Bibliography
Jun. 28th, 2007 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Like the films, quick summaries only today.
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
This took some time to get through, as the great Whaling Novel of the 19th century, containing simply everything you could need to know about whales, how to get oil out of them, their classification, their social and domestic habits, their biology and so on and so forth. Which is more fun than it sounds. Interwoven through this is the tale of Captain Ahab's hunt for Moby Dick, the great white whale that bit his leg off on a previous voyage. One does start to wonder, when there are about 50 pages left and they've still not sighted the bloody thing, precisely how the situation is going to resolve. It does, and tragically, but you're left with this very long and drawn out narrative interspersed with esoteric commentary on the whale that only eventually (and then very quickly) resolves itself. It really is a masterpiece - I was happy to spend two weeks pottering through it, and never once wondered why I was bothering until I noticed there were fifty pages left and started wondering about the practicalities of closure. I needn't have worried. There's also excellent characterisation and quirkiness, not to mention some decidedly homo-erotic elements that makes me curious about contemporary scholarship on the subject. Definitely worth reading, although I think one probably needs to have a bit of life under one's belt to appreciate it - I can see why people who try to read it in their teens are quite throughly turned off.
Howards End - EM Forster
A bit of a shock to go to this from Moby Dick - for a start, it's got women in it! It's a quite interesting work dealing with post-war social convention, and is very good at putting its finger on precisely the sort of character of a person who would do whatever it is said character would do. There's also quite sizable social commentary included in a rather round-about way; the main protagonists are rather liberal social activists, and their assumptions and so forth are quite nicely beaten in, as are those of the antagonistic family, who are strong traditional political and economic conservatives. Finding a coherent line in that matrix is a strong theme of the book - which makes it sound incredibly heavy, but it's handed over with an extremely light touch. Plus there's a lot of stuff about identity, family, what it means to be who you are and where you came from, not to mention a good exploration into what it is to be a woman, which is reasonably insightful and probably quite forward looking. I really enjoyed this and recommend it as a toe-dip into Forster; although it had the potential to be incredibly depressing, it managed somehow not to be.
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
This is supposed to be a homage to Howards End, hence reading the pair back to back. This was a good plan. Initially, I was unimpressed by Smith's use of her model - it appeared rather derivative and mirroring, rather than anything new, smelling somewhat of 'translating' Forster into modern English. However, she then managed to do a lot of very interesting things with the plot points she borrowed, brought in things of her own, inverted some of her motifs and embellished others... again, we had a novel with social commentary, although brought rather more to the fore, and questions about identity and who one is, although Smith decided to talk about that in the context of a black identity rather than general terms as Forster did. I found myself devouring this to the end, rather like working your way through a tub of ice-cream - you don't quite know why you're still eating it, but it tastes nice. I think I would have given up after the first thirty pages if I hadn't had the Forster intertext to play with, to be honest - there's a lot of rather loose and somewhat sloppy writing and plotting in there. It's not a patch on White Teeth, although it covers many of the same themes about identity and the relationship of children to their parents. I'm not sure I'd recommend reading it - read the Forster instead.
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
This took some time to get through, as the great Whaling Novel of the 19th century, containing simply everything you could need to know about whales, how to get oil out of them, their classification, their social and domestic habits, their biology and so on and so forth. Which is more fun than it sounds. Interwoven through this is the tale of Captain Ahab's hunt for Moby Dick, the great white whale that bit his leg off on a previous voyage. One does start to wonder, when there are about 50 pages left and they've still not sighted the bloody thing, precisely how the situation is going to resolve. It does, and tragically, but you're left with this very long and drawn out narrative interspersed with esoteric commentary on the whale that only eventually (and then very quickly) resolves itself. It really is a masterpiece - I was happy to spend two weeks pottering through it, and never once wondered why I was bothering until I noticed there were fifty pages left and started wondering about the practicalities of closure. I needn't have worried. There's also excellent characterisation and quirkiness, not to mention some decidedly homo-erotic elements that makes me curious about contemporary scholarship on the subject. Definitely worth reading, although I think one probably needs to have a bit of life under one's belt to appreciate it - I can see why people who try to read it in their teens are quite throughly turned off.
Howards End - EM Forster
A bit of a shock to go to this from Moby Dick - for a start, it's got women in it! It's a quite interesting work dealing with post-war social convention, and is very good at putting its finger on precisely the sort of character of a person who would do whatever it is said character would do. There's also quite sizable social commentary included in a rather round-about way; the main protagonists are rather liberal social activists, and their assumptions and so forth are quite nicely beaten in, as are those of the antagonistic family, who are strong traditional political and economic conservatives. Finding a coherent line in that matrix is a strong theme of the book - which makes it sound incredibly heavy, but it's handed over with an extremely light touch. Plus there's a lot of stuff about identity, family, what it means to be who you are and where you came from, not to mention a good exploration into what it is to be a woman, which is reasonably insightful and probably quite forward looking. I really enjoyed this and recommend it as a toe-dip into Forster; although it had the potential to be incredibly depressing, it managed somehow not to be.
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
This is supposed to be a homage to Howards End, hence reading the pair back to back. This was a good plan. Initially, I was unimpressed by Smith's use of her model - it appeared rather derivative and mirroring, rather than anything new, smelling somewhat of 'translating' Forster into modern English. However, she then managed to do a lot of very interesting things with the plot points she borrowed, brought in things of her own, inverted some of her motifs and embellished others... again, we had a novel with social commentary, although brought rather more to the fore, and questions about identity and who one is, although Smith decided to talk about that in the context of a black identity rather than general terms as Forster did. I found myself devouring this to the end, rather like working your way through a tub of ice-cream - you don't quite know why you're still eating it, but it tastes nice. I think I would have given up after the first thirty pages if I hadn't had the Forster intertext to play with, to be honest - there's a lot of rather loose and somewhat sloppy writing and plotting in there. It's not a patch on White Teeth, although it covers many of the same themes about identity and the relationship of children to their parents. I'm not sure I'd recommend reading it - read the Forster instead.