Yale lectures on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner by Wai Chee Dimock: lectures 8-16

Posted on August 19, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Well, compared to my earlier review of lectures 1-7, I confess I’m a little less enthused with this second set of lectures. (By the way, for clarity’s sake, I downloaded all 25 lectures at once with no indicated break. These breaks for review purposes are random and my own.) I continue to find some audio issues – volume variations, breathiness, background noise – distracting and a little frustrating; I can better understand other users’ complaints as I go on and as this annoyance builds. And I have decided I do not want to read any more Faulkner. It’s not encouraging to have this professor repeatedly confirm that he is difficult; and what I’m learning about the two studied works I haven’t read (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying) is not motivating. I am perplexed by Dimock’s characterization of As I Lay Dying as “Faulkner’s version of To Have and Have Not” (this is at 15:00 or 14:55 of lecture 16, if you want to hear more). I confess listening to Dimock acknowledge Faulkner’s esoteric nature, combined with being thrilled to hear Hemingway discussed, is only serving to cement me further in my feelings about these two men. And that’s not really the purpose of academia, is it! I wish I could attend this class with classmates and participate in the study sections she refers to; I’d love to write papers as assigned and get feedback on them; maybe one day I’ll still go back to school and do these things, but for now, listening to these lectures is… still worthwhile, but sometimes frustrating. I hear things I don’t agree with, or need further explained, and there’s no platform for that. I could criticize and pick apart Dimock’s thoughts here, but it doesn’t feel entirely fair. I’d feel much better about doing it in the format intended: class discussion. Besides that, it’s difficult to articulate my arguments for you here, in front of this keyboard, after having listened to the lectures while driving my car and thus not taking adequate notes! These are the limitations of “study” under these terms as a busy professional. I’m still listening. But part of what I’m getting out of these lectures is just more regret that I’m not a full-time grad student!

I will choose one concept to argue here. It struck me hard enough that I made a note and went back to listen to this quick bit at home so I could share with you.

This is in lecture 16, covering For Whom the Bell Tolls (for the record, my favorite Hemingway novel). Dimock reads briefly from a conversation between Robert Jordan and Anselmo (whose name, inexplicably, she pronounces more like Ensalmo; it drives me nuts) in which Anselmo says of the gypsies,

To them it is not a sin to kill outside the tribe. They deny this but it is true.

Dimock comments.

Usually, for most of us, the injunction is against killing, period, right? So there’s just no qualifying after that… [but for the gypsies] outside your tribe you’re free to kill anyone. That’s an incredible charge to level against the gypsies.

She continues on to argue that this accusation, that gypsies lack some moral rectitude that the rest of us possess, is a statement that Anselmo is making about the gypsies’ inferiority; she goes on to discuss Robert Jordan’s apparent ignorance of Spanish culture & history based on a comment that he makes about the Moors. Well, I’m not so sure that Robert Jordan is all that ignorant, but that’s another argument. I think Dimock missed a key piece of irony in that statement about gypsies killing outside their tribe. What struck me about Dimock’s response was her dismissively clear-cut understanding of “our” rules about killing: “the injunction is again killing, period.” First of all, the groups that Anselmo and Robert Jordan belong to (the Abraham Lincoln brigade; guerrillas; Spanish republicans) certainly don’t have a universal injunction against killing people: they kill fascists, don’t they? In other words, depending on how you define one’s tribe, they also feel that it’s permissible or justifiable to kill outside the tribe. Or let’s take this a step further: nowhere does Anselmo, or Dimock, note that it’s okay or not okay to kill humans outside one’s tribe. No, she states that “for most of us, the injunction is against killing, period.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. People kill sentient beings by the billion: to eat them, to take their habitats, as collateral damage during our search for fossil fuels, on and on. To take a more modern approach, we as a society not only kill all nonhuman things as a matter of course and without a second thought; we also seem to accept under certain circumstances that it’s justifiable, at the very least, to kill nonwhites, or non-Americans, or non-Christians; in the post-9/11 United States, there was (is) a certain acceptance of our right to kill Muslims or brown people who live in certain countries! Now, Hemingway didn’t live to see 9/11, but this brand of ethnocentrism is not unique to my generation’s experience. I believe that Hemingway, unlike Dimock – and likely Robert Jordan too – saw and intended the irony in Anselmo’s statement about gypsies killing outside the tribe. It’s all a matter of how you define one’s tribe. Dimock herself pointed out in an earlier lecture that Hemingway’s work is simply dripping, saturated, with irony. I think she missed a fine example here.

