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The 16th Gift of Christmas in Surrey, England, 1815

Dec16

From Emma by Jane Austen, chapter 16:

“To youth and natural cheerfulness like Emma’s, though under temporary gloom at night, the return of day will hardly fail to bring return of spirits. The youth and cheerfulness of morning are in happy analogy, and of powerful operation; and if the distress be not poignant enough to keep the eyes unclosed, they will be sure to open to sensations of softened pain and brighter hope.

Emma got up on the morrow more disposed for comfort than she had gone to bed, more ready to see alleviations of the evil before her, and to depend on getting tolerably out of it.

It was a great consolation that Mr. Elton should not be really in love with her, or so particularly amiable as to make it shocking to disappoint him—that Harriet’s nature should not be of that superior sort in which the feelings are most acute and retentive—and that there could be no necessity for any body’s knowing what had passed except the three principals, and especially for her father’s being given a moment’s uneasiness about it.

These were very cheering thoughts; and the sight of a great deal of snow on the ground did her further service, for any thing was welcome that might justify their all three being quite asunder at present.

The weather was most favourable for her; though Christmas-day, she could not go to church. Mr. Woodhouse would have been miserable had his daughter attempted it, and she was therefore safe from either exciting or receiving unpleasant and most unsuitable ideas. The ground covered with snow, and the atmosphere in that unsettled state between frost and thaw, which is of all others the most unfriendly for exercise, every morning beginning in rain or snow, and every evening setting in to freeze, she was for many days a most honourable prisoner. No intercourse with Harriet possible but by note; no church for her on Sunday any more than on Christmas-day; and no need to find excuses for Mr. Elton’s absenting himself.”

Born on December 16th:
Ludwig von Beethoven, b.1770.
Jane Austen, b.1775.
Marie Hall Ets b.1895, author of many children’s picture books including Gilberto and the Wind and Nine Days to Christmas
Playwright Noel Coward, b.1896
Arthur C. Clarke, b.1917, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and other science fiction classics.

Who knew that Jane Austen and Beethoven were near in age and shared a birthdate?

The 7th Gift of Christmas in Lincolnshire, England, 1820’s

Dec7

Today is “a day that will live in infamy.” And still Christmas came in 1941 as it always does every year, as it came back in the early part of the nineteenth century:51hiUMUSraL._SY344_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_

“The red berries were just as abundant on the holly, and he and Maggie had dressed all the windows and mantlepieces and picture-frames on Christmas eve with as much taste as ever, wedding the thick-set scarlet clusters with branches of the black-berried ivy. There had been singing under the windows after midnight, supernatural singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom’s contemptuous insistence that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the church choir; she trembled with awe when their carolling broke in upon her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. The midnight chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of common days; and then there were the smell of hot toast and ale from the kitchen, at the breakfast hour; the favorite anthem, the green boughs, and the short sermon gave the appropriate festal character to the church-going; and aunt and uncle Moss, with all their seven children, were looking like so many reflectors of the bright parlor-fire, when the church-goers came back, stamping the snow from their feet. The plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it had been heroically snatched from the nether fires, into which it had been thrown by dyspeptic Puritans; the dessert was as splendid as ever, with its golden oranges, brown nuts, and the crystalline light and dark of apple-jelly and damson cheese; in all these things Christmas was as it had always been since Tom could remember; it was only distinguished, if by anything, by superior sliding and snowballs.” ~The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.

Today’s Gifts from Semicolon:
A song: Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus at Mocha with Linda.

A booklist: Read aloud Christmas titles from the library at Hope Is the Word.

A birthday: Willa Cather, American novelist, b.1873.

A poem: The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel

In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Lost in a Walker Percy Cosmos, Part 5

Oct31

The conference, “Still Lost in the Cosmos: Walker Percy & the 21st Century,” that I attended in New Orleans along with Eldest Daughter was a very Catholic conference. I would guess that most, not all, of the speakers at the conference were Catholic. The conference was held on the campus of Loyola University, a Catholic Jesuit university. I told one man at the reception on Friday evening that I had eight children. He immediately assumed that I was Catholic. I should have said, “No, I’m just a fertile Baptist.” I did tell him that I was Baptist whereupon he asked me what I was doing at a Walker Percy conference in the middle of all of the Catholics. Didn’t we (Baptists) think they (Catholics) were all a bunch of heathens?

