Tag: Classics Spin

Classics Club: My Brilliant Career

Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (1901)

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

Here’s a book I’ve heard about for so long, but never read — the perfect pick for a Classics Club Spin, as well as a chance to take part in Brona’s Australian Reading Month event, and to represent another country in my Reading Around the World project. But even without all these side benefits, the story had enough to offer in itself, and I’m glad I finally delved into it.

It was a bit different than I had expected — various blurbs and summaries I’ve read present the narrator, Sybylla, as bravely attempting to choose a writing career over marriage, not an easy thing for a young woman in the early twentieth century. (I suspect these blurbs may be influenced by the movie version by Jane Campion, but I haven’t seen it, so I can’t be sure.) In fact, the book ends with Sybylla in despair after rejecting a good offer of marriage from a man she likes, but does not love, thus apparently dooming herself to a life of peasant drudgery. Far from resolving to become a writer, she expresses contempt for her own talent and dismisses her efforts so far.

Though throughout the story there are frequent references to Sybylla’s longing for an artistic life, given her time and circumstances, a “career” is never a serious option for her. The title is sufficiently ironic, without the “(?)” she wanted to add (till her publishers nixed that idea).

Sybylla was described by some readers as “a frustrating heroine,” and I could see why. Certainly she is a very frustrated young woman. Though she escapes from her poor, trodden-down family to live with her wealthier grandmother, she doesn’t want to admit that this can only be a brief respite, given to her as an opportunity to make a decent match. Her longings for other things, for music, for creativity, have no outlet in the Australian bush, and only make her unhappy when she’s not dreamily ignoring her actual prospects.

In this state she drifts into an engagement with a decent young man who is probably enticed by her difference from other girls, but with whom marriage would never work — a fact that she finally, painfully, has to face and to communicate with him. She is then punished for her discontent by her own mother, sent to drudge for a family even grubbier and lacking in culture than her own. She only escapes when disgust makes her physically ill.

What a bitter, woeful tale, you may think! Yes, in a way, but Sybylla’s voice (a thin disguise for Franklin’s own, one can’t help but assume) often speaks with keen irony, a sharp bush-honed sense of humor, and a knack for observation that helped pull me through. Published when the author was barely out of her teens, the novel is rough-edged and sometimes self-indulgent. With a bit more distance, a more mature perspective, the raw emotion and painful teenage confusion of the novel might have been mitigated. But some of its power might also have been lost.

Frequently the book made me think of a darker, Australian version of Anne of Green Gables. There was the girl heroine with a taste for music and a talent for writing, brought from a life of toil to a more genteel home; there was the conflict-ridden romance; all amidst a dramatic natural setting on the edges of European immigrant civilization. But Anne never loses her home at Green Gables, and she doesn’t torture Gilbert with her own confusion in quite such an extreme way, either. Anne goes to college, but also finds true love; Sybylla goes back to the cows on the home dairy farm and gives up on marriage. Their fates, in the end, diverge utterly, with Franklin’s account the more realistic, if less reassuring.

Reassuringly cozy it may not be, but My Brilliant Career is a book with a unique and memorable persona, an author-heroine I will not easily forget. Against Sybylla’s pessimistic predictions, her creator, at least, did indeed become a writer, leaving her mark upon the world of literature — maybe not the “brilliant career” of a teenager’s dreams, but a real and impressive story of one woman’s struggle to make her voice heard.

Classics Club List #37

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Classics Club Spin #21

It’s time for the Classics Club Spin! Club members pick 20 books from their list and number them. A number is chosen and then the challenge is to read that book by a certain date (October 31, in this case).

Even though I no longer have an official target date for my Classics Club list, I still have books left over that I want to read, so I thought I would participate this time anyway. I only found ten that I wanted to include, so I’m just repeating those ten twice. I really want to make progress on my Reading All Around the World project, so I’m emphasizing titles that would count for that.

Here is my list:

  1. Dubliners – James Joyce
  2. Angel – Elizabeth Taylor
  3. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  4. July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
  5. My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
  6. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
  7. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
  8. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
  9. Faust (Part I) – Goethe
  10. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
  11. Dubliners – James Joyce
  12. Angel – Elizabeth Taylor
  13. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  14. July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
  15. My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
  16. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
  17. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
  18. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
  19. Faust (Part I) – Goethe
  20. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Are you doing the Spin? What’s on your list?