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Yale lectures on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner by Wai Chee Dimock: lectures 1-7

Posted on August 9, 2013 by pagesofjulia

This is a series of 25 lectures – a semester course, presumably – available on iTunes U here. The description provided says…

This course examines major works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, exploring their interconnections on three analytic scales: the macro history of the United States and the world; the formal and stylistic innovations of modernism; and the small details of sensory input and psychic life.

Some of the user comments/reviews on iTunes U accuse Professor Dimock of being difficult to understand; I’d like to speak to that first. These are not ideal audio recordings, it’s true. She’s a little faint, as if the mike was not pinned to her lapel but in the room somewhere (students coughing and rustling are audible); or maybe sometimes she has it too close to her mouth, and we get unnecessary breathiness. I had to crank my volume way up, and Dimock has some (natural, I think) variations of volume that had me making adjustments and occasionally jumping when she speaks up. And she does have an accent. And she does use “ums” and pauses; but again, I think most of us do. While she is not the most articulate, professional speaker I’ve ever encountered, I think she’s plenty fair for a college professor. (They don’t get to be professors by being professional speakers, kids, in case you didn’t know.) And the recording quality is partly to blame for the minor difficulties I had understanding these lectures. All that said, I found it entirely possible to turn up the volume, concentrate, and receive what Dimock had to say; and it was well worth it.

Now on to the content.

In the early episodes, I can’t say that Dimock presented any ideas that were wholly new to me. Here’s where I’ll take some credit for having read at least a little Faulkner, a medium-sized chunk of Fitzgerald, and most of Hemingway (repeatedly), and read similar proportions of biographical material on each, and studied literary criticism in the past. However, I haven’t tried to think in such academic interpretive terms in some time, and this warming up (if you will) of that part of my brain was useful and welcome. It felt really good to think in academic terms again.

I have to say that I couldn’t get on board with all of Dimock’s concepts. For example, her conflation of the “vagueness” of The Great Gatsby (that was, I believe, Maxwell Perkins’s word) with her “counterrealism” of same is problematic to me. I think you could be vague in your portrayal of realism, and I think you could be precise and use clear outlines in representing counterrealism; so I don’t think it works to substitute the one for the other. In addition, I’m 90% confident that in discussing Hemingway’s short story Indian Camp, she first asserts that childbirth is a manmade event (because it takes a man’s action to bring it on, of course) rather than a natural one; and then later comes around and asserts that it is as natural as rain (which I am much closer to agreeing with than the first assertion, by the way). I don’t always agree with her concepts, then, and I don’t always think that she is all that consistent or puts her arguments together all that well. However, all that aside, I’ve really enjoyed having these parts of my brain stretched out again, and I would very much enjoy being in this class to argue these points with her. So my disagreements and criticisms wouldn’t have me pulling out of this class, in other words, and I won’t stop listening now, either.

One big hope I had for these lectures was that they would help me to work my way through my difficulties with Faulkner. In that respect, they’ve been moderately successful. On the one hand, I am vindicated by Dimock’s saying that The Sound and the Fury is really difficult to understand! Now, I began that book at one point, years ago, and I don’t think I made it 15 pages; but already things are illuminated. So perhaps, as I suspected, Faulkner would become comprehensible to me if I had a good teacher looking over my shoulder and consulting page-by-page. I still don’t think I’m going to try The Sound and the Fury again anytime soon. But I look forward to hearing about my recent read, Light in August.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sections on Hemingway so far haven’t given me anything I didn’t know. I suspect I’m fairly well-informed, for an amateur, on that subject.

