And like the Claudine novels, Vindications throws unintended light on the era in which it was written.
Wollestonecraft was raised in a family that skimmed the bottom of the middle class through the improvidence of her father. She worked as a governess for aristocratic Irish families. She operated a school for middle class girls, and she circulated in intellectual circles both in England and later in Revolutionary France. She was, of course, acquainted with servants, with whom she lived for most of her life. The portrait that she paints of women's lives was drawn from her own experience. It was designed to resonate with her audience as plausible background to her arguments for women's education.
It's upsetting.
The most telling part is that Wollestonecraft didn't argue that women would be just as able as men, given the same education and opportunities. Either she didn't believe that herself, or she thought that such an argument was be too far beyond the pale to be included in a serious work of analysis and advocacy -- even as she demonstrated her own learning via extensive in-line references to various learned sources throughout her work.
And even if you're familiar with period literature, you don't get the texture of everyday life from Jane Austen. Wollestonecraft paints a world where men automatically patronized women or preyed upon them....or both. Where women were on the whole ignorant, gossipy, scheming, weak, and silly...because middle class and aristocratic women had no outlet for their energies, no cultivation for their minds, and were degraded by the necessity of obedience first to their fathers, and then to their husbands. Even 'progressive' contemporary thinkers like Rousseau valued women almost exclusively for their appearance.
Yes, Wollestonecraft was writing a polemic. But from my young experiences working various blue collar jobs, I found that gossip, opinion, and petty scheming are much closer to the surface among people with less education. Education really does broaden one's perspective -- or at least teaches you to moderate your less attractive instincts. In a world where women's education was discouraged or blocked, I can well imagine that her world looked much as she described.
The moral of the story: if you're a woman, it's hard not to believe in historical progress. Female time travellers take note! Visiting different eras would be fascinating, but if you're looking to settle somewhere, the modern era rocks.
Mary Wollestonecraft was one of the historical heroines of"Second Wave" feminism, identified as "the first feminist", and her defining book A Vindication of the Rights of Women lauded as "the first" published work of feminist writing. The "firsts" weren't true, of course, but in the early days of academic feminism the claims drew a lot of attention to Wollestonecraft. Wollestonecraft was certainly an early feminist in the Western tradition, and was unique in her era as a woman who supported herself by her writing. She was also the mother of Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and Wollestonecrafts' own works presage Romanticism.
As you might imagine, Wollestonecraft has been the subject of many biographies.
I'm no longer sure why she initially drew my attention, but at this point I've read something like four of those biographies. Wollestonecraft was a fascinating -- and difficult -- person. No surprise. The ordinary, less-stubborn, and more practical middle-class woman of the late eighteenth century became wives. Failing marriage, they became dependents of their married siblings, or perhaps governesses or paid companions. The truly unfortunate presumably became prostitutes and/or died in penury. All of those fates were intolerable to Wollestonecraft. Some combination of determination and luck allowed her to transcend her failed career as a governess and her failed career as a school proprietress, and allowed her to become a professional writer.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is by far her most famous work. Despite its title, it's not really a general justification of rights for women. It's a treatise on education, and in particular, women's education. Its title is a product of its time, and a product of marketing. Wollestonecraft was writing in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution of 1789, and its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. More particularly, her title echoes that of her own earlier work, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, which was written as a hot rebuttal of the conservative Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. That book made her reputation and gave her a public profile. It was natural to title her next book in such a way as to remind readers of that fact.
Is the book relevant today? I bookmarked a few quotes that could have been written yesterday. But overall, its arguments aren't ones that one would make today, at least in the Western world. In Vindication, Wollestonecraft argues that women's intellectual and moral inferiority is a result of their ignorance. When girls were educated at all, their education focused on domestic skills and pleasing men. The result: ignorant, petty, and vain women who were unfit for their natural roles as mothers, teachers of children, and companions to men. Worst of all, women were unfit to live moral lives. The cure that Wollestonecraft advocated was to educate girls alongside boys, teaching all children the same range of historical, philosophical, and religious subjects.
