The Portrait of a Lady

I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed The Portrait of a Lady.  It’s not perfect by any means, but I got into it very easily which really surprised me given how long it’s been since I read something like this.  Maybe that’s why I got into Henry James’s novel so quickly; it’s different from the stuff I’ve been reading of late.  For a book written in the late 1800s by a man that is essentially about marriage, it had some real feminist moments that I found myself cheering along at.  And for a long time, it didn’t feel anything like the 660-something page behemoth that it is.

The book is really split into two parts in my mind.  The first part follows American Isabel Archer navigating English and, more broadly, European society.  It features her rejecting marriage proposals like an absolute boss and taking very little shit from anyone looking to tell her how a lady ought to behave- all encouraged wonderfully by her aunt Mrs Touchett who, frankly, answers to no-one.  I like these two ladies, in case you can’t tell.  The second part is less enjoyable.  Isabel Archer becomes Isabel Osmond and her (much older) husband is a fortune hunting dick who, not content with having come into Isabel’s money, spends his time encouraging his utterly bland daughter to marry a rich man.  I liked this part less.

As I mentioned, there are some parts of The Portrait of a Lady that are screamingly feminist and, given that the book was written in 1881, before the suffrage movement really kicked off feminism as we know it today I have to give James some serious kudos.  There is a part early in the book in which the previously lovely Lord Warburton is demanding that Isabel give him a reason that she does not want to marry him, because he’s such a good guy , you know.  And when he demands her excuse for not marrying him is just, “An excuse?  Must I excuse myself?”  It’s another one of those scenes that are from old books that are still worrying familiar.  How many times are young women still forced to justify not wanting to sleep with or date a guy just because, “I don’t want to,” isn’t deemed a sufficient answer?

James’s novel does go off track after Isable gets married.  It’s only partly her husband that I object to in that it’s a shame to ruin such a good character with such a poor excuse of a man.  The marriage itself comes about through the machinations of Madame Merle.  I wish I could enjoy Madame Merle, but really she is just a pale imitation of Dangerous Liaisons’s Marquise de Merteuil, so obvious in her treachery that it is impossible to fathom how Isabel doesn’t spot it a mile off.  The fact that Madame Merle is pretty unsuccessful in her later plots doesn’t help her case.  If you’re going to make a villain like that, make her bloody brilliant at manipulation.  Her motives are too human to be evil enough to really enjoy her.

Anyway, to summarise; The Portrait of a Lady was far more enjoyable than I was expecting. I didn’t really enjoy What Maisie Knew or, to be honest, The Turn of the Screw so I was a bit put off by the book’s length at first.  But something about Isabel Archer resonated with me.  She’s so easy to get behind as a protagonist and that makes her a hell of a lot of fun to read about.

I’ve now moved on to Franz Kafka’s Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared).

Titus Groan

I didn’t really enjoy Titus Groan.  Meryn Peake’s book is over 500 pages long and I haven’t even marked a single bit that stood out so much that I want to write about it.  As such, this blog post will be mostly waffle.  It does also mean that the book wasn’t actually bad enough to inspire my hatred.  So at least there’s that. 

The copy of the book that I read was covered in quotes from Anthony Burgess and had an introduction written by him too.  I’m not going out on too much of a limb when I say that I think this prejudiced me against the book.  This, I was convinced upon seeing Burgess’s name, was essentially going to be 500 pages of Enderby.  It’s not that bad.  There are similarities, mostly in the tone and style of the thing, which is understandable as Peake clearly influenced Burgess a great deal.  But I did enjoy Titus Groan far more than any of Burgess’s attempts at humour.  There were, however, a few issues that I did have with the book.   I’ll tell you about them.

Firstly, there are the names of the characters.  Peake’s characters have surnames like Groan, Flay, Swelter and Pruneswallor.  It’s as though this is a medieval morality play, except that everyone’s defined by an obscure insult instead of the vice or virtue that they represent.  This is probably intentional, given that the epigraph is a John Bunyan quote.  The same is true for the mansion, Gormenghast- I get that this is an historical family seat on its last legs without the name of the house itself sounding like a death rattle.  It’s the same thing that JK Rowling does with her characters, things like Dolores Umbridge and Remus Lupin- but what works in books for kids should almost always be left out of adult fiction.

