A lot of things in life are unpredictable & unexpected while others, well, aren't. Such is the case (if you'll excuse the pun) when it comes to packing books for a trip away - I often hear of people needlessly justifying their Kindle ownership speaking of its convenience when travelling but, without going into my objection to e-readers (I require very little encouragement on the subject), I often wonder when it was that the modern world decided that a paperback book was such a liability to which as little suitcase case space as possible is dedicated rather than something of infinite value & worth. My books almost outnumbered the number of dresses (my second love) I packed for my two weeks in the States recently &, predictably enough, I didn't get around to reading all of them given how busy I was spending time with family. What I did read, however, mostly in the bath of our hotel room, soaking muscles in steaming water, I found to be very enjoyable & worthwhile choices. Keen to consider context in my decision while avoiding any new purchases (I am already almost set on 'Red Love' as this month's choice, a man's memoir of growing up in East Berlin during the GDR, published by the Pushkin Press whose curated selection continues to pique my interest) & finally settled on Hermann Hesse's 'Gertrude', 'The Hours' by Michael Cunningham' & 'Stoner' by John Williams.
While perhaps not an immediately obvious choice given its lack of Americana, 'Gertrude' by Hermann Hesse had a distinct sense of isolation, both geographical & emotional, that seemed to strike a chord with the uninterrupted calm & quietness of the Colorado mountains. My boyfriend Andrew recently read 'The Glass Bead Game', the last novel that Hesse wrote that envisions a world in which culture has been reduced to an formulaic tournament in which members of society rise to become Magisters of the arts, & he told me that it was due to an interest in spirituality that Hesse came to write such a Modern novel that varied greatly from the work that preceded it. I stumbled across one such novel in a local charity shop &, intrigued at whether Hesse's straight literature was especially different & besotted with the Gustav Klimt portrait on its cover, thought I would give 'Gertrude' a try. 'Gertrude' tells the story of an unfortunate but talented composer, Kuhn, who falls in love with a young girl of the title, the two of them brought together by their love of the arts, but who are romantically detached. The short novel, moving between scenes of Kuhn's rural home town & the bustling society life of Munich, raises questions of the joys & pains of youth as well as the role of art, especially its ability to both inflict & soothe pain. While short & simple in its intent, I found that it followed on well from my reading of Stefan Zweig of late who similarly asks what responsibility art has in its representation of the world, especially one that is at odds with the harmony that the former seeks to create.
Moving into both familiar & unknown territory, it was to another charity shop edition, Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours' that I turned next, en route from Denver to New Jersey, in anticipation of something wonderful & I was glad to discover that this feeling was not misplaced. 'The Hours', by no means a new book but certainly new to me, refracts Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway' through the lives of three very different women living in very different eras & societies - namely the burgeoning Woolf herself in early 20th Century Richmond, languishing housewife Laura Brown in 1950s Los Angeles & seemingly satisfied society woman Clarissa Vaughn in 1990s New York. Cunningham echoes Woolf's prose with uncanny accuracy & beauty, its cadences & recurrent ebbing & flowing that is similarly reflected in the chapters that alternate between character, time & place. As in the Hesse novel, there was a sense of dislocation in this book - a feeling of profound distance between characters, between them & what society expects of them, what they are supposed to feel satisfied with - that is preserved from Woolf's original story. As an avid reader of the latter, it was fascinating to see the way in which Cunningham was able to add depth & multiplicity to the smallest details of that on which he based his novel - the rare moment of cohesion as strangers are bound together by their interest in a movie trailer on a Manhattan street, a chaste kiss between female friends that sends thoughts spiralling into alternate lives gone un-lived. The simplicity of Cunningham's prose also appealed to me, striking its bareness in a way that drew attention to the minute sketching of character & ultimately made the concluding tragedy all the more affecting. I'm so glad to have not neglected this lovely, slim volume in my reading of Virginia Woolf but would recommend it endlessly even if you aren't an especially ardent lover of her writing as Michael Cunningham has doubtless penned something of similar stature.
While I cannot offer as thorough an overview of the third novel, I would like mention it all the same, if only to finally appease all of the people who have relentlessly enquired as to whether I've read 'Stoner' by John Williams. Recently (&, as far as I can tell, quite arbitrarily) retrieved from relative obscurity, 'Stoner' is a novel that tells the story of a very ordinary man living an unremarkable life - one of a university professor, growing from a boy living on a farm in estrangement from his singularly unambitious parents, going on to study & teach at Columbia & marrying a woman to whom he is devoted but who treats him with entirely unprovoked & persistent contempt. I am only just short of halfway but my impression of the novel thus far is that it is one of great sensitivity & insight into the human condition, of ordinary lives played out in quite ordinary fashion, but it is the nuances of Williams' descriptions of character that lift them from the page:
'She was educated upon the premise that she [Edith, Stoner's wife] would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation.'
This is also the case with Williams' descriptions of Stoner's most adored English tutor at the college & the professor's attitude towards his students which, having recently graduated from university, I found to be particularly amusing &, without naming any names, true to life:
'The instructor was a man of middle age, in his early fifties; his name was Archer Sloane, and he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it.'
I am looking forward to seeing the way in which Williams further reveals the facets of these characters, some maddening, others quite affable, & whether everyone's imploring me to read it has been worthwhile.
In anticipation of a postgraduate reading list falling with a heavy thud upon the hall matt any day now, I think it will likely be one of my thrifted Persephone editions that I turn next, although that US Import of the first volume of Knausgaard's 'My Struggle' is eyeing me from my bedside table. I started reading older books with good intentions anyway, whoops...
What've you got your nose in?
Speak soon - O.
While I cannot offer as thorough an overview of the third novel, I would like mention it all the same, if only to finally appease all of the people who have relentlessly enquired as to whether I've read 'Stoner' by John Williams. Recently (&, as far as I can tell, quite arbitrarily) retrieved from relative obscurity, 'Stoner' is a novel that tells the story of a very ordinary man living an unremarkable life - one of a university professor, growing from a boy living on a farm in estrangement from his singularly unambitious parents, going on to study & teach at Columbia & marrying a woman to whom he is devoted but who treats him with entirely unprovoked & persistent contempt. I am only just short of halfway but my impression of the novel thus far is that it is one of great sensitivity & insight into the human condition, of ordinary lives played out in quite ordinary fashion, but it is the nuances of Williams' descriptions of character that lift them from the page:
'She was educated upon the premise that she [Edith, Stoner's wife] would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation.'
This is also the case with Williams' descriptions of Stoner's most adored English tutor at the college & the professor's attitude towards his students which, having recently graduated from university, I found to be particularly amusing &, without naming any names, true to life:
'The instructor was a man of middle age, in his early fifties; his name was Archer Sloane, and he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it.'
I am looking forward to seeing the way in which Williams further reveals the facets of these characters, some maddening, others quite affable, & whether everyone's imploring me to read it has been worthwhile.
In anticipation of a postgraduate reading list falling with a heavy thud upon the hall matt any day now, I think it will likely be one of my thrifted Persephone editions that I turn next, although that US Import of the first volume of Knausgaard's 'My Struggle' is eyeing me from my bedside table. I started reading older books with good intentions anyway, whoops...
What've you got your nose in?
Speak soon - O.
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