I reassured him that I was OK with Catholics if he was OK with Baptists. Everyone else at the reception drank alcohol. I didn’t, but I enjoyed the food. We all enjoyed the keynote address, and then Eldest Daughter and I went back to our bed and breakfast and enjoyed a good night’s rest.

On Saturday morning Eldest Daughter and I decided to mirror the theme of the conference by getting lost in New Orleans. New Orleans, at least the part of New Orleans where we were lost, has lots of narrow, one-way streets, with potholes, and people park alongside the streets, making them even narrower. It’s picturesque, but confusing. We wandered the byways of NOLA for over an hour before we happened upon the Loyola campus and were returned to the bosom of the Walker Percy conference. It all felt predestined.

We did miss the first seminar sessions of the morning, but we were able to make the 10:15 session on Technology and Media in Lost in the Cosmos. The first panelist used the word “semiotics” more than once, but I did not walk out or make any rude noises. If one attends a conference about an author who is interested in something called “semiotics” one must put up with a certain amount of semiotics. Anyway, apparently the alphabet is to blame for modern man’s alienation. The post-alphabetic self gains the whole world (on paper) but loses itself? Actually this analysis of the plight of modern man bears thought. What were the negative results of the invention of the printing press? What did we lose when we put everything into print? The art of story-telling? Community? And what are we losing now as we put everything into pixels on a computer screen?

The next presenter spoke about “the liquid society”, a phrase coined by a sociologist named Baumann. The idea is that we live in a society of individuals and individualists with fragmented lives, no long-term career, no family ties, no sense of place or community, our identities in constant flux. This lack of fixed identity is a major theme of Lost in the Cosmos.

May 9, 2011. Venice. European society, said the Holy Father, is submerged in a liquid culture; in this regard, he pointed out “its ‘fluidity,’ its low level of stability or perhaps absence of stability, its mutability, the inconsistency that at times seems to characterize it.”
He noted that Bauman attributes the birth of the “liquid” society to the consumerist model. The philosopher stated that its most profound impact has been felt in social relations, and, more in particular, in relations between man and woman, which have become increasingly flexible and impalpable, as manifested by the present concept of love reduced to a mere passing sentiment.
Speaking to an audience in the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, Benedict XVI opposed this model of a liquid society with a model of the society “of life and of beauty.”
“It is certainly an option, but in history it’s necessary to choose: man is free to interpret, to give meaning to reality, and it is precisely in this liberty that his great dignity lies,” said the Pope.

Again, the loss of community, and the resultant loss of self, is a theme. Belief in technology and progress alone is inadequate and dangerous. We need a community to “in”form our sense of self. Lost in the Cosmos involves the reader in the message through a repeated use of the second person: “You grow thoughtful” or “you feel like a castaway on an island”. Also, the reader is asked questions and enticed to participate in thought experiments and multiple choice quizzes.

Percy said that “words have a tendency to wear out.” Because of this loss of meaning, authors in particular keep trying to find new ways and new words to express old truths. Percy was always trying to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

Tell All The Truth by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.

I’m not sure how successful Mr. Percy is in communicating with me, but I’m also not sure I am his target audience. Percy was born in 1916, so he’s a twentieth century author to be sure. However, I’m something of an anachronism. I’ve never felt the twentieth century alienation and loss of faith in God that most twentieth century authors exhibit. I settled the God question when I was a teen with C.S. Lewis, a little Josh McDowell, G.K. Chesterton and two verses from the Bible:

Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face. Job 13:15

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life.” John 6:68

Not saying I have all the answers or never feel depressed or never doubt God’s intentions or nearness. But who or what else is there to assuage the ache? (Listen to Ben Shive’s song, Nothing for the Ache, which I would embed here if I could.)