Classics Club Spin

It’s time for another Classics Spin!

What is the spin?

It’s easy. At your blog, before next Friday, March 9th, create a post to list your choice of any twenty books that remain “to be read” on your Classics Club list.

This is your Spin List. You have to read one of these twenty books by the end of the year (details to follow). Try to challenge yourself. For example, you could list five Classics Club books you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favorite author, re-reads, ancients — whatever you choose.)

On Friday, March 9, we’ll post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List, by April 30, 2018. We’ll check in here to see who made it the whole way and finished their spin book!

I did the last spin a few months ago, and got Don Quixote. I only finished Part I by the end of the year, so I’m including it again — so if I get it I’ll read Part II. I’ve mixed up the rest of my list and made a few changes, but it’s basically the same as last time. Have fun, clubbers!

And the spin number is: #3! I’ll be reading Invisible Man.

  1. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
  2. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
  3. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
  4. One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes
  5. Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
  6. The Mozart Season – Virginia Ewer Wolff
  7. My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
  8. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
  9. My Life and Hard Times – James Thurber
  10. The Seventh Raven – Peter Dickinson
  11. Dubliners – James Joyce
  12. Throwing Shadows – E.L. Konigsburg
  13. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
  14. Wise Children – Angela Carter
  15. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  16. Love – Elizabeth von Arnim
  17. A London Child of the 1870s – Molly Hughes
  18. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
  19. The Spire – William Golding
  20. Portrait of a Lady – Henry James

Classics Club Spin: Don Quixote, Part I

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I (1605)

For the last Classics Club spin book, I drew Don Quixote, which I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time. I did read an abridged version in high school, but I remember absolutely nothing about it except the Quentin Blake drawing on the cover. (Does anyone else have an amazing memory for book covers, as opposed to their contents?) I felt I had to make an effort to appreciate what is often called the first and perhaps the greatest modern novel, and the acclaimed new translation by Edith Grossman seemed a good place to start.

Given the kind of December that I had, there was no way I was going to make it through the whole 900-page tome, so I decided to be kind to myself and do it in two parts. These were in fact published 10 years apart, in 1605 and 1615, so I feel quite justified in treating them as two separate books.

Part I, as probably every semi-literate person knows, starts off with the titular Don of La Mancha being driven mad by reading too many books of chivalry, and deciding he’s going to go off and be a knight errant himself. Capers ensue in which he attacks the innocent and frees the guilty, insisting that wineskins are giants and a barber’s bowl is a magic helmet, while his hapless squire, the peasant Sancho Panza, trails along in hopes of being made rich by his noble master. There’s a lot of bawdiness and slapstick, as well as much rhapsodizing on the charms of his lady love, Dulcinea (a wench from a nearby village who never appears in person).

This was all more or less what I expected, and contained some interesting revelations of how long the “post-truth” phenomenon has actually been around; near the end of the book Don Quixote makes a fierce argument that whatever he thinks must be true, because he likes it that way, and he’ll pound anybody to a pulp who says otherwise. Yup, sounds familiar.

What surprised me somewhat was that about two thirds of the way through the Quixotic quest narrative comes to a screeching halt while Cervantes interlayers in a whole lot of boring romance plots with utterly flat, unmemorable stock characters (the wronged wife, the rake who is forced to go straight, the Moorish maiden who wants to convert, the loyal, lowborn lover of a noble lady…) These include a forty-page “interpolated novel,” derived from some random manuscript found in a chest at the inn where the main characters are staying — in a meta-fictional touch, this may have been left by Cervantes himself.

There are also a bunch of characters encountered while Quixote the madman has decided to pretend to go mad in a deserted place, in emulation of one of his chivalric heroes (one of the funnier bits). These end up tagging along for quite a while, and then there are some others met along the way who have to tell their backstory for another thirty pages,  plus another group that turns out to be related to the second bunch… At the very end, when I thought we’d gotten back to the main story, there’s a goatherd-who-is-really-a-wronged-lover-in-disguise, who has to tell HIS tale of woe for a whole chapter. I admit to cheering when Don Quixote gave him a good thumping.

