I am finding it harder and harder to use my Kindle. There are things I absolutely love about it, most often that it allows me to read in bed at night without a light on if my husband is already sleeping or its portability when I travel. But I find a radical diminution in what I am able to recall from books I read on my Kindle compared to printed versions. However, I can think of other factors that make a significant difference: how long I take reading the book and whether or not I have people to discuss it with. This is a novella, and I believe I read it in one sitting. It was squeezed in one night as I found myself between books. So sitting with it once, on my Kindle, and not discussing it with anyone, all lead to my not recalling too many details about it.

But this I remember: It is heartbreakingly beautiful. I read it soon after a friend was telling me of her mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. I followed it by watching the movie Still Alice. Between the three accounts and their happening so close together, I was able to tangibly feel the slow drowning that is the process of losing one’s mind while the body carries on; being aware of it as it is happening and incapable of slowing it down. Each of the three descriptions were marked by a feeling of utter helplessness.

This story is one of an old man and his grandson, as they figure out how to enter this slow losing together and say goodbye before it gets to the point that they can’t anymore. Whimsical and heart-rendingly beautiful, Backman has created a world of the mind that captures within it the life of the heart.

                   

If you talked to me at all in January, you have heard about these two books. They were both, fascinating and beautiful. I read them alongside one another. Each day, as Steinbeck sat down to write his greatest novel, he got warmed up by writing a letter to his long-time friend and editor, Pascal Covici. If you disagree it is his greatest novel, you will have to take it up with him, for he believed this to be the crowning achievement of his career; the book he was born to write. I let the two keep pace with each other, reading the story while simultaneously reading about the writing of it, which as a writer, was extremely edifying.

The slow, leisurely pace and depth of character moved East of Eden from a good story to a beautiful rendering of human life. Some have argued that the book is not enjoyable for the tragedy within it. It is true that the tragedies of this story are not beautiful; they are familiar. It’s themes are as old as the Fall. I found pieces of myself in nearly every character. There is one as ugly and dark as Satan, and she is difficult to read, ever more so as we share a name, but she is real, and therefore needs to be endured. As for me, I loved the book and consider it one of the greatest I have ever read or likely will ever read. Far from feeling despair, I closed this epic drama with great hope. You may as well.

 

 I began this book in a study of point of view, specifically when an author has several POV characters. There are rules for this, and though Virginia Woolf breaks most of them, she is heralded for it. Artful prose, like poetry, is that balance between following form, and knowing when to break with the form. Being consistent enough with your reader that they can follow where you are leading them, but making exceptions at some points to allow you to take them by surprise. We readers want this too. We bore of the books that do exactly what we predict, and even those that do what we want.

It is beautifully written, and reflected the inner life of the mind well. I valued hearing the inner monologue and its relationship to the outward actions of each of these characters. It would often bring up a memory or a thought such as, “Yes, I’ve done that before,” or “Yes, I have felt that same way.” It allowed me to connect with the characters, especially those of which, if one hadn’t heard their inner monologue, one would have guessed they had nothing in common, or even made up their own simple reasons for why that character did what they did. It is equal parts novel and study in human nature.

The difficulty I had with it was the lack of structure. At first I was baffled. There are no chapters. It begins and does not stop until it ends. I knew, before reading, that it would only cover one day of time, but dozens of pages in and only 15 minutes into the day, having jumped from the thoughts in Clarissa’s head to (anyone!) the florist, the couple passing by on the sidewalk, then back to Clarissa- I was bewildered. It jumped, and it jumped, and it jumped again with no warning, no transition. Once, about 10% of the way in (I read it on a Kindle) I realized this is what the whole book would be like, and I was able to let go of every assumption and drift along the current of her thought. Some people would take to this style of writing better than others- it may be too scattered for some. I did find it hard to keep up with all of the characters- some she returned to over and over again, while others you would hear from for a few pages and then never again. You never knew if this person, whose thoughts you were hearing, would be a significant part of the story or not.

All in all, it is truly different from most books and beautifully written. And if you are nervous because you’ve seen the movie The Hours, fear not! It was barely resembled.

I wanted to like this because people I love and admire really liked it. Maybe I went into it with too high expectations. It was sharp and funny, but I had a love/hate relationship with Bernadette. I liked her, but she was selfish, and her selfishness was devastating to others, but it read like you were supposed to forgive her for that because it was just her mysterious way. I couldn’t. I saw in her my tendency toward selfishness and the devastation that can have on those around me and I was angry with her, with me. Her excuses were not good enough. (No, neither are mine.) It was an entertaining read, but I hoped for much more at the conclusion.

