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Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Apr26

What a find! I’ve never read anything by Barbara Pym before, but I found her book, Excellent Women, to be reminiscent of Jane Austen (drolly observant), Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford (insightful in regard to the ordinary), and even Jane Eyre, without the drama, but with the wry self-analysis.

Mildred Lathbury, the narrator of the story, does say near the beginning of the book: “I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.” Miss Lathbury then proceeds to tell her story in first person and depict herself as a rather plain female who is always cast in the role of the excellent woman who offers sympathy and a cup of tea at crucial moments.

Perhaps there can be too much making of cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. We had all had our supper, or were supposed to have had it, and were met together to discuss the arrangements for the Christmas bazaar. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look. ‘Do we need tea?’ she echoed. ‘But Miss Lathbury . . .’ She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.

Shades of J. Alfred Prufrock: “Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?”

More observations from Mildred Lathbury, excellent woman:

“Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one’s struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti?”

“I remembered my Lenten resolution to try to like him. It was getting a little easier, but I felt that at any moment I might have a setback.”

“I dare say a clever person with a fantastic turn of mind could transform even a laundry list into a poem.”

“I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone, and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people’s business, and if she is also a clergyman’s daughter then one might really say there is no hope for her.”

If you’ve read and enjoyed other books by Ms. Pym, what would you suggest next?

Wodehouse for Comic Relief

Apr24

I read a couple of P.G. Wodehouses back in March; I needed them for comic relief and a bit of a palate cleanser in between this and this and this.

Leave It to Psmith is the first Psmith book I’ve read. I’ll be reading more. Themes and motifs included The Flower Pot motif (in which someone got hit with one or something got hidden in one or somebody stole one with great frequency), money and the lack thereof, crime and robbery, and impersonation (every character in the book impersonated someone else at some point, adding to the incidence of confusion, crime, robbery, lack of money and broken flowerpots.)

Quirky Quotations:
“To find oneself locked out of a country house at half-past two in the morning in lemon-coloured pyjamas can never be an unmixedly agreeable experience.” (You can tell this is a British novel because of the country house and the spelling.)

“A weird and repellent female . . . created for some purpose which I cannot fathom. Everything in this world, I like to think, is placed here for some useful end; but why the authorities unleashed Miss Peavey on us is beyond me. It is not too much to say that she gives me a pain in the gizzard.”

“A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances.” I know that smell, unfortunately.

Jeeves in the Offing was my second Wodehousian selection. I don’t think I’d read this one before, but it’s hard to tell for certain. The plots in a Wodehouse farce are somewhat interchangeable; only the names are changed around to protect the innocent.

More Quirky Quotations:

“It just showed once again that half the world doesn’t how the other three-quarters lives.”

“‘And the severe mental strain to which I am being subjected doesn’t matter, I suppose?’
‘Not a bit. Does you good. Keeps your pores open.'”

“I don’t know why it is, but whenever there’s dirty work to be undertaken at the crossroads, the cry that goes round my little circle is always, ‘Let Wooster do it.’ It never fails.”

“I quivered like somethng in aspic.”

” . . . with girls of high and haughty spirit you have to watch your step, especially if they have red hair, like Bobbie. If they think you’re talking out of turn, dudgeon ensues, and dudgeon might easily lead her to reach for the ginger ale bottle and bean me with it.”

“I don’t know if you know the meaning of the word ‘agley,’ Kipper, but that, to put it in a nutshell, is the way things have ganged.”

“The silly young geezer . . . I’d always thought of her as half-baked, but now I think they didn’t even put her in the oven.”

And that, my dears, concludes your dose of Wodehouse, a quite salutary and salubrious prescription, for today.

The Small Rain by Madeleine L’Engle

Apr19

I’ve been working on several projects this year: my Newbery project, my TBR list, and my Madeleine L’Engle project. I want, over the course of the next year or two, to read or re-read all of Ms. L’Engle’s books —or as many of them as I can find. I started with A Winter’s Love, published in 1957, my birth year. Here’s what I wrote about that book. I then read Camilla, one of her first novels published in 1951 and then re-published in 1965 after A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery and made Ms. L’Engle famous. I wrote about Camilla here.

During my blogging break in March, I re-read Ms. L’Engle’s first published novel, A Small Rain. It’s the story of Katherine Forrester, the daughter of two famous musicians. her mother is a celebrated concert pianist, and her father is an eccentric, but talented, composer. The novel follows Katherine through her lonely and difficult adolescence and ends with her plan to return to study with her beloved piano teacher, Justin, in Paris on the eve of what turns out to be World War II.