So in a nutshell, I’m feeling stimulated and am enjoying these lectures very much so far, and will be continuing through all 25.

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Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (audio)

Posted on July 31, 2013 by pagesofjulia

flightAnother beautiful, thought-provoking book from Kingsolver; and another outstanding narration by the author herself. Like The Lacuna, which I called one of the best books I read in 2012, this will be a standout. I fear this will be one of those longer reviews, as I have so much to say…

We open with a young mother of two in a less-than-thrilling marriage, named Dellarobia Turnbow, hiking up a mountain to meet a man for adulterous purposes. On her way there, she’s distracted by an amazing sight. The hills appear to be aflame, but there is no sound and no heat. She is amazed, and disturbed, and stands up her would-be lover and goes back home; it’s something like a religious experience, although she’s not particularly religious. She does, however, attend church – one of many compromises for the sake of her mother-in-law, who terrifies her.

Dellarobia lives on her in-laws’ sheep farm in Tennessee and rarely gets to leave the property. Her husband is kind but dull. She is frustrated. The strange thing happening up on the mountain, however, will expand her world: it has implications for climate change, and is variously interpreted as an event of an environmental as well as a religious nature.

The cool orange flame on the mountaintop is a mass migration of Monarch butterflies, pushed out of their normal overwintering site in Mexico by a mudslide that killed a village, caused in turn by clearcutting and climate change. Dellarobia doesn’t have the context to begin to comprehend such happenings, so she has to learn slowly; aiding her in this process is the amazing Dr. Ovid Byron, an entomologist who has written the book (many of them) on Monarchs who shows up to park his camper on the Turnbow farm and study their special mountain. Ovid is a striking figure – physically, as a black man, he is of such a minority in the rural mountains of Tennessee as to be exotic to Dellarobia; audibly, his accent (similar to Jamaican) is mellifluous and musical; and intellectually, he boggles Dellarobia’s mind and pushes her to new ways of thinking. This is a young woman who would have gone to college if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, and her thwarted ambitions are sparked by Ovid’s presence.

Meanwhile, the local religious community becomes convinced that Dellarobia prophesied the Monarchs’ arrival, that she had a vision; she is tentatively treated as a hero or religious figure, which doesn’t sit well with her feared mother-in-law, Hester. The media – local, and then national – blows things out of proportion, highlights the sensational, and alternately threatens to turn her into a sex symbol or accuses her of suicidal tendencies. Her marriage – which we learned in the opening scene was not strong or happy – is predictably strained by all the activity and attention. And perhaps most poignantly, her small son Preston is told by Ovid that he is a scientist, and begins a new way of thinking, himself.

As a family story or the story of one woman, alone, this would be an extraordinary masterpiece. Dellarobia is a remarkable woman, and I think she is probably representative of many young women who have greater abilities than they end up exploring, trapped (in Dellarobia’s case) in rural and familial circumstances that limit her. Just as in The Lacuna, one of Flight Behavior‘s greatest strengths is Dellarobia’s realness: her quirks, her frustrations, her fantansies, her day-to-day life and thoughts. We get to experience this story inside her head, and the inside of Dellarobia’s head, all by itself, would be a glorious gift for Kingsolver to bestow upon us. The other characters too, all of them, are fully realized, more real than the people I know in the real world; they’re complex, and even the initially unlikeable ones (I’m looking at you, Hester) are multi-faceted and deserving of our sympathy in the end.

But! That’s not all! There’s more to this story than Dellarobia and her family of wonderfully real, odd people. The Monarch butterflies, climate change, the complexities of farming in a changing world, the environmental movement, 350.org, and academia are all explored and examined in a wonderfully nuanced way. Idealistic young – and old – environmentalists show up on the scene as well, and there’s a lovely scene in which one of them quizzes Dellarobia on her commitment to leave a smaller carbon footprint. As it turns out, being rural and poor puts her in a pretty good place footprint-wise already, a fact which humbles (not to say embarrasses) her interlocutor.