Is there any reason to read Vindications today? It's certainly an important historical work. If you're interested in Mary Wollestonecraft, it is an essential complement to reading about her life. And like the Claudine novels, Vindications throws unintended light on the era in which it was written.
Wollestonecraft was raised in a family that skimmed the bottom of the middle class through the improvidence of her father. She worked as a governess for aristocratic Irish families. She operated a school for middle class girls, and she circulated in intellectual circles both in England and later in Revolutionary France. She was, of course, acquainted with servants, with whom she lived for most of her life. The portrait that she paints of women's lives was drawn from her own experience. It was designed to resonate with her audience as plausible background to her arguments for women's education.
It's upsetting.
The most telling part is that Wollestonecraft didn't argue that women would be just as able as men, given the same education and opportunities. Either she didn't believe that herself, or she thought that such an argument was be too far beyond the pale to be included in a serious work of analysis and advocacy -- even as she demonstrated her own learning via extensive in-line references to various learned sources throughout her work.
And even if you're familiar with period literature, you don't get the texture of everyday life from Jane Austen. Wollestonecraft paints a world where men automatically patronized women or preyed upon them....or both. Where women were on the whole ignorant, gossipy, scheming, weak, and silly...because middle class and aristocratic women had no outlet for their energies, no cultivation for their minds, and were degraded by the necessity of obedience first to their fathers, and then to their husbands. Even 'progressive' contemporary thinkers like Rousseau valued women almost exclusively for their appearance.
Yes, Wollestonecraft was writing a polemic. But from my young experiences working various blue collar jobs, I found that gossip, opinion, and petty scheming are much closer to the surface among people with less education. Education really does broaden one's perspective -- or at least teaches you to moderate your less attractive instincts. In a world where women's education was discouraged or blocked, I can well imagine that her world looked much as she described.
The moral of the story: if you're a woman, it's hard not to believe in historical progress. Female time travellers take note! Visiting different eras would be fascinating, but if you're looking to settle somewhere, the modern era rocks.
Friday, 11 September 2015
The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey
Pages: 300
Published: 1949
I've read and enjoyed a couple of other books by Josephine Tey:
Published: 1949
I've read and enjoyed a couple of other books by Josephine Tey:
But not every classic book is worth reading, not even if the author generally amuses. Perhaps it was just my mood, but this book grated.
I suppose that for a class system to survive, the people who benefit from it need to believe that it's justified.
The heroines of this piece are a wrongly-accused pair of spinsters: a mother and daughter of good family but limited means. Their case is taken up by a middle-aged lawyer, who succumbs to the appeal that he should help them, not because of his expertise, but because he's "one of the right sort", that is, of the right class. The villain comes from a lower class, and is in fact adopted. Upon investigation, we learn that the villain's mother was of poor character. It all makes perfect sense: after all, bad blood will out.
There's more, much more. Including the interesting fact that you can always tell a murderer, because they inevitably have their eyes set slightly asymmetrically in their sockets. But I draw a veil over the rest of the book. I think you get the idea.
The actual mystery is somewhat novel, and is apparently based on an historical event: it deals with an accusation of kidnapping, and the suspense involved is the attempt of the investigator to clear the afore-mentioned polite spinster and her mother. The suspense would be greater if there were any suspicion that they weren't -- OF COURSE-- innocent, given their social class.
The only part that made me laugh was the heartfelt question of the struggling spinster, trying to clear her name. "What do people do who have no money?" she asks, as she struggles to pay the expenses involved with the investigation. The question is meant to elicit sympathy.
But the answer is that they are convicted both by the courts and by public opinion. No one reaches out to help them, and no one believes them, as the country lawyer believes the spinster. Those with no money at all are obviously inherently criminal.
Monday, 17 August 2015
Claudine at School by Colette
Started: 12 July
Finished: 25 July
Pages: 187
I first read Colette when took a class in 20th Century French Literature in translation, offered by the French department at the University of Saskatchewan back in the 1980s. I think that must be why I picked up a second-hand copy of The Claudine Novels at some point, and why I finally pulled it down off the shelf earlier this month when I was looking for something to read.