I read this in two days- it is so good! There is a profusion of interesting and lovable characters, and I found it fascinating to hear the story only through letters and telegrams. My only complaint was that the author waited until the absolute end to resolve the building conflict. It made the conclusion seem too quick; I wanted to relish in it longer and to see how it played itself out. This is how one usually feels when a book ends that was a pure joy to read. C.S. Lewis says, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” I would have been happy for this book to go on forever.

I love the WWII era- they were such a chivalrous and scrappy people. To think of so many nations fighting the same fight. Yes, they all had their own reasons. Some entered the fray before others. Some did so reluctantly. But they sacrificed. They lived in wartime and felt the effects of it. Unlike now, when I had to explain to my little girl that actually our country is at war and has been for many years. No, we don’t see the fighting. No, we don’t feel the danger. No, we don’t have to give up anything for it. It felt absurd to say. It feels a bit absurd to live. Hear me, I love that my children don’t live in a war zone, but there is something beautiful and strong that emerges within a people who have suffered. Those who have been brought low have a greater capacity for seeing every little thing as a gift. And those who have been brought low together experience a deep connection with one another. Then think of the scale of the connectedness! These were the thoughts traveling through my mind as I read this book, where destruction from the war was everywhere. It was on the front porch, in the empty seat at the table, piled up against ruins of buildings, and in bones showing through the skin of meager bodies. But what beauty and valor came of it!

So that’s one love this book hit on for me. The other was letter writing. The book is told entirely from letters, with an occasional telegram thrown in. It occurred to me how much fluff was removed from the book because of this. Imagine if your only way to communicate was through writing! That back and forth conversation with your best friend written in the form of letters. That is the way to cut the fat of what we say! You don’t go to the trouble to beat around the bush. It’s trickier to hide behind small talk. Letter writing is intentional; nothing slips out. You speak as much by what you don’t say as by what you do. It revolutionized the conversation!

I found myself laughing out loud until my sides ached, holding back tears with a quivering lip and tight throat, and thinking upon the connections these characters made with the authors and books they read long, long after setting the book down. The poetry and stories lived on inside of them as this story will live on inside of me.

The same book that introduced me to Tess of the D’Urbervilles has introduced me now to Madame Bovary. This is a book I am thankful for, not because of any enjoyment in the reading of it, but because it spoke so truly on things society would rather you ignore. Gustave Flaubert released his book to a shocked audience. For a woman of his time to seek enjoyment in lovers outside her marriage was unthinkable. But as Karen Swallow Prior says,

Books meet with disapproval because of their objectionable content. Wisdom, however, considers not only what a book says (its content), but how it says it (its form). Just as important- or perhaps more important than- whether a book contains questionable themes….is how those topics are portrayed. Are they presented truthfully in terms of their context and their consequences?…Discerning judgments of literature consider form as much as content, just as with any other art.

This book is not so much about adultery as it is about the difference between love and passion, the oppression that follows the consumer, and the isolation and futility of disenchantment with reality.  Do not come to this book for entertainment. It will not deliver you that; but if you come to seek the reality of love, the repercussions of bottomless desire, come. This book has saved many from the errors of its heroine.

Emma Bovary, were she to enter upon 21st century music, would have been a fan of The Darkness:

Love is only a feeling
(drifting away)

She would have sung it with gusto. She is a woman searching for love, finding it, losing it, searching again, finding, losing, ad infinitum. For her, love is a feeling; it is synonymous with passion.

As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.

We see it all over: in music, in film, in literature, we even feed it by the spoonful to our children (enter Disney). Emma realizes in the weeks following her wedding the stark difference between her idea of love and the reality of it:

Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

But rather than question her idea of love, she assumes her mistake was in the finding of it as opposed to its definition.

As to me, I have found love to be a number of things in my life. It takes shape in a myriad of ways. It is a Person, an action, a choice, and sometimes a feeling. Feelings, even the feeling of love, is fleeting. It is susceptible to changes in circumstance, evolving personhood, or even things as fickle as the lighting of a room, the time of day, the latest story to influence imagination, or the mood one happens to be in- everyone knows this. I have walked into my daughter’s room to watch her sleep and felt so full of love for her I could burst. But when I was up in the middle of the night nursing a screaming baby, I was not feeling the love. I didn’t love her any less than eight hours before, but the feeling was gone. The love was still there, it was the very thing motivating me to hold her gently, nurse her, sing and rock her back to sleep- despite the hour, despite the cold, despite the exhaustion. Love was a choice; love was my act.