Dellarobia turns out to be the perfect vehicle for teaching us all the science of Monarchs, of migration, of weather patterns and geography, of climate change, and of relationships among people and cultures. She’s ignorant, but not unintelligent, and once she learns how to open her mind, she is an inquisitive student; and Ovid Byron is a wonderful teacher, and let me add, his dreamy accent, so well performed in this audio edition, is to die for. [I do recommend listening rather than reading, upon which more in a moment.] However, this is never a polemic, and Dellarobia is far, far more than a vehicle; you remember I was terribly bothered by that issue in Sophie’s World, and a little bothered by it in Ishmael, but there is no trace of it here. As I wrote above, Dellarobia is very, very real. Instead, this is a moving, complex story, starring sympathetic, believable characters, that also handles some large, important questions: like, what are we doing with our world?

I have a quick note to make on the ending, mostly for my father. Pops has noted that where Derrick Jensen is brutally honest about our future, Bill McKibben tends to draw intelligent conclusions and then inexplicably end on what feels like an unrealistically optimistic note. Well, in the same vein, Kingsolver may end things a trifle more hopefully than is realistic – it feels good, you understand, but it’s a McKibben ending rather than a Jensen one, if you follow. And then she thanks McKibben in her Author’s Note, so that’s fitting.

The Author’s Note also includes a brief discussion of what in this story is true to life (and how she found it out), and what is fiction. This is a well-researched book, and I appreciate her delineating the boundary between fact and fiction, as I always do.

The audio narration by Kingsolver herself could not be improved upon. Dellarobia has an Appalachian twang and darling figures of speech. Her BFF Dovey is even cuter and mouthier; she collects jokey church billboard sayings, some of which Dellarobia is sure she makes up (“Moses was a basket case”). Dellarobia’s in-laws have their own audible personalities; her husband Cub is nothing in life if not sloooow in all respects including speech. And Ovid Byron! Oh, the accent. Swoon. Kingsolver does all these beautifully. If you have to read this book rather than listen to the author read it, then fine, but I pity you. Get the audiobook!! Do it!

Rating: without question a perfect 10 newborn lambs.

This book is so wonderful – particularly in Kingsolver’s masterful narration – that I wonder if I should go back and try some of her earlier work again. I remember being decidedly nonplussed by The Poisonwood Bible, and I know I’ve read The Bean Trees but have no impression of it (which is not a good sign); I can’t decide if I’ve read The Prodigal Summer or Animal Dreams or not (also not a good sign). But The Lacuna and this one are both so grand, I feel I should delve more deeply. Also, while I’m pondering past readings, I wonder why I keep getting Kingsolver crossed with Margaret Atwood in my mind? I wanted to attribute The Robber Bride (which I enjoyed) to Kingsolver. Maybe it’s that I’ve found them both a little hit-or-miss; I was less impressed with The Year of the Flood and ambivalent about Oryx and Crake and The Blind Assassin; have no impression from Surfacing; but loved The Penelopiad, and found The Edible Woman mindblowing.

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final review: Light in August by William Faulkner (audio)

Posted on July 4, 2013 by pagesofjulia

augustI am challenged by Faulkner. I already began to share my frustrations in an earlier post that you might want to check out.