After reading A Small Rain, I had to skip ahead chronologically in Ms. L’Engle’s oeuvre and read A Severed Wasp, probably my second favorite of all Ms. L’Engle’s novels. She wrote A Severed Wasp (1982) as a sort of sequel to A Small Rain (1945) some thirty-seven years later. In this book, Madame Forrester Vigneras is an elderly woman beginning the task of looking back on her life and evaluating, forgiving, and coming to terms with the people and events that made her who she is. She has settled in New York City after a career as concert pianist travelling all over the world. The book contains multiple insights about love, marriage, forgiveness, aging gracefully, and simple grace, and it demonstrates maturity, wisdom, and craft gained by the author over many years of writing.

I highly recommend both books, read together if possible.

“. . . there was nothing Felix Bodeway couldn’t talk about, nothing he couldn’t put into words as facile as they were intense. And maybe that was good . . . maybe that was a way of exorcising things that worry you. For when you put something into words, it becomes an affair of the intellect as well as of the emotions, and therefore loses some of its fearsome power.” —A Small Rain

Words are useful for entrapping emotions and experiences and confining them to manageble proportions. It’s part of why I blog. I like using words and sentences to define my thoughts and feelings about a book or an issue or an everyday occurrence or even an episode of a TV show. Then, I can remember and re-examine and take out whatever is illogical or immoral or unreal, just leaving the true and the lovely essence of whatever it is I’m writing about.

At least, Truth is the goal. And truth, if one can get to it with words, even approximate it, does minimize, sometimes eliminate, fear.

Next L’Engle book to read: And Both Were Young, published in 1949.

What do you think about the covers of these 1980’s paperback editions? I’m not much of a design critic, but I think they’re odd with their pieces of face.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Apr17

In the first few pages of this novel, set in Zaire from 1959 into the present time, I found two quotations that I liked a lot.

“I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”

“The forest eats itself and lives forever.”


After that, the story took over, and I forgot to keep track of individual sentences and paragraphs. It’s the story of a missionary family in Belgian Congo (Zaire) who set out to convert the Africans to Christianity and of the way that Africa transforms each member of that family. Ms. Kingsolver’s use of words and phrases in this novel is beautiful. I also liked the way the story was told from differing points of view: the dutiful daughter who becomes more African than the Africans themselves, the oldest daughter who worships, not books, but rather material comforts, and the odd twin whose disability and intelligence give her the detachment and eccentricity to do something that will truly help the African people. Even the youngest daughter, the sacrificial lamb of the family, tells the story from her vantage point some of the time.

The father, the preacher in the story, is a caricature. White missionaries to Africa are almost always caricatures: clumsy, insensitive, argumentative, violent, and self-absorbed. These fictional Cartoon Missionaries are always unable to communicate, always sure that Christianity is synonomous with American culture, always convinced that all truth resides in themselves and their own ideas. Although there were and probably still are missionaries who approach the spread of the gospel (good news) in this manner, I’ve met many missionaries, Southern Baptist and other evangelical missionaries, and I didn’t find them, for the most part, to be culturally insensitive or arrogant at all.

In spite of this stereotypical villain, I enjoyed reading The Poisonwood Bible. Some of the ideas, philosophies and scenes within the novel have stuck with me. I’m, in fact, still thinking about the novel and its implications a month and a half after having read it. Some of those “sticky” thoughts:

Africa is a vast and complicated continent, and understanding even the culture of one country within that huge continent of more than sixty countries and many more people groups would be the work of a lifetime.

It’s not really possible to understand and become a part of a culture outside of your own —even with the work of a lifetime. However, I believe Jesus transcends culture and unifies Christians across cultural lines.

African Christians have much to teach us about how to follow Christ and how to live lives of simple discipleship and obedience. However, I’m not sure that anyone is listening. One group wants Africans to fit into Rousseau’s ideal of the “Noble Savage” and not to adopt Christianity at all, and another is still stuck in a less extreme version of what the preacher father preached in this book: “see what we (western) Christians can do for the poor benighted Africans.”

Sisters, even twins, can grow up to hold very different views of the world and to espouse very different causes and beliefs. Even so, they can’t completely escape the link that growing up in the same family, and perhaps heredity, gives them. Sisters are inextricably bound together in some ways by their past and their shared heritage.

I can’t forget the image of an army of ants moving across the landscape devouring everything in sight. Could an army of insects, literal or figurative, devour our culture someday and make all that we’ve said, written, and invented, irrelevent?

