What I did on break: book roundup
I spent a month between jobs — a month that comes to an end this week. One of my goals for the time off was to spend a lot of time reading. While I didn’t read as much as I might have wished (but when is that ever possible?) I think I did reasonably well. Here’s a roundup.
Tristana, by Benito Pérez Glaldós
This is a strange little novel, which I picked up impulsively in a used bookstore. I’d never heard of the author before but I’d seen the movie, a Buñuel film of the same title starring Catherine Deneuve as the doomed beauty. Written in 1892, it reads as though it were written in one feverish rush, the author never quite sure where the whole thing is going.
Perhaps it’s best treated as a character study. In the opening chapter we meet Don Lope, an old lothario in distressed financial circumstances who fancies himself, in a way remeniscient of Don Quixote, the last true gentleman. He discourses on honor, dignity, and morality, but his conscience is deficient in one area: his treatment of women. When friends of his die and leave behind a beautiful orphan daughter, he scoops her up and, before she understands anything of the world or what is happening to her, makes her his mistress. The first chapter tells us about her: “She was nothing, and that was all there was to it, for she belonged to him as if she were a tobacco pouch, an item of furniture, or an article of clothing, with no one to dispute his ownership; and she seemed perfectly resigned to being nothing but a tobacco pouch!”
It’s not long before Tristana becomes something other than a tobacco pouch, and begins to demonstrate a formidable, terrifying intelligence. She attempts escape from Don Lope through a love affair with a mediocre artist, but when it becomes clear that she’s his superior in every sense, the escape falters, and Don Lope tries new tricks to keep her dependent on him.
Tristana occupies itself largely with the question of whether there’s a place in the world for a woman who is posessed with a burning ambition and uninterested in subordination to men. Readers of the novel, including myself, are likely to find its conclusions fascinating but unsatisfying.
The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
This one is another character study, and another book where I’d previously seen the movie. Both movie and book were heaped with acclaim, and both are absolute gems. The movie, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma, is a heartbreaker, but though it adapts the novel very strictly, matching scene by scene, it misses a lot of the novel’s humor and irony.
The novel is narrated in the first person by Mr. Stevens, former butler to Lord Darlington. His master Darlington had a magnificent manor house and some questionable political affiliations, and Stevens attended to his every need as though it were a sacred calling. The poignancy of his near-religious dedication to an undeserving man is something the reader slowly comes to grasp; when Stevens comes close to realizing it — the truth, we sense, is something he is not capable of fully facing — the moment is shattering. The portrayal of his blindness, dedication, dignity, and self-importance, as well as the profound smallness of his world, is masterful.
Paradise, by Edna O’Brien
I’d first learned of Edna O’Brien through this remarkable 2019 profile of her in the New Yorker, and this is the first I’ve read of hers.
Paradise is not a novel but a short story, published in standalone format by Faber (the physical book is small and very cute), and it makes me want to read much more of her work.
We meet an unnamed woman, on a beach vacation with an unnamed rich man and his rich friends. She’s in love with the man, ambivalent about the friends, and desperate to fit in. We learn her situation:
“If I had a horse I’d call it Summer Lightning,” one of the women said, and the man next to her said, How charming. She knew she ought to speak. She wanted to. Both for his sake and her own. Her mind would give a little leap and be still and would leap again; words were struggling to be set free, to say something, a little amusing something to establish her among them. But her tongue was tied. They would know her predecessors. They would compare her minutely, her appearance, her accent, the way he behaved with her. They would know better than she how important she was to him, if it were serious or just a passing notion.
Of course it can’t end happily. Towards the end is this wonderful line: “It seemed to her that she always held people to her ear, the way her mother held eggs, shaking them to guess at their rottenness, but unlike her mother she chose the very ones that she would have been wise to throw away.”
The Fugitive, by Marcel Proust
This was my yearly Proust installment, and next year’s will be the last. You can read what I had to say about The Fugitive in a previous edition.
Stanislavski on Opera
I used to read a lot of opera forums on the internet, and on one of them I remember a young singer, a soprano, who felt about Eugene Onegin (the brooding antihero of Tchaikovsky’s opera and Pushkin’s poem of the same name) the way some girls feel about Twilight’s Edward Cullen. If there’s such a thing as Onegin fanfiction, she would have written it. One of the primary texts of her fandom was Stanislavski on Opera, a chronicling of the father of method acting, Constantin Stanislavski, and his work with opera singers (I may have more to say about this book soon).
I’ve had this book for ages and finally read it last week. I wonder where that soprano is now, and if she still pictures Onegin as Stanislavski describes him here:
[Tatiana] is awkward, even absurd. She is just a frightened girl. And what you have to undertake is to make her see how noble you are. You should have at your command a whole arsenal of Byronic attitudes. These are the poses of a world-weary man, indifferent to everything. At the big society balls such young men would stand about alone, leaning against columns in the most contrived poses. One arm thrust in your coat à la Napoleon, your head all but concealed inside a high collar, languishing eyes, feet pointing outwards, nothing overdone yet all calculated to make an impression.
The Marquise of O— and Other Stories, by Heinrich von Kleist
The Marquise of O— (dash to protect her privacy), at the beginning of Kleist’s short story, is a widow of “unblemished reputation” who finds herself in a difficult position: she’s pregnant, but doesn’t remember having sex with anyone. She places a newspaper advertisment asking for the father to come forward, resolving to marry him for the sake of family honor.
From this premise Kleist, the 19th century German romantic poet who famously died in a suicide pact, spins a story full of twists and tumult. In this, and the other standout stories in the collection (in particular “The Earthquake in Chile”, and “Michael Kohlhaas”) he demonstrates what I can only call moral wildness — his characters, who flip from villainous to heroic and back, are constantly flying in and out of strange extremities of circumstance, and the question of whether they’re victims or villains is never straightforward. “The Marquise of O—” in particular is a strange, ecstatic joy.
One warning: “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo”, set during the Hatian revolution, is both an inferior story and explicitly racist.
Happiness, As Such, by Natalia Ginzburg
This novel, as is typical of Ginzburg, has a surface-level breeziness that hints at a great darkness beneath. It’s told mostly in the form of letters to and from a young man, Michele, who has abruptly fled his family in Italy and moved to England, ostensibly to go to art school. His mother alternately scolds and frets about him (“I don’t think your paintings of owls and falling-down buildings are that good,” she complains).
Michele has left mysteries in his absence — is he the father of Mara’s baby? Was Osvaldo “just a friend” or his lover? — but we slowly learn some of the facts of his dire situation. Ginzburg’s signature jumble of sharp, funny character writing, mordant witticisms, and sudden intrusions of violence is sometimes disorienting but always memorable.
My favorite Ginzburg is still the story pair Valentino and Sagittarius, which I wrote about here.