Lost in a Walker Percy Cosmos, Part 2

Oct27

I forgot to mention, in Part 1 of this series of posts on the Walker Percy conference at Loyola University in New Orleans, that Eldest Daughter was presenting a paper at the conference. I will not tell you which paper she presented, but it was good and it had nothing to do with French medieval poetry, the ostensible subject of her dissertation that she is supposed to be writing. Walker Percy is simply more compelling right now than French medieval poetry, a truth universally acknowledged, is it not?

For those of you who, like me, have never attended an academic conference, the format is quite simple. The presenters, mostly professors of something or another at some university or another, get up in groups of three or four and they read their papers. That’s right, they read to the audience, just as librarians read picture books to first graders in story time, except mostly there are no pictures, and then they take questions. Some of these academics are better storytellers and readers than others, but I will say that I learned something from almost every paper I heard read, except when I got lost in the cosmos of academia and erudition. (I heard and made lots of “lost” jokes at this conference.)

Here are some really, truly, actual sample titles of papers from Still Lost in the Cosmos: Walker Percy & the 21st Century:

Alienation, Dislocation and Restoration: Percy’s Semiotic Psychology
The Semiotics of Shame and the Christian Meta-narrative in Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos (I can’t tell you about these first two because I refused to attend session or panel in which one of the papers to be presented used the word “semiotics” or meta-narrative”. I have my limits. See Part 1 of this series.)
Falling into Transcendence: Walker Percy’s Demoniac Self, the Erotic and the Lust for God
Walker Percy’s Semiotics of Self: A Case Study: C.S. Peirce and the Problem of Reentry (Two colons! But pardon my ignorance, who is C.S. Peirce, and does he really place the “e” before the “i” in his last name?)
Deceit, Desire, and the Self-Help Book: Rereading Lost in the Cosmos as a novel in light of Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory (Ditto Rene Girard?)
The Mishmash Theory of Man
Where are the Hittites? Tracing Walker Percy’s Theology of the Jews
A Moveable Piece: Stefan Zweig and Walker Percy’s Problem of Artist-Writer Reentry (And who is Stefan Zweig? I’m starting to feel like a low-information conference attendee.)
Revealing the Transcendent Third: Walker’s Percy’s Trinitarian Imagination
Starting Over: Amnesia, Escape, and Redemption in Lost in the Cosmos and in Percy’s Novels
Lost in the Cosmos and Gulliver’s Travels: Christian Satire in the Anglo-American Tradition
Walker Percy, Herman Melville, and Moby Dick, the (Second-to) Last Self-Help Book: An Intertextual Study of the Self (Ah, at last, Melville, Moby Dick, and Gulliver I know. I went to these two presentations, wanting to feel as if I had at least something in my brain besides mush, the mishmash theory of me.)
The Dialectic of Belief: Participation and Uncertainty in Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos

'St Ignatius T Shirt Beads' photo (c) 2009, Infrogmation of New Orleans - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/To begin with, I learned from just reading these titles that an academic conference requires colons. Without colons, the professors would find it impossible to give titles to their papers. However, my favorite title of a paper presented at the conference had no colons at all. It was a joke. Really, the paper was titled: “I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.” It may have been my favorite, or at least second favorite, part of the entire conference.

So, the presenting of papers began on Friday afternoon in various conference rooms in the library at Loyola. I like libraries, and it was a very nice library. As we entered, to our left, was a statue of St. Ignatius of Loyola. He was wearing a purple T-shirt.

“Outside the front steps of the Monroe Library stands a life-size bronze statute of St. Ignatius de Loyola, a diminutive ex-soldier, courtier, and our patron saint.
Our students have named the statue Iggy, and occasionally loan him hats and T-shirts to promote various campus events and or decorate him with Mardi Gras beads during carnival season.”

I don’t think the purple shirt had anything to do with Walker Percy, but he might have appreciated the local color. The first panel I attended was transcendence, amnesia, and the paper with the joke title. I took notes. However, my notes may or may not have been recognizable as related to the topics being discussed. In my mind, My Self, the notes I took make perfect sense and are semiotically and integrally related to the papers that I heard. However, an impartial judge, if such a judge were to exist, might beg to differ. Perhaps St. Ignatius in his purple t-shirt will deign to judge in Part 3 of this series, Digression, Catastrophe, and Narcotic Refuge: Are the Existentialists Really Epicurians?