It might just have been me, but I found the whole thing just a little bit dry.  It has such legs as a concept-a noble house that it bound by such traditional that the patriarch must have books consulted each morning to find out what his actions that day have to be that is suddenly introduced to anarchy and to progress.  I’m just not sure that it’s very well done.   There is no time frame in which the book and the social progress of the anarchic Steerpike are contextualised.  It could be just after World War Two- the period that influenced Peake- or it could be as the Magna Carta was being signed.   Again, I understand that this was intentional (or at least I assume it was) but the book loses something for its lack of context.  The narrative doesn’t leave Gormenghast and so we have no idea if Steerpike is rebelling against society or bringing things up to date.

At times this entire book strikes me as an overly long joke told by a man who isn’t nearly as funny as he thinks he is.  I actually read Titus Groan alongside The Female Eunuch and although parts of Germaine Greer’s book are now horribly outdated, it’s easy to see why she was so pissed off.  Yes, Greer was writing twenty years after Peake but her points are applicable to it.  I don’t believe that this is a book that a woman could have written; there is something pervasively masculine about it.

I know I’ve focused so much on the negatives of Titus Groan but it’s difficult not to.  Humour has changed and so Peake’s epic feels very dated even as it chides its characters for the same thing.  The real joke in all this is on me- Titus Groan is the first part of a trilogy and one of the sequels is on The List. 

I’ve now moved on to The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James.

A Boy's Own Story

I wasn’t too sure what to expect when it came to A Boy’s Own Story.  What I got certainly wasn’t what I thought it would be; not in a bad way or in a particularly good one, come to that.  It was just different.  I didn’t know a thing about Edmund White and there’s no actual blurb on the back of the book, it’s just praise comparing the thing to Catcher in the Rye and De Profundis.  Given that I’ve only read the former of these, I wasn’t in great stead for judging what a mash up of the two might be like.  I’m not exactly sure why this meant that I’d go into the thing with any preconceived notions, but there you go; I did.

The book tells the story of a gay teenage boy growing up in 1950s America.  It’s fairly episodic and non-linear, but in broad terms it starts when he’s fifteen and follows him through a couple years of high school. He has a lot of sex in this time.  Definitely more than you’d expect- especially given the legality of it at the time.  He’s at it with family friends, with prostitutes, with his teachers.  I always assumed that when teenage boys talk about the amount of sex they’ve had that they’re lying to impress their friends.  And there is an element of that; our narrator does make up shocking things to impress his psychiatrist- who seems more concerned about his own family issues than anything that his patient’s going through.  It’s fairly uncomfortable to read in places.  Not because it’s pornographic- it’s not- but just because everyone involved is so young.  There aren’t very many people who really want to read about twelve year-old boys shagging and I’m fairly comfortable passing a bit of judgement on those who do.

I think part of the reason that A Boy’s Own Story and White get away with all the underage sex is the tone of the book.  It vacillates between cold and clinical during the sex and the day to day and wonderfully wistful and longing when he’s talking about the men that he loves and why he loves men.  This has the effect of making some parts a great read and others deathly dull, as though the narrator could not be bothered to care about the happenings in his own life.  It also dulls any angst about being gay.   I expected more angst and there’s really very little and that that there is is dulled distance.  At one point the narrator refers to his sexuality as a choice, a decision that he is putting off making because he can’t have what he really wants and there’s a sense throughout the novel that he really believes this; that he is electing to be gay and he’s going to do it.  It’s so at odds with modern views, while remaining accepting that it’s jarring.

I’m not sure if, on the whole, I liked this book.  It has moments.  But there is so much tedium.  If the narrator of the story cannot be bothered with it then why should I?  It’s harsh to judge someone writing about their own life, but for great chunks of the book I was just reading a very dry autobiography of the childhood years of someone I knew nothing about.  And it didn’t incite me to read on.

I’m now on to Meryn Peake’s Titus Groan… it’s already inspired mixed feelings.  

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye is one of those books you read wishing that it weren’t still relevant.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book, but it is 37 years-old and you’d hope that the passing references to racial tensions in Baton Rouge would reference tensions that had passed.  No such luck; the world, we must remember, is terrible.  I’ve struggled with Toni Morrison in the past, but this book hits a cord.  It’s brilliant in its descriptions of the problems poor black women experienced in constructing their identity and in recognising their own beauty.  Now, I don’t pretend to be anything near an expert on that subject, but it is fascinating that things Morrison was saying years ago can still be clearly seen today.