So then, the second half of the book. The short story is I still don’t understand what this book is about. It opens with a pregnant country woman, traveling on foot in pursuit of the missing father of her child. He left her when he found out she was pregnant, promising to send for her when he had a household set up; everyone Lena talks to, and I the reader, understand that he’s no good and this is a lie, but she is dogged. She succeeds in tracking him down, this man she knows as Lucas Birch, to all our surprise, and he is indeed no good (and also now goes by Joe Brown). And then the story shifts to that of a companion of Birch/Brown’s, a man named Joe Christmas. We learn his entire life story. He was an orphan, living mostly as a white boy/man but occasionally outed as being part black. (Note that there are lots of n-words in this book. Something to keep in mind in the audio format, if you’re driving around with your windows down.) There is also a Byron Bunch, who cares for Lena while she gets close to having her baby; and a man named Hightower, a former minister who advises Byron Bunch. We learn pieces of their stories, as well. We don’t learn terribly much about Birch/Brown himself, despite in some ways him being the hub around which these spokes rotate. And I’m torn between wishing we knew more about Lena, and being frustrated (and therefore satiated) by what I do know of her.

The bottom line is that I still do not understand what this book is about. On one hand, that makes it really a pretty good candidate for what I’m doing with it, which is listening to it to prepare to to listen to a lecture explaining to me what the heck it’s about and what Mr. Faulkner was trying to do with it. On the other hand, it has not aided my enjoyment of this book. I’m confused. Why do we care about these people? I never learned to care about these people. Are we concerned with Lena? Or are we concerned with Christmas? Are we concerned with Byron Bunch?

I found it strange that certain characters make very long, descriptive speeches, when they’re meant to be simple people. When they speak, I hear Faulkner, not Lena, or Mrs. Hines or whomever. I’m not a fan of the author speaking through the dialog of his characters.

My audio edition concluded with an interview – of all people – with James Lee Burke. This is strange because he’s one of my favorites (and stranger still because I just days ago finished his new book, Light of the World – sorry, the review won’t post til the book is published in late July). It turns out that he puts Faulkner right up there with his top four greatest writers of all time: Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and Keats. I am baffled. I won’t try to re-hash this interview for you, in which Burke touches on the gifts of Faulkner; suffice it to say it’s the first time I failed to “get” James Lee Burke. [If you’re interested, it’s the Brilliance Audio production of 2011, read by Will Patton. The interview with Burke is conducted by an awesomely-named James Atlas.]

I think that maybe Faulkner transmits on a frequency I don’t receive. I understand vaguely that this is a work of allegory. Perhaps the Yale University class lectures that I plan to listen to eventually (you can find them here on iTunes U) will illuminate things; possibly they will not. This is a non-review, I know. I’m sorry. I don’t get Faulkner.

Next up in my audio collection is The Sound and the Fury and I don’t think I’m brave enough. Jason’s recommendation of As I Lay Dying was encouraging, but I’m still a little gun-shy; plus my local library doesn’t have that one on audio. For now, I will take a break from Faulkner. Maybe I’ll even start with some of the Yale lectures and see if I’m inspired and educated.

Rating: requires discussion.

When trying to come up with a numbered rating for this book, I think: I did not like this book. But whose fault is that? Is it partly my fault? Do I share some blame for being unable to appreciate or follow? I give Light in August a 3 for my enjoyment level, but to acknowledge my complicity in our minds’ failure to meet, Faulkner’s and mine that is, I will assign a very generous 5 grumbles and hope for either better, or no, future Faulkner reads.

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the books I’ve listened to that simply must be audio

Posted on June 27, 2013 by pagesofjulia

It has taken me weeks to post this – sorry! But I did have some interest, in the comments on a past post, in those books I’ve listened to that I feel really must be experienced as audiobooks. Here’s a briefly annotated list.