Lost in a Walker Percy Cosmos, Part 1

Oct26

A couple of months ago Eldest Daughter asked if I would like to accompany her to an academic conference in New Orleans in October. New Orleans in October with Eldest Daughter who is one of my favorite persons? Of course, I would love to go. Then, she told me the subject of the conference, “Still Lost in the Cosmos: Walker Percy & the 21st Century.”

Now I am not a fan, really, of Mr. Percy’s fiction. I say that, having read one, maybe two, books by Percy, The Moviegoer and another book long ago that I think was The Thanatos Syndrome. I remember people in trees(?) or sitting on flagpoles and something about poisoning the water supply and a priest and a doctor. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, and unfortunately that’s all I remember of the novel. The Moviegoer I read more recently, and according to Eldest Daughter herself, who is a fan, I just didn’t get it. I concur: I didn’t get it. The main character, Binx Bolling, was the kind of person who, if I were to meet him, I would feel strongly impelled to shake until he spits, as my mother would say. Existentialists (Percy had a thing for Kierkegaard) affect me that way, oddly enough.

Still I am a fan of Eldest Daughter and of a trip to New Orleans, and I like to feel as if I know what people are talking about when I listen to them speak. So in preparation for the conference I began reading Mr. Percy’s book, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. Lost in the Cosmos is not a novel, but rather a parody of the myriad of self-help books that tell us that we can categorize our angst and work it out in six easy steps or by repeating one mantra or by listening to the author who will tell us who we really are. The first part of the book is really quite clever as Percy gets the reader first to admit that “it [is] possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life.” Then, through a series of “thought experiments”, Percy leads his readers to recognize the existential lostness that afflicts each of us: we are indeed lost in the cosmos.

So far, so clever. In the middle of the book, however, Percy stops for an extended tour of the science of semiotics, a word I had to look up in my handy, dandy dictionary. Semiotics is “the study of signs and symbols, and their use or interpretation.” (Clear as mud? No? You obviously need to undertake a serious study of semiotics.) This part of the book is called “A Semiotic Primer on the Self.” The print becomes much smaller, and the text much, much more dense. Diagrams are inserted, and footnotes abound. Percy himself writes, “The following section, an intermezzo of some forty pages, can be skipped without fatal consequences.” I skipped. Not only did I skip, I also skipped out and never managed to finish Lost in the Cosmos before the conference in New Orleans. The consequences were not fatal, but perhaps were an inhibition to my understanding of the presenters at the conference.

So, there you have a synopsis of my preparation for the Walker Percy conference at Loyola University in New Orleans. My preliminary studies were inadequate at best. However, I went with the expectation that I would be enriched and challenged by the conference speakers and satiated and enlivened by the food and sights of New Orleans. And Eldest Daughter is still one of my favorite people, even if she does understand Walker Percy when I do not.

Tomorrow, read part 2, Amnesia, Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Shadow of Catastrophe, or How to Title an Academic Paper on Walker Percy.

The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge

Jun20

I have read very few authors with as much insight into the feelings and thought processes of men, women, and children as Elizabeth Goudge. The Rosemary Tree is remarkable in its treatment of characters who are all somewhat broken (as are we all), but who fall on a continuum from repentant to ineffectual to struggling to wise to completely evil. And the character who is represented as utterly irredeemable, because she doesn’t want to be forgiven or changed, might be the character you least suspect.

It all seems very true to life. (By the way that’s an awful cover, but the others I saw at Amazon weren’t any better. I don’t know why the people are wearing what looks like Elizabethan or Edwardian costumes. The story takes place in the twentieth century, after World War II.) The main characters in this little vignette of village life are:

John Wentworth, a bumbling and diffident country parson who sees himself as a weak man and a failure who can never get anything quite right.

“He took off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, lifted up to Almighty God the magnitude of his failure and the triviality of his task, and applied himself to the latter. The hot water warmed his cold hands and the pile of cleansed china grew satisfactorily on the draining-board. There was a pleasure in getting things clean. Small beauties slid one by one into his consciousness, quietly and unobtrusively, like growing light. The sinuous curves of Orlando the marmalade cat, washing himself on the window-sill, the comfortable sound of ash settling in the stove, a thrush singing somewhere, the scent of Daphne’s geraniums, the gold of the crocuses that were growing round the trunk of the apple tree outside the kitchen window.”