What the heck was Cervantes up to with all this? In terms of composition and structure, I can’t say that I would call this mess a great novel compared with Pride and Prejudice or The Scarlet Letter or even Ozma of Oz. I suppose he was still trying to figure out what a “modern novel” was or could be, and was just mixing in all kinds of narrative styles current at the time, without much rhyme or reason. (It’s not unlike a lot of Shakespeare plays mashed up together, actually.)

The result, for me, was that the narrative momentum was somewhat diffused and lost, leaving me dissatisfied that things were not tied together in a more conscious way. While the character of Don Quixote was brilliant in its comedic irony, and highly relevant, again, as a comment on our modern muddled thinking, these other threads failed to compel in the same way. I’m assuming this is largely what got abridged out of the edition I read earlier.

At any rate, I made it through, and Don Quixote has now returned to his village without having changed or learned anything whatsoever (another element one would find a failing in most novels today). I do wonder what will happen in book II, and whether during the intervening decade Cervantes will have figured out how to write a novel more like the ones I would call “great.” After a short break, I’ll look forward to returning to La Mancha and finding out.

Classics Club List #71

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Classics Club Spin

It’s time for another Classics Spin!

What is the spin?

It’s easy. At your blog, before next Friday, November 17th, create a post to list your choice of any twenty books that remain “to be read” on your Classics Club list.

This is your Spin List. You have to read one of these twenty books by the end of the year (details to follow). Try to challenge yourself. For example, you could list five Classics Club books you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favorite author, re-reads, ancients — whatever you choose.)

On Friday, November 17th, we’ll post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List, by December 31, 2017. We’ll check in here in January to see who made it the whole way and finished their spin book!

All right, here’s my list…what will I get? And are you participating in the spin?

  1. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe – Penelope Lively
  2. Love – Elizabeth von Arnim
  3. A London Child of the 1870s – Molly Hughes
  4. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
  5. The Spire – William Golding
  6. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  7. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
  8. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
  9. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
  10. One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes
  11. Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
  12. July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
  13. My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
  14. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
  15. My Life and Hard Times – James Thurber
  16. The Seventh Raven – Peter Dickinson
  17. Dubliners – James Joyce
  18. Throwing Shadows – E.L. Konigsburg
  19. Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
  20. Wise Children – Angela Carter

Put on a Funny Face: Lucky Jim

LuckyJim

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954)

LuckyJimLucky Jim came up recently as my Classics Club Spin book, and I was glad, because it’s a book I’ve tried to read a few times without success. Still, I was determined to find out why Amis’s debut novel has been hailed as one of the funniest books of all time (it regularly makes top ten lists, such as this one, and this) and hoped that the public challenge would motivate me to make it through.

The experiment was a success, for in hopes of meeting the August deadline I checked the book out and started right away, and a few days later I was finished. It turned out that once I became thoroughly involved in the adventures of hapless history professor James Dixon, I had to keep reading in order to find out what happened to him, and whether he did indeed turn out to be “lucky” in the end.

Was it a funny book, though? There were some screwball-comedy moments, such as when Jim inadvertently burns his bedsheets while staying at his senior professor’s house, and tries to cover up the damage by cutting off the soot marks. He then spends the rest of the book trying to avoid the professor’s shrewish wife, which gives rise to some amusingly Wodehousian situations. The loutish son of this same professor also provides both comedy and conflict, as Jim becomes interested in the girl he’s stringing along and who is clearly much too good for him. This pretentious family drags Jim into their “artsy” activities, forcing him to read French plays aloud and sing part-songs — he opens and closes his mouth and hopes that nobody will notice, which succeeds until his fellow tenor is diverted to another part. And there’s a famous scene in which Jim has to give a dreaded speech on the topic of “Merrie England” and ends up sabotaging his own career with drunken caricatures of his university superiors. . .