More or less by coincidence, I also started reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollestonecraft and a book of SF short stories by Judith Merrill at almost the same time. Claudine at School was written in the 1890s, Vindications was written about a hundred years earlier in 1792, while the Judith Merrill short stories were written between the late 1940s and the 1970s. All three are by and about middle class women.
I feel a bit as if I'm starting a "compare and contrast" essay. But perhaps I'll desist, given that I haven't yet finished Vindications or the Merrill stories, and it's been more than 25 years since I wrote my last literary essay. I will say that reading the three books together felt a bit like time travel: as I write about the other books perhaps I'll pull a bit of commentary together.
Of the books, Collette's is not self-consciously a commentary on women and women's lives. This is her first novel, written as a very young married woman, to please a demanding older husband who eventually got the book published under his own name. Her later novels explore women's lives, but this one simply describes the life of a teenaged girl attending her local village school.
Claudine at School is described as "charming" on Wikipedia and in its introduction. And so it is. It's a slice of a lost time, set in a quiet village where a visit from a local politician is enough to justify an all day program of welcoming songs by schoolchildren dressed in their best clothes and speeches by local dignitaries. It's a time when girls from village families might get an education so that they could train as school teachers, girls from not-so-ambitous families might snatch kisses from boys in the forest, while girls from good families like Claudine might go to school solely to keep themselves amused while waiting for their lives to begin. The book's not quaint: the school girls and school teachers leap off the page as real, complicated, squabbling people. And because the book was originally written as soft porn (Colette's husband kept nagging her to make the contents 'hot'), it reads as surprisingly modern. (Lesbians, oh my.)
Would I recommend it? Colette's later books, like The Captive are more interesting. Claudine feels more like backstory, and a reminder of some of the ways that women's lives have changed (more opportunities), and have not changed (harassing male authority figures) over the last 100 plus years.
Finished: 25 July
Pages: 187
I first read Colette when took a class in 20th Century French Literature in translation, offered by the French department at the University of Saskatchewan back in the 1980s. I think that must be why I picked up a second-hand copy of The Claudine Novels at some point, and why I finally pulled it down off the shelf earlier this month when I was looking for something to read.
More or less by coincidence, I also started reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollestonecraft and a book of SF short stories by Judith Merrill at almost the same time. Claudine at School was written in the 1890s, Vindications was written about a hundred years earlier in 1792, while the Judith Merrill short stories were written between the late 1940s and the 1970s. All three are by and about middle class women.
I feel a bit as if I'm starting a "compare and contrast" essay. But perhaps I'll desist, given that I haven't yet finished Vindications or the Merrill stories, and it's been more than 25 years since I wrote my last literary essay. I will say that reading the three books together felt a bit like time travel: as I write about the other books perhaps I'll pull a bit of commentary together.
Of the books, Collette's is not self-consciously a commentary on women and women's lives. This is her first novel, written as a very young married woman, to please a demanding older husband who eventually got the book published under his own name. Her later novels explore women's lives, but this one simply describes the life of a teenaged girl attending her local village school.
Claudine at School is described as "charming" on Wikipedia and in its introduction. And so it is. It's a slice of a lost time, set in a quiet village where a visit from a local politician is enough to justify an all day program of welcoming songs by schoolchildren dressed in their best clothes and speeches by local dignitaries. It's a time when girls from village families might get an education so that they could train as school teachers, girls from not-so-ambitous families might snatch kisses from boys in the forest, while girls from good families like Claudine might go to school solely to keep themselves amused while waiting for their lives to begin. The book's not quaint: the school girls and school teachers leap off the page as real, complicated, squabbling people. And because the book was originally written as soft porn (Colette's husband kept nagging her to make the contents 'hot'), it reads as surprisingly modern. (Lesbians, oh my.)
Would I recommend it? Colette's later books, like The Captive are more interesting. Claudine feels more like backstory, and a reminder of some of the ways that women's lives have changed (more opportunities), and have not changed (harassing male authority figures) over the last 100 plus years.
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