Others see him as Don Quixote, the Man of la Mancha.

Daphne Wentworth, John’s wife, is much more competent than her husband, but also full of pride and thwarted ambitions from her youth.

The couple have three children: Pat, who is like her mother, competent and intelligent and sharp, Margary, who is more like John, dreamy and vulnerable, and Winkle, who is the baby of the family, but wise with the innocence of childhood.

Harriet lives upstairs in the Wentworth parsonage, and she is wise with the wisdom of many years of experience, first as John’s nanny, then as the parsonage housekeeper, and now as a retired pray-er and watcher over the entire household.

“They all said they could not do without her. In the paradoxical nature of things if she could have believed them she would have been a much happier woman, but not the same woman whom they could not do without.”

Maria Wentworth, John’s great-aunt, lives in Belmaray Manor and keeps pigs.

Young Mary O’Hara, Irish and full of vitality, and Miss Giles, middle-aged, bitter, and full of frustrations, both teach school at the small private school that the Wentworth girls attend. Mary’s aunt, Mrs. Belling, “was a very sweet woman and had been a very beautiful one.” She is headmistress of the little school, where all three girls are quite unhappy, each in her own way.

Into this mix comes a stranger, Michael Stone, who is weighed down by many, many real failures and sins and who comes to Devonshire where the story takes place not so much for redemption as simply for a place to go, perhaps to hide from the world. Michael will find more than he’s looking for, and the other characters in this novel will change and grow as a result of Michael’s presence and the truth he brings into their lives.

Elizabeth Goudge really has written a lovely novel. Apparently, The Times criticized its “slight plot” and “sentimentally ecstatic” approach when the book was first published in 1956. I’ll admit the story is a bit short on action, but the descriptions of how and what people think and feel more than makes up for any deficiency in fictional exploits.

Sidenote/detour: While looking for more information about Elizabeth Goudge, I found this article about an Indian author, Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen, who plagiarized from The Rosemary Tree in her 1993 Cranes’ Morning. In fact, aside from changing the setting to India, the names of the characters to Indian ones, and the religion to Hinduism, Ms. Aikath-Gyaltsen copied much of Goudge’s novel word-for-word. It took about a year for the plagiarism to be noticed and confirmed, and in the meantime Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen died, probably committing suicide. Sad story.

I wonder what Elizabeth Goudge, who died in 1984, would have thought about it all?

Not to end this review of and homage to Ms. Goudge’s agreeable novel on such a sad note, I’ll leave you with one more quote:

“The way God squandered Himself had always hurt her; and annoyed her, too. The sky full of wings and only the shepherds awake. That golden voice speaking and only a few fishermen there to hear; and perhaps some of the words He spoke carried away on the wind or lost in the sound of the waves lapping against the side of the boat. A thousand blossoms shimmering over the orchard, each a world of wonder all to itself, and then the whole thing blown away on a south-west gale as though the delicate little worlds were of no value at all. Well, of all the spendthrifts, she would think, and then pull herself up. It was not for her to criticize the ways of Almighty God; if He liked to go to all that trouble over the snowflakes, millions and millions of them, their intricate patterns too small to be seen by human eyes, and melting as soon as made, that was His affair and not hers.”

I like the idea of God as a spendthrift, creating beauty for the sheer joy of it all whether there’s anyone there to perceive it or not. Isn’t there a poem based on that idea? Maybe Emily Dickinson?

The Resurrection and the Life

Mar29

I thought I’d post a few times today and tomorrow about the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and what it means to me and to some of the authors and fictional and actual characters that I have on my bookshelves. I’m going to take turns blogging and house-cleaning and see how that goes.

I first read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities when I was in ninth grade. Three of us—Christina, Teresa, and I— wrote a chapter-by-chapter summary of the entire book, making our own little study guide to the novel as a school project. We did this before the age of personal computers and before any of us knew how to type. I can’t remember exactly what the finished product looked like, but it was a lot of work.