We cling to this romanticized version of love because the story sounds prettier. Because we want to believe that something or someone can fulfill every desire, even though deep down we know (don’t we?) that love reveals itself not in self satisfaction but in service to others. That is why this novel is truly novel. Gustave takes our culture’s mistaken understanding of love and pursuit of self and presents it truthfully in terms of its context and consequences. The result isn’t pretty at all. It doesn’t start pretty, and it certainly doesn’t end pretty. And in this way, Gustave becomes an artist.

She was not happy—she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?… nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.

I always want to advise the characters I’m reading, not because I am a wealth of wisdom, but because in them I can see parts of myself, but without blindness. I wanted to give Emma Bovary this piece of a poem from Hans Ostrom’s “This is the Gazelle Ghazal”:

This is the love affair, so raging it convinced itself it would last forever but ended.
This is the friendship, which began before it knew it began and will not end.

Emma, said my soul, you cannot force the feeling of love to do what it cannot- remain. Pursue a love for others that exceeds your love of self. Rather than become a student of fantasy, become a student of friendship. Find in your husband a friend, rather than a lover, and you may find that he becomes both.  Love is so much more than a feeling.

 I am currently reading a phenomenal book by Karen Swallow Prior in which each chapter brings the reader through her life like a memoir, but each chapter also centers around a piece of literature that shaped that life, that contributed something to her evolving identity, as good literature does, most especially in our very formative years. There are a few chapters that center on books I have not read, so as I get to those, I have stopped to read the books. That is how I came to this novel, written by Thomas Hardy in 1891.

It took me a while to start enjoying this book. I realized in the reading of it how much point of view really affects my ability to engage with the story. In the beginning, it felt like eavesdropping on the life of Tess. I could see what she did or what would happen to her, but I couldn’t see who she was. She seemed stoic, her thoughts and feelings hidden by a stony exterior. This made it hard for me to connect, so I didn’t. And then I met Angel Clare. If Tess is a charcoal sketch, Clare is a life size statue. In getting only rough images of her, he is a character you can walk right up to, look in the eyes, view from behind, take in the creases on a hand or the thought behind the brow. I connected immediately to him and began to enjoy the book. Still, as more and more characters are brought into the story, Hardy gives us more glimpses inside them than of our main character, choosing to keep her veiled for a good portion of the book. I found this so interesting as a writer, but it frustrated me as a reader.

This story is a tragedy, and you can feel the foreboding of it early on. There were times I wanted to throw down my book and plead with the characters to stop, to rethink their plan, to be brave and admit they were wrong, to surrender to the difficult and scary, but better choice before them.

This book was significant in that it presented a new understanding of purity, and that what made Tess pure was not her actions, but her will. Hardy wanted to show a woman who, though not a virgin, was pure in the real sense of the word, because she desired what was pure. The problem with this is that her will is veiled to the reader, and her actions are equivocal. In different editions of the novel, Hardy portrays different accounts of the first tragedy, ranging from full on rape to seduction. The edition I read leaned toward the latter. Nonetheless, Tess appears blameless, which is Hardy’s point. I loved this quote by Karen Swallow Prior on Tess’ tragic flaw: passivity.

This is why the ambiguous circumstances surrounding that night in The Chase are not important to her status as rape victim: whether she was taken by Alec through force or through seduction, equipped by neither nature nor circumstances to do otherwise, she passively succumbs to this fate. This passivity is both literal and symbolic: literal within the story’s plot and symbolic of her role as the archetypal tragic heroine victimized by a combination of her own choices and forces beyond her control. This is how Hardy could deem Tess as “pure” despite her “ruined” physical state: she does not will such a thing even as she does not know how to exert her will against it.

This not knowing how to exert her will against something happens on repeat throughout the story, constantly lowering her to circumstances she never chooses. But everything is a choice. Not making a choice is a choice. What was clear was that Tess did not want Alec, but he very much wanted her and was willing to use any opportunity he had to have her. Tess had no good choices on the night mentioned above. It seemed inevitable that Alec would use her. But isn’t there a great difference in how that happens and isn’t that Tess’ choice? It happens all throughout the story, not just with Alec, but with Clare too- Tess chooses not to exert her will. I have to wonder if it is because indifference is hidden beneath the weakness of her will. For all of her non-choices, she chooses to accept the very thing she doesn’t want. Then you get to the end and Tess finally wakes up from her stupor to decisively act. And what she chooses condemns her. She proves that there cannot be such a separation of will and action. The will should determine the action, and the strength of the will determines the action’s ability to endure.

Hardy, I have to disagree with you: where the will is good, but the action evil, what remains is guilt, not purity. A tragedy indeed.