So I did chuckle quite a bit, but the comedy had a strong undercurrent of misery underneath. Jim is trapped in a horrible job that he hates but is terrified of losing, he’s stuck in a relationship with a woman he doesn’t love but can’t leave, and he lacks the will to do anything about either. His strange habit of making grotesque faces to which he gives special names indicates an almost pathological self-alienation. That we somehow find him likeable rather than merely pathetic is in large part due to the fact that most of the other characters are even more unpleasant. There’s nobody else to relate to, and Jim does at least have some human qualities.

“Woman trouble” is supposed to be one of the more relatable comic themes in the novel, and that might work for readers to whom women remain a category of creatures primarily defined by their attractiveness to men, for they’re not given much purpose or identity otherwise. This may be meant as a comment on Jim’s limited understanding and experience, but it still gave an off-taste to the humor for me. There’s a bitter, mean quality to Amis’s treatment of women; even the most sympathetic among them just happens to be “pretty” and “nice” and thus has the good fortune to be desired by Jim. Oh, hooray.

However, I’m aware that many would find such concerns irrelevant to this kind of novel. It’s a satire, and not a bright and sparkling one — bitterness and meanness come with the territory. I am glad that I finally read it, though I can’t say I wholeheartedly enjoyed it, and I wouldn’t put it on my personal top ten list of funny books. Brilliantly, savagely humorous it was, but not in a way that left me with a smile on my face.

Classics Club List #41

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Classics Club Spin

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I’m getting rather behind on my Classics Club list, so I hope this little challenge will get me going again. The idea is to choose 20 books remaining on your list, and when the “spin” number is announced, read that book by August. I’ve selected an assortment from all the categories of my list, including some that I find quite intimidating (Midnight’s Children, Don Quixote, Love in the Time of Cholera), and will trust to luck to give me the perfect one that I might not have chosen for myself!

UPDATE: And the spin number is 15, so I’ll be reading Lucky Jim. A campus novel for summer reading sounds perfect.

  1. The Fledgling – Jane Langton

    DonQuixote
    Will this be my summer reading?
  2. White Peak Farm – Berlie Doherty
  3. Dubliners – James Joyce
  4. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe – Penelope Lively
  5. A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
  6. The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
  7. Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
  8. Love – Elizabeth von Arnim
  9. The Makioka Sisters – Junichiro Tanizaki
  10. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
  11. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  12. July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
  13. My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
  14. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
  15. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
  16. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
  17. Excellent Women – Barbara Pym
  18. Troy Chimneys – Margaret Kennedy
  19. The Rise of Silas Lapham – William Dean Howells
  20. Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy
  21. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

Have you read any of these? Any on your list?

 

Short and Bittersweet: Bliss and Other Stories

Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories (1920)

I don’t usually seek out short stories, though I often enjoy them when I do read them. Usually I’m looking for a longer-term reading experience, with characters I can live with over time. But when I read Katherine Mansfield’s collection Bliss and Other Stories (having drawn it as my Classics Club Spin book), I was reminded of how a beautifully rendered painting of a few objects, or an insightful portrait, can be a perfect work of art; we don’t always want or need a grand historical canvas with dozens of figures. In the same way these exquisitely written stories cast light on just a few characters or events, with an economy of language that does not lessen their emotional impact, but may even serve to heighten it. Freed from the necessity of plodding through a complicated plot, Mansfield often comes at her subjects in a surprising, sideways manner, with effects that are sometimes startling, sometimes amusing, but always masterfully done.

I know next to nothing about Mansfield, except that she was from New Zealand. This gave me the notion that her stories would be set in that country and that I would learn something about that place. However, this turns out not to be a strong element, at least in this particular collection; many of the stories are set in Europe, and the only one that is obviously set in New Zealand, the opening novella called “Prelude,” is far more occupied with the inner lives of the characters and their particular physical circumstances than with the setting in a wider sense. This is in no way a drawback, only a false expectation that I had to overcome in the process of reading.

The stories often end with a reversal or down-turn in the protagonist’s fortunes, but so light was Mansfield’s touch that this somehow did not depress me as it does with some authors. Comedy and tragedy can be very close together, and these stories delicately reveal their affinity.

Many more of Mansfield’s stories await me in my e-book edition. I’m sure I’ll be dipping into them again for a brief, invigorating dose of a fine writer’s art.

Review copy source: Free e-book from Girlebooks
Classics Club List #40

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