The themes of death, burial, imprisonment, rescue and resurrection are woven throughout Dickens’ tale set during the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Doctor Manette is rescued from a living death inside the Bastille. Jerry Cruncher is a “resurrection man” who digs up dead bodies to sell them. Charles Darnay is rescued and recalled to life twice during the novel, once when he is on trial in England and again when he is headed for guillotine in France.

But the most vivid representation of death and resurrection comes at the end of the novel when the reprobate Sydney Carton gives up his life to save Charles and Lucy Darnay and to ensure their future together. Carton is walking down the street when he remembers these words from Scripture read at his father’s funeral long ago:

“I am the resurrection, and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”

Now, that the streets were quiet, and the night wore on, the words were in the echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly calm and steady, he sometimes repeated them to himself as he walked; but, he heard them always.

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion.

But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays. And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge of light appeared to span the air between him and the sun, while the river sparkled under it.

The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a congenial friend, in the morning stillness He walked by the stream, far from the houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lingered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea.- “Like me!”

A trading-boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf, then glided into his view, floated by him, and died away. As its silent track in the water disappeared, the prayer that had broken up out of his heart for a merciful consideration of all his poor blindnesses and errors, ended in the words, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

On Good Friday, when we are in the midst of death and sin and darkness, it does sometimes seem a if “Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion.” A blogging friend sent out a tweet earlier today saying that he had “difficulty ‘pretending’ on Good Friday that Jesus is dead.” Of course, Jesus isn’t dead, but as far as imagining the feeling of despair and “being delivered over to death”, I have no trouble whatsoever. Sometimes things in this world are very dark, and the hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and our eventual resurrection with Him is all that keeps from utter despair.

Thank God for Resurrection Sunday!

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Feb17

This novel from a Nigerian/American author is classified as young adult fiction in my library, probably because the narrator is fifteen years old, but I think it will resonate with adults of all ages, and with readers around the world because the themes–abusive relationships, religious legalism, freedom, and the source of joy–are all universal themes.

Fifteen year old Kambili and her older brother Jaja live with their mother and father in a wealthy or at least upper middle class Catholic home in Enugu, Nigeria. Their father’s strict, legalistic Catholicism pervades the family’s life, from twenty minute prayers before meals to reciting the rosary on car trips to fasting before mass every Sunday. Not only is the family required to be strictly Catholic by Kambili’s papa but they are also held to a stringent schedule made up of course by the father. Kambili has conflicting feelings about Papa: she is pleased, even thrilled, when he approves of her words or actions, but of course when harsh punishment comes her way, Kambili is crushed.

Then, the catalyst for change enters the life of this silent, repressed family: Kambili’s Aunty Ifeoma invites the children to visit her home in Nsukka. Aunty Ifeoma is a widow, a teacher, much poorer than her brother, but the joy in Aunty’s home is overflowing and overwhelming for her love-starved niece and nephew. Kambili and Jaja learn another way of life, without rigid schedules and authoritarian rule-keeping, and most of all without fear. Kambili, who comes across as much younger than fifteen throughout most of the story probably because of her repressed childhood, doesn’t know what to think or do with all the freedom that she is given in Aunty Ifeoma’s home, so she mostly does nothing and remains very, very quiet, even silent. Jaja sees the possibilities of freedom and becomes rebellious. However, it is the children’s meek, long-suffering mother, who has also suffered abuse at the hands of her husband, who takes the most surprising action of all.

The story is terribly sad. The depth of the dysfunction and abuse in the family is revealed slowly, a little at a time, until it becomes overpowering. Papa is not a wholly evil man; he publishes the truth about the government in his newspaper and he is generous to the poor, to family, and to many others. But of course, this generosity and honesty displayed to outside world makes the secret, petty evil that Papa perpetrates inside his home even worse.

I hope I haven’t spoiled the narrative arc of this novel by telling what it is generally about. I don’t think so. Ms. Adichie is quite skilled in the way she spins her story, and she enlists our sympathy as readers for all the characters in the novel, even Papa to some extent. One senses that he is caught in a web of legalism himself, and he cannot see a way out. That emotional captivity certainly doesn’t justify the abuse, but it explains to some extent why the children and their mother take so long to escape and why their feelings about Papa are so contradictory and confused.