Barbara Kingsolver’s website.

The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan

Apr12

Three separate blurbs in the front of my paperback copy of The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan compare Harrigan’s Alamo epic to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and to other tales of Texas by Mr. McMurtry. The comparison occurred to me independently, too, but I thought Mr. Harrigan’s novel was much better than the portion of Lonesome Dove I managed to struggle through a couple of months ago.

In fact, even though The Gates of the Alamo is obviously designed to appeal to the mostly male fans of historical war sagas and even though I could have done without some of the violence and crude behavior of some of the characters, I read the book in two days, absorbed in the narrative, the characters, and the history.

Mr. Harrigan says in his author’s note at the end of the book that he “made a pledge of absolute fidelity to the truth of the events.” He goes on to say: “That is a naive pledge, though, as any historian will tell you.”

The Alamo is to Texans what Gettysburg is to unreconstructed Confederates —sacred ground, a loss that became a victory, full of mysterious significance, a mythology not to be tampered with or revised. Mr. Harrigan’s book both tampers and revises, but as a die-hard Texican I was fascinated by the new perspectives on the story and characters of the Alamo myth, not offended or disturbed. If you’re a big fan of Sam Houston, you may want to skip The Gates of the Alamo. Harrigan’s Sam Houston is a drunkard (true) with imperial dreams of taking Texas as his own fiefdom. (I’m not so sure about Houston’s being such a grandiose blowhard who won at San Jacinto by luck, but I’m willing to grant that Mr. Harrigan has done more research on the subject than I have.) Travis and Bowie don’t come off as unadulteraed heroes either, although both, as portrayed by harrigan, have more redeeming features than does Houston. Davy Crockett, always the consummate politician even in Texas, seems to be Harrigan’s favorite of the Texian heroes.

Texas history buffs, those who enjoy war stories and Westerns, and probably all those McMurtry fans out there, will be entertained and informed by The Gates of the Alamo. The fictional characters, Edmund McGowan, a botanist who has devoted his life to the study of Texas flora and fauna, and Marry Mott, a widowed innkeeper with an obdurate and unquenchable character, weave themselves into the saga of the Alamo and the beginning of the Texas Republic as seamlessly as if they had really been there. Mr. Harrigan also presents fictional and true characters on the Mexican side of the battle who give the narrative a balanced and well-rounded panorama that is more satisfying and illuminating than a one-sided account would be. (I still can’t work up any sympathy or justification for Santa Anna, the Mesican general and dictator. He’s just a villain.)

The Alamo fell on March 6, 1836. I read The Gates of the Alamo the first week in March of this year, 2007, one hundred seventy-one years later. It was a good way to “remember the Alamo.”

Follow-up to Monday’s Review of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Apr11

If you come to Semicolon to read book reviews, you have a right to know what my standards are for judging a book. Sometimes I just don’t care for a book; the author and I just don’t mesh or it was a bad day for me. If so, I usually say so in my post on the book. Sometimes I really like a book that I know might be offensive to other people; if so, I try to remember to mention the parts that might be offensive so that readers can be forewarned. Sometimes I read a book that I hate for reasons that I am willing to share in print here; if so, I state my reasons as plainly as I can.

I read books that have profanity, vulgarity, sexual content, and violence. I think some of these books are excellent, vividly portraying the human condition and our need for God’s mercy. As many people have pointed out, the Bible tells stories about people who were profane, vulgar, sexually immoral, and violent.

I don’t like books that contain pervasive profanity and/or vulgarity, graphic, detailed sexual descriptions, or lurid, gratuitous violence. And I don’t like books that try to make sin and degradation, however graphically described, seem exciting, fulfilling, and joyous. Enjoyable, yes, sin is usually pleasureable for a season. But adultery and promiscuity do not lead to joy and happiness in this world or the next, and violence is wrong and awful, even if you believe (as I do) that it is sometimes necessary.

“Do not be deceived, whatever a man sows, he will reap.” Books that depict characters who “sow” rebellion and sexual sin and violence and “reap” happiness, peace, and joy are simply untrue. And their authors do a disservice to their own talent and to readers in writing such books. Oscar Wilde said famously that there is no such thing as an immoral book, only a badly written one. However, Oscar Wilde, who was quite witty and often quite immoral himself, was wrong in this instance. Books that deceive and tell lies and portray evil as good and good as evil are immoral —and badly written, too, no matter how skillfully their authors may use words and phrases and elements of prose to create that effect. In fact the more skillful the author is in manipulating words and ideas, the more harm he can do when he sets out to serve a lie instead of the truth.

