Trollope, Nina Balatka, John Caldigate, Linda Tressel, The Kellys and O'Kellys, Ralph the Heir, The Landleaguers

Since my last post, I had read a number of Trollope's books: Nina Balatka, John Caldigate, Linda Tressel, The Kellys and O'Kellys, Ralph the Heir, and The Landleaguers. Trollope portrays Jews sympathetically, but with still a strong sense of otherness, in his novels. Nina Balatka is a about a Christian woman who loves and eventually marries a Jew. Like Guess who's coming to dinner, the character of the other is practically a saint. I also read two of Trollope's Irish novels, The Kellys and The Landleaguers. Kellys is Trollope's first novel, and I always read a first novel with curiosity. It certainly announces all his strengths, without actualizing all of them quite yet. Landleaguers is not particularly remarkable. Linda Tressel is another tale of love misplaced. I found Ralph the Heir was irritating with all its characters called Ralph -- this was ineffective as a device and irksome for the reader. John Caldigate is about Australia, and has the long legal plot, about the legality of a marriage, of a number of Trollope's novels.

I also read Sandor Marai's Embers and Casanova in Bolzano. Marai is only now being translated from the Hungarian, and the two novels I have read (only three are available) show a great propensity for the characters making speeches several pages long. The Memoirs of Hungary, however, are riveting and written much more vividly.

Anthony Trollope, Bullhampton, Clerks, etc.

I have read the Vicar of Bullhampton, Three Clerks, He Knew He Was Right, Richmond Castle, Dr. Wortle's School, An Old Man's Love, The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, and Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. The Vicar of Bullhampton is a pathetic story, with the fallen woman returning to the berth of her family after walking a long distance, displaying 'an appetite not quite in keeping with the romance of her situation." I enjoyed that flash of wit, but the story is lengthily sad. I laughed only at the introduction of the reverend Mr. Outhouse and his wife. Three Clerks is a satire of the post office, thinly disguised as the Weights and Measures office, and anyone who knows bureaucracy will laugh at the conscientious worker Fidus Neverbend, and all the competing for jobs. It's right up there with Cold Comfort Farm. He Knew He Was Right is a conventional melodrama, although long at 950+ pages. Richmond Castle is the same, save that it is set in the Irish famine, and has little asides deploring the scandalous inaction of the government. Read Blanche Fitzgerald's history of the famine instead of this, it's riveting. (She has a double-barreled pseudonym, which I now forget.) Dr. Wortle's School also is a satire, with a clergyman discovering his wife's previous husband, supposedly dead, is still living, and all the scandal that brings. An Old Man's Love is elegiac, as you might expect from Trollope's last novel, and the elderly (he's 50!) hero loses the girl in self-sacrifice. Sigh. The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson is another attempt at satire, which doesn't work, and Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite is another melodrama, albeit a short one.

Trollope, several books

If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you know that I am gorging on Trollope. Since my last post, I have read Belton Estate, Claverings, Small House at Allington, Marion Fay, Rachel Ray, and Lady Anna. I am in the middle of Castle Richmond. Trollope at his best certainly knows how to catch a reader, and put on an exciting plot. I particularly enjoyed Lady Anna in this respect. Marion Fay is an anguished tribute to the siblings and nephews that Trollope lost to tuberculosis. Belton Estate's plot has those sudden turns in plot that remind me that Trollope was first and foremost a serial writer. I enjoyed most of it. The Claverings is supposed to be up there with the Barchester series and the Palliser series, but I did not enjoyed this book as much as the others. In any event, I have twelve books left to read before a business trip in a week, I ought to be able to finish it all off.

Trollope, four books in a day

I foolishly decided to read the rest of Trollope because I had read the Barchester stuff and the political novels. Unfortunately, I failed to notice he had written 49 books in his life. So I've got over 20 of them on my nighttable, borrowed from other libraries. I plowed in yesterday. First, I have to mention that I started the Vicar of Bullhampton, and I am already convinced it is a masterpiece of portraiture, especially after reading the description of the miller. I also read some of Trollope's later works: The Golden Lion of Granpere, The Fixed Period, Mr. Scarborough's Family, and Harry Heathcote of Gangoil. Scarborough and Granpere are conventional Trollope pieces of misplaced love and money troubles, although Granpere is set in France. Frankly, I hardly noticed the change of setting and I didn't find the portraiture of rural XIXth century France convincing at all. Fixed Period is a satirical novel about statisticians who plan everything in principle, but I did not find the satire very biting. Gangoil is another late novel set in Australia, and I didn't find that setting convincing either. It would appear that the critics were right: Trollope moved away from his strengths as a novelist when he moved away from his usual type of novel, although I can hardly blame him for doing so.