Recommended.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Feb9

Victor Hugo’s epic novel is divided into five volumes:

Volume 1: Fantine
Volume 2: Cosette
Volume 3: Marius
Volume 4: Saint-Denis
Volume 5: Jean Valjean

In January I read, or rather re-read, the first two volumes, but I’m sort of stuck. I first read the entire novel when I was in college. This reading was back in the Dark Ages, before the stage musical, before any movie versions that I was aware of, certainly before the most recent movie musical version starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway. I didn’t know what would happen to Cosette, Marius, and Jean Valjean. This burning desire to know how the story would turn out explains why I stayed up until two in the morning once upon a college dorm room, reading Les Miserables even though I had an eight o’clock class that same morning. I had to finish; I had to know.

Now I already know. And although I am enjoying my re-read thirty-plus years later, I no longer have the suspense pulling at me to finish the novel. So, I’m not sure when I will get the motivation to go ahead and read the rest, but here are a few observations on the first two parts.

The first part of Book 1, like the first part of the musical, actually focuses on Monseigneur Bienvenu, the Bishop of M., who first shows Jean Valjean what grace and mercy look like.

Of M. Bienvenu: “He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him.” Brown Bear Daughter thinks the good bishop is too good to be true, but I have met people who, having put their past behind them (and it is implied that M. Bienvenue may have a past of some sort), are veritable saints.

However, Jean Valjean does not immediately become good after his life-changing encounter with the bishop. Even after he is shown mercy, in the book Valjean robs a child on the road, out of habit(?) or dullness or ingrained hopelessness. He only sees himself in his own sin after this shameful act that cannot be excused by “the law is too harsh” or “I had to help my sister and her children by stealing a loaf of bread.” When Valjean sees himself in all his wickedness, then he is given even more grace to go ahead and “become an honest man,” sort of, or at least a useful and respectable man.

Fantine is another character who is more multi-dimensional in the novel than in the musical/movie. She is certainly “more sinned against”, abandoned by Cosette’s father, cheated by the Thenardiers, and driven into debt, prostitution, and slavery by her situation. However, she also nurses hatred and pride in her heart as she thinks of how she lost her factory job and as she continues on to a life of prostitution instead of appealing to M. Madeleine to give her job back. And she, like Valjean, needs and receives redemption and mercy.

Part 2 does introduce us to Cosette, and we watch her grow into a young lady as Jean Valjean grows in his ability to love and to sacrifice himself for another. He becomes Cosette’s true father.

Girl Detective enjoyed reading all 1231 pages of Les Miserables, but she complains, as do most people, about the long digressions and says the book begs to be abridged. I understand and have some sympathy for the abridgment position, especially when it comes to the name-dropping, political sections when Tholomyes and later Marius and his friends talk about people and political situations that we latter-day readers have never heard of and don’t need or want to know about. The political/historical parts where Hugo writes about people who add no value to the story are skippable. But the sewer and the cloister chapters are actually quite interesting to me anyway, and they set a tone for the setting of the story that I think makes it richer and more intense. (Not sure those are the right adjectives? Maybe “deep” or “vivid”.) Yeah, you can skip those and the whole battle of Waterloo, except the part where Thenardier rescues somebody, and the argot chapter and it’s OK, but I would argue that at the least there is good writing (essay and historical writing) there, too.

If the digressions bore you, skip them or get an abridged version. If you’re like me and you enjoy ponderous chapters full of information about arcane subjects, chapters that interrupt the action but do something that I can’t put my finger on exactly for the tone and development of the story, then go ahead and read them. I can’t say that you miss anything, really, by skipping, or that there is any virtue in being able to say you’ve read the entire, unabridged version. Just read it in some version. My favorite novel ever.

By the way, I loved the movie, except for the one part with Santa and various other vulgar vignettes in the Thenardiers’ inn, a scene which begged to be abridged, cut, censored and never even thought up in the first place. Drunken Santa Claus, at least, makes no appearance in Victor Hugo’s novel.