There’s this documentary on Netflix called Miss Representation.  It’s wonderful.  Watch it.  And in this documentary it is mentioned that black women, or women of any ethnic minority in the West, are less likely to suffer from issues stemming from poor body image.  The reason for this, it is thought, is that white women are bombarded by images that so nearly resemble them- if they lost ten pounds and got their nose fixed.  Black women in the media, when they are there at all, are celebrated (admittedly to the point of fetishism) for their curves.  So black women have some very different body issues to white women.  It was different again back when The Bluest Eye is set.  The black community has no media approved template for black female beauty and so the women attempt to emulate white film stars, while the men and boys see only ugliness.

The main narrative of the story follows Pecola Breedlove.  It’s a tale told from varying viewpoints and focusing on her family history and significant events in her life, rather than a cohesive story.  We are told time and time again that Pecola is ugly.  It is the first thing that her mother thinks when she looks at her.  It is Pecola’s defining characteristic and it becomes how she defines herself.  The novel’s title refers to Pecola’s greatest wish; to be blue eyed.  She could bear her ugliness, if only her eyes were blue.  Through various convoluted means this leads her into the path of a paedophile that isn’t half as harmful to her as her own father.   Anyway, Pecola’s story is utter misery - what else could be expected for one so ugly- that concludes with the death of her incest rape baby.  This also means that, distressingly, the wish granting paedophile isn’t the least likeable character in the book.

I did enjoy this book.  It’s very choppy but when it is good, it is great.  The main thing that I took from it, however, is the life lesson that it’s a bad idea to read banned books at work.  After being asked why it was banned by multiple people, I Googled it.  It’s sufficient to say that my internet history on my work computer now involves incest and rape.  That’s the kind of thing that gives HR departments the wrong idea.  But that’s not my lasting impression of this book.  I was left with frustration.  I say this so often when themes of race or sexism come up.  Stuff like this should not be as relevant as it still is.  The Bluest Eye just hits a serious intersectional double whammy for discrimination that’s not as outdated as it should be.

I’m now on to A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White.  

Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water For Chocolate was a bitter disappointment.  Reading the blurb, I was geared up for an epic tale of love enduring through impossible circumstances and over decades.  I was hoping for something of Love in the Time of Cholera or Captain Correlli’s Mandolin proportions.  But with traditional Mexican recipes.  Laura Esquivel, unfortunately, is no Gabriel García Márquez.  On the birght side, this does mean that there’s no geriatric sex.  On the not so bright side, it also means that Like Water For Chocolate lacks depth and doesn’t have that same emotional punch when the two lovers finally end up together. 

Esquivel’s book follows the story of Tita, a not so maiden great-aunt of the narrator.  When love of her life, Pedro, proposes marriage to the then sixteen year-old, Tita’s mother refuses (because of tradition) and so Pedro marries Tita’s sister just to be close to her.  There are clear flaws to this plan.  Anyway, time passes, people die and Tita and Pedro love one another in secret.   They are crap at this.  Everyone knows they love one another and Tita’s sister Rosaura even gives them permission to have an affair on the grounds that they are subtle about it. 

The book isn’t particularly well written.  It’s problem when you’re trying to tell such a large and long story in 200 pages.  This is meant to be the history of a family over more than twenty years but it’s not.  It’s the highlights and books like this, ones that are essentially about yearning and unresolvable sexual tension, work because of their length.  Not only does it allow for proper characterisation of everyone (which is woefully absent here- a lack the book suffers for), it gives the depth and reality of the day to day to the thing.  There is an ellipsis of years in the final chapter of the book in which Rosaura dies and Tita breaks off an engagement with another man.  These are all brushed over- as is the characters’ aging.  Part of why books like Love in the Time of Cholera are so good is because they are about the characters growing older and wiser.  Throughout Like Water For Chocolate, and especially in the way it ends, it seems that Esquivel is scared of writing about love in old age. 

I didn’t get the recipes either.  Each chapter starts with a list of ingredients and the recipe itself is incorporated into the chapter, sometimes in an oblivious way- such as when Tita makes her Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding cake; sometimes in an obliquely thematic way that involves sausages preserving meat.  I don’t know if it’s the fault of the translation, but they don’t always flow with the narrative.  At times the transition between recipe and story is clunky and this is a shame, because it’s such a novel idea and it’s a great way of characterising Tita who is so linked to the kitchen.

So, to conclude- I did not enjoy this book.  It was too simple.  The blurb seemed so appealing and serious, but Tita doesn’t grow.  Her relationship with Pedro when she is thirty-something is no more credible than her teenager lusting for him.  She doesn’t grow up and the other characters are sketches that are given so little time or personality that there is nothing else to this book.  It is 200 pages of a moody teenager whining about the cards life has dealt her and telling us how to make obscene amounts of delicious sounding chilli.  

I'm now on to The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.