Trollope, An Eye for an Eye

I had read all of Trollope's political and academic novels, as well as all those held in the university library. So now I am receiving a stack of his books from other libraries, so that I can legitimately claim to have read all of him. I just read An Eye for an Eye, the usual tale of misplaced passion set in Ireland, this time. There is nothing remarkable about this novel, having read all of his greater works. I expect I can plough through the ten books in a few days -- Trollope is a quick read.

Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola and Mythologies

I am enjoying Barthes' books more as I go down the list, and these were the last two...I have now read all of his writings. Mythologies is enjoyable -- he discusses the relationship between meaning and form for all sorts of things: the beard of the saintly Saint Pierre, laundry detergent, Racine! This is also the book which has given many scholars lots to think about -- all the way to Thunder Bay's Persians (a pastry, not the people), as far as I can tell. Much more interesting to me, of course, were the comments on literature and writing. These precious comments, in the introductory section on the essay on Saint Ignatius, are what I was reading Barthes to find. He discusses how the Jesuits have given France (and therefore, me, as a French Canadian formed by my French Canadian education) its concept of literature, a concept that is Jansenist: good literature is clear literature, form serving only sense. That is far more utilitarian than I had hitherto recognized, but essentially correct, I would think. I'm surprised at his open-mindedness about the Jesuits and Ignatius, since Barthes is so clearly a Marxist. He also talks about the reader-writer relationship, which he proposes is always indefinite since once can never know who is the reader. Fabulous.

Roland Barthes, Essais critiques and L'aventure semiologique

While I was waiting for the oil to be changed on my car, I finished reading Aventure semiologique and read the Essais critiques. My estimation for Roland Barthes has gone up from reading these two collections of essays, even though I am still quite frustrated by his lack of long forms. Certain, for a literary and cultural critic, he went far beyond the norm. I was interested to see, for example, that he considers all literature and poetry Aristotlelian until Brecht's work -- a high value given to Brecht, that is certain. He also is far more Marxist than I realized: he considers literature to be the result of the clash of the classes, their ideas, their habits, their symbolism, their money, their property. I don't agree with that last statement, but with my prejudice against Aristotle solidifying all the time, I found the notion intriguing that all literature is that. I can't agree, either, I think there are lots of Platonic writers in the canon. But I had simply never thought of any of them as being either Platonic or Aristotlelian. I enjoy the novelty. I also enjoyed the novelty of the analysis of certain texts from the New Testament, particularly Acts. I had never thought of the structure of the text itself as being difficult for people to accept, in addition to some pretty revolutionary suggestions about living in common and judging oneself by the hidden intentions of the heart, not just by the actions. I also enjoyed a short piece on Voltaire as a happy writer, and what actually constitutes failures, historic and immediate, of a work of literature. Historic means, I suppose, failure to move humanity forward, whereas immediate failure means only failing to find an audience.

Alastair Macauley's Matthew Bourne's Adventures in Motion Pictures

I found a reference to this book in an article in the New Yorker which said it documented in detail the creative process of a choreographer. Well, it certainly does that. The book is a printing out of a series of conversations between an admiring, perhaps even sycophantic author and a choreographer of considerable daring, Matthew Bourne. Bourne provided modern adaptations of a number of the great ballet classics, Swan Lake, Nutcracker. It reminds me of the work of modern settings for Shakespearean plays. The process Bourne uses has some points in common with my own writing: he discusses the sorts of images and influences on his work and where he got his outlandish ideas. But the book would have been better if there had been more analysis. I also failed to be shocked, as the audiences apparently once were, at the gay iconography in the dances. A male corps de ballet for Swan Lake...big deal.

Turgenev, Virgin Soil

I read the last of Turgenev's novels, Virgin Soil, last night. The experience consolidated for me the idea that Turgenev's great theme is the lack of political freedoms in Russia. I thought the protagonist, Nedhezov, might actually be based on Alexander Herzen, whose memoirs I read lately. The novel itself, spare and smoothly written, didn't interest me all that much. The introduction to this 1920 edition was written by Edward Garnett, the reader in London who established Somerset Maugham.