So one of my standards is that I like books that tell the truth. If I think a book is lying, I’ll say so.

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Apr10

Once upon a time, about twenty-five years ago, I read a biography of Huey “Kingfish” Long, and I only remember the highlights: Huey ran Louisiana in the 1930’s, was a populist to end all populists, had a proposed program called “Share the Wealth,” and was assassinated by some guy who was in turn shot by Long’s bodyguard(s). Robert Penn Warren’s 1947 Pulitzer prize winning fictional account of the life and times of Willie Stark, popular governor of an unnamed Southern state, pretty much follows the general outline of what I remember of Long’s career. However, it’s been a long time, so I can’t vouch for the details.

The book is much more than Huey Long renamed and fictionalized, however. It’s an exploration of how power corrupts, of how we’re all, as Willie says, “conceived in sin and born in corruption.” The novel is misnamed. It’s either about Willie and one of his men, the narrator, Jack Burden. Or it’s about all the King’s women —his long-suffering wife, Lucy, his mistress, Sadie, and his upper class lover, Anne. For a Southern novel it’s strangely silent on the subject of race and race relations. It seems that in the Louisiana of Willie Stark, black people are to be seldom seen and definitely not heard. It’s the white voters who count, and Willie has a gift for making the poor white hicks of rural Louisiana feel as if they’re an important part of the power structure. He’s one of them, he says, a hick, too, raised up by God to lead them on to good roads, decent sanitation, free education, and universal health care. And he’ll pay for it all by taxing the rich. Gee, haven’t we all heard that speech before? Maybe old Huey/Willie has been reincarnated several times since the 1930’s.

“For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?
Ambition, love, fear, money.”

All the King’s Men explores all of these motivations for sin and corruption. The novel’s characters display the consequences of action and of inaction in a world in which the choices are between using evil means to create some possible (corrupt) good or remaining pure by not participating in the world, particularly the world of politics, at all. I think there is a Third Way, as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would say, but perhaps I am mistaken. Or perhaps in Louisiana there are only two possibilities: become corrupted by the process or stand back and let the corrupt men rule the state.

It seems to me that all this should relate to New Orleans post-Katrina, but I’m not sure how it does.

Resurrection Reading: The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas

Apr6

The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas is the story of a Roman centurion, Marcus, and his personal slave, Demetrius. Marcus is stationed in Jerusalem when a confusing and rabble-rousing carpenter from Nazareth is condemned to be crucified. Unfortunately, Marcus is ordered to carry out the crucifixion, and he is the soldier who “wins” the robe of the condemned man in a game of dice.

“Suppose you say that Jesus is divine; a god! Would he permit himself to be placed under arrest, and dragged about in the night from one court to another, whipped and reviled? Would he –this god!— consent to be put to death on a cross? A god, indeed! Crucified —dead —and buried!”

Justus sat for a moment, saying nothing, staring steadily into Marcellus’ troubled eyes. Then he leaned far forward, grasped his sleeve, and drew him close. He whispered something into Marcellus’ ear.

“No, Justus!” declared Marcellus, gruffly. “I’m not a fool! I don’t believe that —and neither do you!”

“But I saw him!” persisted Justus, unruffled.

Marcellus swallowed convulsively and shook his head.

“Why do you want to say a thing like that to me?” he demanded testily. “I happen to know it isn’t true! You might make some people believe it —but not me! I hadn’t intended to tell you this painful thing, Justus, but —I saw him die! I saw a lance thrust deep into his heart! I saw them take his limp body down —dead as ever a dead man was!”

“Everybody knows that,” agreed Justus calmly. “He was put to death and laid away in a tomb. And on the morning of the third day, he came alive, and was seen walking about in a garden.”

“You’re mad, Justus! Such things don’t happen!” . . . “If you think Jesus is alive,” he muttered, “where is he?”

Justus shook his head, made a hopeless little gesture with both hands, and drew a long sigh.

“I don’t know,” he said dreamily, “but I do know he is alive.” After a quiet moment, Justus brightened a little. “I am always looking for him,” he went on. “Every time a door opens. At every turn of the road. At every street corner. At every hillcrest.”

Resurrection Reading: The Hawk and the Dove by Penelope Wilcock

Apr4

It was Easter, two years after Father Peregrine had come to be their abbott. Easter, the greatest feast of the Christian year, and all the local people had come up to the abbey, and the guest house was full of pilgrims come to celebrate the feast of the Resurrection. So many people, so many processions, so much music! So many preparations to be made by the singers, the readers, those who served at the altar and those served in the guest house, not to mention those who worked in the kitchens and the stables. The abbey was bursting with guests, neighbors, relatives, and strangers.

