Chapbook: Before Jane Austen, Harrison R. Steeves

"At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was no novel. By the end, novels of every description were being published, not in dozens but in hundreds." p.1

"The history of the novel is a history of quick growth, quick because in some respects it is no more than the adaption of other and well-matured literary forms. There are no primitives among the novelists; for plot making had been studied and elaborated in the drama and in shorter narrative forms like the novella; character portraiture had reached the level of accomplished art in the seventeenth-century writers of "characters" and in periodicals like The Spectator; situation and incident had been competently handled in long narratives of the romantic type, even as far back as Malory's Morte d'Arthur- or for that matter the Homeric epics and the Northern sagas, with striking sharpness in the domestic sagas of Iceland. The novel, then, can be regarded as an assembled rather than an invented artistic form." p.2

"...the essential purpose of the novel- if not to create the impression of downright and uncompromising reality, at any rate to deal with what seem to be real people, in situations which have the tang of the life of the time and which pose significant problems related to that life." p.4

"Miss Austen can properly be called the first modern English novelist, the earliest to be read with the feeling that she depicts our life, and not a life placed back somewhere in history, or off somewhere in imagined space." p.4

"I know no way of honestly extending one's knowledge of literature other than by reading it- not reading about it." p.5

Chapbook Entry: The Household Guide to Dying

"I'd always thought that this soft margin between winter and summer could never be cruel. But now I was as bitten by cruelty as the poet was. Spring is the time of hope.Of inspiring songs and rousing actions. Of possibility,of anticipation, of plans. People emerge from winter after tolerating autumn's capricious start to the season, and know that if spring has arrived then summer isn't far away... Spring is the time of action, of cleaning, of revolution." (p.3)

"...innumerable books, many of them excellent, a lot of them trashy but wonderfully so..." (p.7)

"I tasted the smaller atoms of life in those few quiet moments, drinking tea and waiting with the chickens before the rest of the world raised its head." (p.10)

"What I needed, more than anything, were books.... Surrounded by books, I felt safe, secure." (p.46)

The Flying Troutmans, Miriam Toews: Part II

While I was reading this book I wasn't loving it but the more I look at the passages I marked up the more impressed I am with Miriam Toews.

More Chapbook~

I wanted to ask her why she regretted being born, if it was a knife-in-the-heart all-consuming regret or an intermittent, passing regret like a loose tooth you worry with your tongue every once in a while. I didn't know how to say the words. I didn't know how I'd answer her answer. (p.73)

How do you love someone who wants to be left alone and die? How do you stay? How do you walk away? (p.130)

I also dreamt that I'd had a baby.
So did I! I said. the other night.
Logan rubbed his face and moaned and stared out the window. He didn't want to be having the same dreams and dark desires as his flabby-armed aunt. (p.134)

But, said Logan, a fifteen year old could technically live on his own, right?
...
No, a fifteen year old cannot live on his own, I said.
Pippi Longstocking wasn't even fifteen, said Thebes, and she-
Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said.
And she was Swedish, said Logan.
So there would have been a solid safety net of social programs to help keep her afloat, I said. It doesn't work here.
Yeah but the point of Pippi was that she didn't need anybody or any social programs to help her, said Logan. She was that strong.
Yeah, I said, but unhumanly so. She could lift a horse. Can you?
(p.150)

I'd come up with a plan. Min was in the universe. She was a dim and falling star, but she was alive. She hadn't loved watching the sun's eclipse as much as she'd loved watching it reappear. If she had really, truly wanted to die she'd have succeeded a long time ago. She loved the brink, going to it and returning from it. Or maybe she didn't love it. Maybe she hated it. But it didn't matter. Maybe going to the brink made her feel like she'd accomplished something extraordinary, like there was a purpose to her life, if only to prolong it in spite of herself. She was the captain of both teams, waging war against herself but always pulling back from any decisive victory because that would also mean a decisive loss.

I had a new career. I had a mission. I'd become a cartographer of the uncharted world of Min and I'd raise her from the dead, like a baby, sort of. We'd do it again from scratch. We'd start all over.

....

I had faith in my plan. I had faith in Min. And I loved her. She was the baby in my dreams and maybe in Logan's too. (p.258-259)

Chapbook Entry: The Housekeeper and the Professor

I looked at the food I had just finished preparing and then at my hands. Sauteed pork garnished with lemon, a salad, and a soft, yellow omelet. I studied the dishes, one by one. They were all perfectly ordinary, but they looked delicious- satisfying food at the end of a long day. I looked at my palms again, filled suddenly with an absurd sense of satisfaction, as though I had just solved Fermat's Last Theorem. (p.135)

"I feel empty when Root isn't here," I said.
I hadn't really been speaking to him, but the Professor murmured in reply, "So, you're saying that there's a zero in you?" (p.140 continues on into the passage about the discovery of zero)

In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth. (p.124)

Chapbook Entry: Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood, Maria Tatar

"In children's literature the grown-up wants a comforting image of childhood, or just a familiar name or story; the child wants a boat, a way out, an example of the life beyond. The parent wants to get back, the child wants to get out." - Adam Gopnick (p.4)