  • Bossypants by Tina Fey, and read by the author: surely this will be obvious? Tina Fey is hilarious and you should let her tell you her story. Qualification: there are images in the book that you miss on the audio version.
  • The Likeness by Tana French: I’ve enjoyed some of hers in print and in audio, but this is my favorite and I feel strongly about the audio. For one thing, they’re set in Dublin and the Irish accents are amazing. For another, the plot of this novel involves faking someone else’s identity, and to hear how her voice changes when she’s in character is really something. Well done, narrator Heather O’Neill.
  • The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: also read by the author, and what an amazing feat, for her to be such an artist both of literature and of voice acting! Characters include Russians, Mexicans (of different social castes), a New York Jew, back-woods Appalachians, and a young man raised in between cultures; the importance of all those accents couldn’t be overstated, and Kingsolver executes them beautifully. It’s a magical audiobook and I wouldn’t let anybody I liked read this in print.
  • Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson: a memoir, read by the author, and she sings her chapter titles, operatically. That should be all I have to say.
  • The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King: also read by the author, as it happens, and I enjoyed knowing that I was hearing King’s own impression of things. He does a great job. (If you’re noting how many on this list are author-read: I’m as surprised as you are.)
  • Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende: this is a historical novel of the founding of Chile, and thus another one with accents done gorgeously by narrator Blair Brown.
  • all of the P.G. Wodehouse novels read by Jonathan Cecil: I love Cecil’s voices for the very very silly Bertie Wooster and all the rest; I now am opposed to the print versions, and wary of the non-Cecil-narrated audio version. What can I say, I’ve found the Wooster I like.
  • The Dorothy Parker Audio Collection: a collection of stories and articles read by a handful of different women, who more than narrate; they act out Parker’s caustic wit.
  • all the Lee Child books read by Dick Hill: I really like Hill’s expression of Jack Reacher. (He also narrates a few of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books, which I also recommend. In other words, I like Dick Hill.)
  • bonus: I have it on good authority – although I have not listened yet (it’s in line!) – that the audio version of the new novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald is not to be missed, for the southern accents.

Further, I would recommend the following books in their audio format, although I would stop short of saying they must by heard rather than read.

  • Rules of Civility by Amor Towles: New York of the 1930’s and 40’s perfectly evoked via Rebecca Lowman’s lovely narration.
  • Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland: the author reads this work of nonfiction herself, and because it’s the story of her own family, I think that’s important (and it is well done). Her voice is warm, she clearly cares for her subject, and she executes the French and German accents (and words) well.
  • The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson: Robin Miles narrates this work of history in a beautiful, warm voice that I found helpful to the subject.
  • The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger: read by Richard M. Davidson, it has all the taut, tense action it needs without ever feeling over-dramatized. Bonus: at the end, it includes a recording of the author speaking about the making of the book, which was awesome.
  • Loving Frank by Nancy Horan: Joyce Bean’s narration immersed me in a time and place and helped me learn to care very much about the characters.
  • Touch by Alexi Zentner: a magical, otherworldly, immersive feel to this novel is helped along by Norman Dietz’s wondering performance.
  • Left Neglected by Lisa Genova: I felt intimately close to the female lead character in this story thanks to Sarah Paulson’s reading.

I’m sure there are more out there, and I can’t wait to discover them! Do share – are there any books you’ve listened to that you would say have to be heard?

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an interim report on Light in August by William Faulkner (audio)

Posted on June 24, 2013 by pagesofjulia

augustI am nearly halfway through Light in August, and I need to get some things off my chest.

The lack of physical descriptions in this book is bothering me. Race is clearly a major issue, and yet I am often left confused about who was of what race. In some stories that would be a strength – that neutrality – but considering that I suspect it is so darned important here, I would like to know who is who. Rarely do we get a physical description. And then, out of nowhere, I get this:

She was a waitress in a small, dingy, back street restaurant in town. Even a casual adult glance could tell that she would never see thirty again. But to Joe she probably did not look more than seventeen too, because of her smallness. She was not only not tall, she was slight, almost childlike. But the adult look saw that the smallness was not due to any natural slenderness but to some inner corruption of the spirit itself: a slenderness which had never been young, in not one of whose curves anything youthful had ever lived or lingered. Her hair was dark. Her face was prominently boned, always downlooking, as if her head were set so on her neck, a little out of line. Her eyes were like the button eyes of a toy animal: a quality beyond even hardness, without being hard.