Novel Views: Les Miserables by Jeff Clark. These charts and graphs are fascinating. Did you know that, other than character names, some of the most common words used in Les Miserables are: bishop, love, mother, child, gamin, Paris, old, right, war, barricade, sewer, man, day, street, city, wall, door? And each character has characteristic verbs that are used to describe his/her actions.
Jean Valjean fell, condemned, concealed, stood, robbed, slept, caught.
Fantine coughed, sighed, sang, shared.
Cosette gazed, grew, developed, fetched, noticed, woke, loved.
Marius lived, fixed, paid, launched, fell, reflected, heard.
Javert pinioned, killed, permitted, bound, hunted, recognized, yielded.
Thenardier screamed, unmasked, growled, shook, lied, cast, thrust.
Gavroche muttered, sang, scratched, climbed, shrugged, pushed.

Emotional Detachment and Les Miserables by Michael Sacasas at Mere Orthodoxy. This article asks if some critics of the new movie and of the story itself are disturbed by “having been brought dangerously near the edge of feeling again what had been assiduously suppressed by reflexively deployed irony or cynicism.”

Les Miserables book study at the blog Mommy Life. Barbara Curtis, the blogger at Mommy Life has gone on to be with the Lord, but her blog lives on in cyberspace. Her comments and thoghts on Hugo’s opus are full of insight and Christian theology.

Magistramater gives us some quotations from Volume 1 and from Volume 2.

Amy’s rambling thoughts on Les Miserables at Hope Is the Word.

I started this blog post a couple of weeks ago, and now I think I’m about ready to get back to Les Miserables and finish it. I’ll try to check in again when I’ve finished Volume Three, Marius.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Feb4

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. ~Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service. I didn’t return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing.

Set in the 1960’s, this novel of lies and spies and deception within deception is spell-binding, especially toward the end as the author begins to tie up all the loose ends into a choose-your-own ending sort of denouement. As it begins, Serena Frome tells us how she became a spy, a very low-level spy with a fairly innocuous duty to perform. She simply has to recruit an up-and-coming novelist and lie to him about the source of her funding. No big deal. However, as Sir Walter so aptly observed, small deceptions grow over time into large, knotty messes.

Serena, who is anything but serene throughout most of the novel, and her spy-target, Tom, become lovers. They actually fall in love with each other, and the secrets between them become more and more heavy and complicated and unsustainable. In one scene Serena and Tom make love to one another on the beach and declare their love in words for the first time:

“I knew that before this love began to take its course, I would have to tell him about myself. And then the love would end. So I couldn’t tell him. But I had to.
Afterward, we lay with our arms linked, giggling like children in the the dark at our secret, at the mischief we had got away with. We laughed at the enormity of the words we had spoken. Everyone else was bound by the rules, and we were free. We’d make love all over the world, our love would be everywhere. We sat up and shared a cigarette. Then we both began to shiver from the cold, and so we headed for home.”

So ridiculous. We all do this: fool ourselves into thinking that the rules don’t apply to us, that we can lie and steal and cheat and still give and receive love that is lasting and stable. But love that’s built on deceit is just like that Biblical house built on beach sand, headed for a fall.

However, just when the reader thinks that he knows the end of this story, after all we’ve all heard it and experienced it before, love lost, betrayal uncovered, and tragedy, Mr. McEwan and Tom the novelist and Serena herself all have a few more tricks and twists of plot to reveal or live through. I’m not sure the ending is really, truly possible or likely (can the Gordian knot really be dispatched with a single sword stroke?), but I want it to be so.

I’ve read McEwan’s most famous novel, Atonement, and it, too, had a twist at the end. The surprising or ambiguous ending seems to be a trademark in most of Mr. McEwan’s novels, as is a “predeliction for more graphic sexual description than I am comfortable reading” (what I wrote about Atonement and what is also true of Sweet Tooth). I thought the sexual details were unfortunate and unnecessary, but I usually do think that about modern novels. These lascivious particulars were skim-able, and the rest of the story somewhat redeemed the few vulgar parts.

So I give the novel, which also deals with the value of fiction and the intricacies of the Cold War, a qualified recommendation.