"The adult longs for a return to the pleasures of childhood through Wonderland, Neverland, or Narnia, while the child uses those same places as launching pads for moving beyond childish things. Nostalgia drives adults. Children light out for new territory and make those symbolic stories work for them, using them as road maps for navigating the real world. Contact zones are often less comfort zones than conflict zones where the wistfully melancholy adult meets the energetic child hankering to be grown up." (p.4)

Chapbook Entry: How Reading Changed my Life, Anna Quindlen

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones."
-Henry David Thoreau p.3

...there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me; the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of Middlemarch and A Little Princess, and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with Anna Karenina. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, and Jane Eyre. p.3

"There is no Frigate like a Book-
To take us Lands away
Nor any coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry"
-Emily Dickinson p.4

"When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me."
-Montaigne p.5

I felt that I... existed in a different dimension from everyone else. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island. p.6

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
-Hazel Rochman p.7

The Travelling Horn Player, Barbara Trapido

I have a long standing affection for Barbara Trapido's first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack. It is endlessly quotable, full of funny moments & literary allusions, and several characters get to have a happy ending which I appreciate. I saw this and thought I would have similar feelings for The Travelling Horn Player... I was so wrong.

The Travelling Horn Player was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and it starts out promisingly. The chapters are each told from a different character's point of view and everything revolves around the accidental death of a young student, Lydia Dent. Everyone is in some way connected back to Lydia. The first chapter is told from Lydia's sister's point of view. Their father dubbed them "gigglers one and two" and treated them like "two halves of the same pantomime horse". The chapter is sad and sweet and believable.

My problems with this book are not with Trapido's writing. She is consistently funny, smart, and entertaining. My problem is with her plot. I just don't buy it in this book.

She lost me as the second chapter opened describing a famous novelist- all of a sudden I realized that the famous novelist is the same (formerly) struggling young writer who was last seen having a happy in love ending with the main character from Brother of the More Famous Jack. I don't like books that don't advertise themselves as sequels revisiting perfectly happy characters and taking them from their "Rosie O'Grady lifestyle" pg. 44 into an amoral-midlife-crisis- casual-adultery territory. It made me mad to see the happy ending of the earlier book cheapened by this book.

I'm not going to list the rest of my grievances with this book: I have plenty. The main one being that I just don't think it is realistic; especially the plot line with Stella and what she does on the last pages of the book. It is seriously lame is all I will say.

Chapbook: all these entries are from the first (& best) chapter when I still thought I was reading a good book...

"I ask no flower,
I ask no star;
.........................
I am no gardener
And the stars are too high"

Die sterne stehn zu hoch

-Wilhelm Muller

pg. 3 vergissmeinnicht

pg. 6 Lydia's letter

pg. 8 making the cake for "the novelist"

pg. 9
"Pitted with holes the size of sixpence"
"It must have given the vicar fair gyp"

pg. 10
"This book is NOT literature"

pg. 17
serving suggestions

pg. 25
"a frenzy of specialist consumer activity"

pg. 39
"She was a person who had experienced amputation"

NB
"Dover Beach"
Heart of Darkness
"For I Love Sweet Rosie O'Grady, and Rosie O'Grady loves me."
song at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Chapbook Entry

I’ve had The Dud Avocado on my To Read list for a long time and am finally getting around to it. How could I not want to read a book with this blurb on the back cover from Groucho Marx:

“I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you’re the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).”

I haven’t been laughing, screaming, or guffawing yet but I admire Elaine Dundy’s writing. I’ve just been having a hard time getting into the story so far. I am going to keep trying. Meanwhile a few things to remember:

pg.25

“Why so broody?”

“I am in mourning for my life,” I said, still staring at my shoes, wishing they were black, at least, and wondering if he’d ever read the play. He hadn’t.”

Like Uncle Roger, I’m not so up on my Chekhov but thanks to the internet I’ve now added The Sea Gull to my To Read list. Which is probably a good thing. I’ve never read any Russian plays. And seeing how they are name dropped in certain show tunes that I like to sing it seems like I should give one a try.

pg. 37

“… I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time.”

Chapbook Entry

p.41

“It is true, there is little real culture among men; there are few strong thinkers and fewer honest ones; but they have still some advantages. If their education has been bad, it has at least been a trifle better than ours. Six hours a day at Latin and Greek are better than six hours a day at worsted work and embroidery.” Catherine Crowe, The Story of Lily Dawson, 1852

p. 43

George Eliot, caring for her widowed father in Nuneaton, studied German, Italian, and Latin, and read theology, history, fiction, poetry, and science. Much later, Eliot showed this same enviable ability to use periods of forced seclusion for study, rather than waste them in nostalgia or self-pity. In the years 1855-1858, “during the long period of social ostracism, when, because of her honest avowal of the union with Lewes, she was not invited to dinner,” she read, in Greek, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Ajax, the Oedipus trilogy, the Electra, the Philoctetes, and the Aeschylus trilogy; and in Latin, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Persius, Livy, Tacitus, Plautus, Quintilian, and Pliny.

p.54

“If self is to be the end of exertions, these exertions are unholy, there is no doubt of that- and that is part of the danger in cultivating the individual life, but I do believe we all have some appointed work to do; which no one else can do so well… and that first we must find out what we are sent into the world to do, and define it, and make it clear to ourselves (that’s the hard part) and then forget ourselves in our work.” Elizabeth Gaskell, Letters, p.106