This is both lovely and, in some ways, bothersome to me. I love that she was not short, but rather “not tall.” And then that “smallness… not due to any natural slenderness but to some inner corruption of the spirit” comes along and I wanted to sarcastically retort, “you mean like a cocaine addiction is an inner corruption of the spirit”? Her face “always downlooking, as if her head were set so on her neck” is quite amazing and evocative; it makes me pause to picture this. But I can’t quite tolerate the “quality beyond even hardness, without being hard.” Come off it, Faulkner.

My impatience with his writing makes me question myself. I am often a little scornful of what strikes me as pretentious Literaryness; but then I’m so often appreciative of lyrical writing, so where do I draw the line? Am I letting my prejudice against (or to be more honest, my fear of) Faulkner get in the way of an honest appraisal? How to account for taste – even my own? It remains a puzzle. As I’ve written before, I think we all should attempt – as I am trying to do – to own our own reactions and tastes, and not apologize for not liking those who are called literary greats (Henry James, T.S. Eliot, I’m looking at you). Why don’t I like Faulkner? Take in a sentence like this:

I do not know yet that in the instant of sleep the eyelid closing prisons within the eye’s self her face demure, pensive; tragic, sad, and young; waiting, colored with all the vague and formless magic of young desire.

I’m sorry, but this reminds me of the abstract art that us philistines can’t tell from a kindergartner’s work. Speaking of vague and formless – this reminds me of The Waste Land, or Gertrude Stein, for goodness’ sake. If I keep reading this, I may go crazy.

On the other hand, I took in Jason’s lovely, helpful comments on the book beginning I posted, and I am somewhat encouraged. Some of this will just turn out to be a matter of taste; Jason can have Faulkner and I can have Hemingway, who some people abhor and that is fine, etc. etc. But perhaps I can continue with Faulkner and find more to like, too. Jason, I’m still looking forward to As I Lay Dying. I am trying; don’t lose patience with me yet. 🙂

And for now, I continue, but wish me luck.

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book beginnings on Friday: Light in August by William Faulkner

Posted on June 14, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

august

Friends, I have a confession: I fear Faulkner. I tried to read The Sound and the Fury once, and I was left feeling certain that either I’m an imbecile, or he is. The jury is still out. But I found this collection of audio lectures on iTunes University, from Yale, on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner; and I already love two of those authors, and the three are often considered together; and I want to listen to these lectures and be able to follow along; so here I am again, attempting Faulkner. I’m told Light in August is a little easier than The Sound and the Fury. Wish me luck. It begins lucidly enough:

Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old

[Regarding punctuation: I checked two print editions and both left off that final period, so I guess that was Faulkner’s work. I actually value punctuation, myself; trying not to let this make me nervous.]

Any Faulkner fans out there who can reassure me? I want to like this book!

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The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (audio)

Posted on June 13, 2013 by pagesofjulia

swanThis is book 2 in a series, because I couldn’t find book 1; so be it. You know I don’t bother too much with these things, anyway.

Set in Dublin, and thus very enjoyable as an audiobook with those Irish accents – various Irish accents based on region, of course. I’m no connoisseur of dialect but I can hear the different effect coming through and I appreciate it. Having visited there now, too, I think I might call an Irish accent the most musical and pleasant to listen to that I know.

Our protagonist (I started to call him a hero; but I think the jury is out) is named Quirke, and he’s a pathologist, meaning he performs autopsies. The scene is set when an old friend – hardly more than an acquaintance – from school calls up to request that Quirke forgo cutting open his recently dead wife, Deidre Hunt, professionally known as Laura Swan. (No, not what you’re thinking. She’s a beautician.) Deirdre is an apparent suicide. Quirke goes poking around where he doesn’t belong. He behaves awfully like a detective, but of course he isn’t; although it is hinted at that in the first tale of his adventures, Christine Falls, which I missed, Quirke likewise tried to do the cops’ job for them, and it didn’t turn out well for him. Ah well, these hard-boiled types never learn, and Quirke goes looking into Deirdre’s life and habits. He discovers a former lover with an angry wife, and some financial troubles, but none of that is as interesting as Quirke’s own family drama. Apparently he had a daughter who was passed off as his niece until just a few years ago; so he has a “new”, adult child; and she becomes embroiled herself with Deirdre Hunt’s life and menfolk. Oh, and Quirke has the classic characteristic of being a reformed or reforming alcoholic; there are scenes where he hangs out in bars (to talk to his informant) and yearns for a drink. No real new ground there.