The Easter Vigil was mysterious and beautiful, with the imagery of fire and water and the Paschal candle lit in the great, vaulted dimness of the abbey church. Brother Gilbert the precentor’s voice mounted joyfully in the triumphant beauty of the Exultet; all the bells rang out for the risen Lord, and the voices of the choirboys from the abbey school soared with heart-breaking loveliness in the music declaring the risen life of Jesus. Easter Day itself was radiant with sunshine for once, as well as celebration. Oh, the joyful splendor of a church crammed full of people, a thundering of voices singing, ‘Credo –I believe.’

Another trilogy, another book for the whole family, children, teenagers, and adults, another resurrection reading. I re-read The Hawk and the Dove by Penelope Wilcock over the Palm Sunday weekend and found it as inspiring and insightful as ever. In the books, an English mother tells her daughters, especially her fifteen-going-on-grown-up daughter Melissa, stories about their long ago ancestor, the abbot of a Benedictine abbey, and the monks under his care. The stories are deceptively simple and quotidian: stories of forgiveness asked and given, monks who are injured and need healing, others who don’t fit into the abbey life and must learn to do so. However, these are the same issues that Melissa, her mother and sisters must deal with in daily family life, and they’re the same things we try to iron out and work through here at Semicolon House.

In the other two books in the trilogy, the brothers of St. Alcuin monastery continue to work together and grow in community. They also grow older and must confront the difficulties that old age brings in its train. In fact, the third book in the series is about death and dying and living with serious impairments —all to the glory of God. It’s quite timely in these days of “death with diginity” and compassion redefined as hurrying the dying into death, but it may be a bit too much for children. Again, I think the entire family will enjoy the first two books in the trilogy.

A few more excerpts:

“Theodore saw his hopes of a new beginning turn to ashes in the miserable discovery that even men who had given their whole lives to follow Christ could be irritable, sharp-tongued, and hasty.” How many new Christians upon becoming involved in a church have stumbled over that particular realization? Monasteries, and churches, are simply places for imperfect people to come and begin to learn to serve and show kindness and love, not places where the already perfected live in flawless harmony.

Fifteen year old Melissa to her teacher in English class: “Mother says, that love is only true love when it shows itself in fidelity, —ummmm, faithfulness. She says if a person has the feeling of love, but no faithfulness, his love is just self-indulgent sentimentality. And that’s what Shelley was like, isn’t it? He wrote fine peoms to his wife and his lovers, but he wasn’t a faithful man. So how can his poetry about love be worth anything if his love in real life wasn’t worth anything?” From the mouths of babes, can an untrue person write truly? Can he write true poetry that he hasn’t lived in some fashion, however imperfectly?

“Mother said these stories were true, and I never knew her tell a lie . . . but then you could never be quite sure what she meant by “truth”; fact didn’t always come into it.”

I assure you that the stories in Ms. Wilcock’s Hawk and the Dove trilogy are quite true —as fiction sometimes is.

Books Read February 2007

Apr3

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom A- Recommended by P.D. James. I really liked this one. I hope there will be more books about the detective Matthew Shardlake who works for Henry VIII’s Thomas Cromwell. Wait, I just checked Amazon, and there are sequels: one called Dark Fire and a new one called Sovereign.
Grumpy Old Bookman’s review of Dissolution.

From Cover to Cover: Evaluating and Reviewing Children’s Books by Kathleen Horning BRecommended by Mindy at propernoun.net. Actually, I skimmed a lot of this book; the information seemed fairly basic and self-explanatory, but maybe if I were new to the world of children’s literature . . .

The Geographer’s Library by Jon Fasman. B Recommended at Flos Carmeli by Steven. Semicolon review here.

The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Padraic Colum. Semicolon review here.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. C+ Recommended by Jane at Much Ado. Semicolon review here.

The Fencing Master by Arturo Perez-Reverte. B+ Interesting suspense novel set in Spain, written by a Spanish author.

The Dark Frigate by Charles Boardman Hawes B 1924 Newbery Award winner. Semicolon review here. And here’s a review from Sandy D. at The Newbery Project.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Re-read for the American literature class I’m teaching at our homeschool co-op.

Come Back to Afghanistan by Said Hyder Akbar B Semicolon review here.

Best book of the month: Dissolution by CJ Sansom. I’m definitely going to read more in this series.