As a mystery, there were a few odd elements here. Quirke behaves very much like a detective, which is tolerated surprisingly well by everyone, including the detectives; yes, there’s a little complaining, but no efforts to limit his actions. On top of that, I thought the husband was a fine suspect from the very start – that is, once we’ve established that Deirdre was murdered, which is a conclusion danced around for much of the book. The husband then requests that no autopsy be performed; and yet Quirke never really does get around to suspecting him. I was left feeling that I had missed something; and maybe I did, but I think in that case at least some of the blame falls on the story.

I enjoyed this read somewhat, but frankly, I think most of my enjoyment lay in the lovely Irish voices telling the story. Other than that, it was just fine.

Rating: 5 very neutral shrugs of my shoulders for this one.

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

Posted on May 28, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

swan

In chatting with one of my volunteers at work, we agreed upon Lee Child and Michael Connelly; I recommended James Lee Burke, whom she (a Louisiana native, no less!) had never heard of, and she’s loving him. Her reciprocal recommendation was one Benjamin Black, whom I had never heard of; but I think I’m going to like him. His hero/detective type is a pathologist – the one who does the autopsies. And it’s set in Dublin. This audio version, especially, is great fun because I love the lilting Irish accent. Here’s your teaser:

The waters into which Deirdre Hunt’s corpse had plunged were deep and turbid. The autopsy he had done on that other young woman two years ago had raised a wave of mud and filth, in the lees of which he was still wading. Was he not now in danger of another foul drenching? Do nothing, his better judgment told him; stay on dry land.

I chose one of the more dramatic bits for you.

I’m enjoying this! And what’s your new read this week?

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did not finish: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (audio)

Posted on May 22, 2013 by pagesofjulia

bonhoefferI’ve gotten better at putting down books I’m not enjoying. As I keep repeating to myself & others, there are far too many excellent books in this world for me to ever read them all, so why would I spend my precious, limited reading time on less-than-excellent books? But I guess I’m still working on applying this same policy to audiobooks. They are fewer, and a little harder to get my hands on, so I find myself taking more chances with audiobooks. But somewhere between a third and halfway through Bonhoeffer, I gave up.

This is the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who lost a brother in World War I and was more prescient than many during Hitler’s rise to power. He was already involved in “the church,” but as Hitler’s government worked to take over the German church establishment, Bonhoeffer became even more active. I didn’t get this far, but apparently he also acted as a spy (for the anti-Nazi Abwehr), and was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

As a non-Christian, I thought I would be able to appreciate this as a work of history and biography. But I found myself too much irked by the unspoken premises: that Bonhoeffer, as a good Christian, was a good guy; that he could do no wrong; that the Christian church was inherently good. Christian readers of this book (who I can only assume are the majority, and its target audience) will naturally not be offended by these assumptions; but I am bothered by premises being treated as fact. Bonhoeffer comes off as a good and likeable man, and I may even miss him; but he’s presented as a totally good man, and I just can’t buy that about any human being. In other words, I don’t think Metaxas treats him objectively, and that tends to bother me a great deal in my reading. The religious bias, combined with copious quotations from the Bible, proved too much for me. In a shorter book, I would have hung in there: I made it 8-10 hours into its 22 hours! But I could go no farther.

I am happy to accept that Bonhoeffer was, on balance, a force for good against Hitler’s evil; but in a lengthy biography I would expect a little more objectivity, and would prefer a nonreligious starting point for study. I found his life interesting and would read another book about him. But not this one.

Rating: 2 sermons.

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