Bibliography - bumper edition
Oct. 30th, 2010 03:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyRight, this is going to be loooooong.
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Yes, I genuinely had not read this before. I don't quite know how, but I really, really hadn't. Given the recent run of vampire films that G and I have been consuming, it seemed only reasonable to finally fill in that particular gap in my reading experience. I am, it has to be said, jolly glad that I did so.
For a start, I think I agree with G that I have yet to see a decent adaptation of the film. (Notwithstanding Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I actually haven't seen in full yet.) There's a whole load of complicated personal relationship stuff and so forth that just gets elided or simplified out of most film narratives. Especially Lucy's complicated relationship with her three suitors, which is just fascinating and all Female Vampirism and stuff.
I think in the main, my impression of this book is that it's jolly good Daring Do, and I can see why it's held so much appeal for so long. It is profoundly silly, and the epistolary/diary nature of the book does require quite considerable suspension of disbelief. But it's well-written Daring Do, it's excitingly dangerous, it has compelling characters (even the women, who don't just get lumped into the Damp Squib category but actually have life and energy and action to them), and - yeah. I very much enjoyed this, as it's the sort of mildly ridiculous fiction that's right up my ally, and I suspect it might well enter the category of daft-but-decent comfort reading.
Eugénie Grandet - Balzac
Oh man, this was so sad. I'd got used to Balzac's light-hearted touch of depicting the vices and stupidities of Paris and the upper-class, and getting plunged down here into rural French life was just - ouch! Not least because of the book's protagonist, the eponymous Eugénie Grandet. Her father, Grandet, is phenomenally rich - but lives as if he didn't have two sous to rub together, measures out daily rations, won't let his wife and daughter have more than one new dress a year, won't have proper wax candles in the house... I mean, it's an epic portrait of sheer meanness and avarice, and it is absolutely horrid. Because his poor daughter has no idea that life can be lived with any modicum of gentleness or pleasure or light, and thus it's hardly surprising that she falls in love with her destitute cousin, one of the Parisan social set whose father's fall upon hard times is the catalyst for the son's arrival at Grandet's, the second she sets eyes on him. Equally, the tragic end of what she thinks is a great love affair is also entirely unsurprising; she honestly didn't stand a chance, given what she hasn't know and indeed has no way of knowing she doesn't know.
It's a heart-rending book. Really, really heartrending. In some ways, it's the inverse of Old Goriot; there, a father was willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of his daughters, whereas here a father has no regard for his daughter beyond being the heiress to the money he has worked so hard to collect, for no purpose other than the having of it. Honestly, chills ran down my spine - and it becomes abundantly clear why this is the book that really brought Balzac to public prominence as a writer, and gave La Comédie Humaine the kick-start that it needed.
The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett
You might remember that, some time ago, we were quite fond of the film version of this, for it was very silly. It came from a novel; there was also a recent piece in the New Yorker that touched on Hammett in passing. So I figured I would sit down and read the novel. It is, unsurprisingly, very silly.
The best bit, I think, was discovering that the heiress/ex-gumshoe dynamic that existed in the film also exists very powerfully in the book. Nora Charles is completely laid back with her husband Nick's shady past and lifestyle; Nick does manage to do all the business-running stuff at the same time as being involved with a murder investigation. It is all jolly good fun, told in just the right tone - there's a sardonicness to Nick Charles that really works as a narrative voice, especially when bounced off Nora, who is so other and yet so right that it creates a beautiful dynamic. The plot moves easily and elegantly; there's a lot of Daring Do without too much unbelievability; and it's generally a convincing set-up in an elegant New York including trips down to the mean underbelly. Definitely worth taking the time to read, and I'm pleased I did.
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
Alright, so The Thin Man came in an elegant collected volume of Hammett's novels from the Library of America, and when I put two and two together, I couldn't resist reading The Maltese Falcon as well. Plus, we were in San Francisco! Where the Falcon is set! It was appropriate holiday reading material! Right? Right.
Anyway. This shows off different strengths of Hammett as a writer, I think. Sam Spade, that notorious anti-hero of anti-heroes, never does what you expect him to; you're never quite sure who he's going to double-cross or where his morals lie. Nobody's ever quite telling the truth, much like the fog that surrounds the city. Spade's laconic and angry stance at the world lashes out at everyone - the police, his clients, his enemies (who are often the same people), his employees. His personal life is convoluted and messy, and he seems too distracted by other things to care much about it staying that way. His priorities are strange and unpredictable, yet he seems to have a sixth sense about putting information together to get a true picture of whatever situaton he's in.
The plot, as I'm sure most of you know, revolves around a falcon statue, which may or may not be the fabelled one of legend, and the murder of Spade's partner in connection with said falcon. It all ultimately ends up with a bit of an anticlimax, but it feels right - the overarching story of the falcon is left unresolved, but Spade's individual story in relation to it is neatly concluded. Of course, there are plenty of other complications out there concerning Spade's story when we leave him, but that doesn't matter - we feel we've seen a glimpse, enough to get this A to B, but not to understand the man and the bigger story that we're being told. It's very compelling, and I actually rather enjoyed it, despite the obvious doses of blatant misogyny.
That said, the male female protagonist, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, is absolutely spine-chilling. She has this ability to claim one story, be caught out in a lie, wiggle her way into another story until she is caught out in that one... and all the way through claim this dewy-eyed sort of innocence and distance from blame that is just - wow. She has this ability to step back from any kind of moral responsibility and look kind of stunned anyone would expect her to take any (which only really appears in the closing section of the novel) that just leaves you utterly flabberghasted at her sheer nerve. Except she doesn't think it's nerve. She thinks it's completely reasonable and she doesn't understand why anyone else would think that what she's done deserves anything more than a slap on the wrist. As a creation, she is just. Man. Hammett's genius here is not actually revealing this until the very end of the novel, so you are sat there gasping at her sheer audacity, and almost kind of on her side, as the novel closes. It's pretty darn impressive craftsmanship, and very film-friendly.
The Glass Key - Dashiell Hammett
This was not such a good decision. I don't quite know why I went with this one rather than one of the two other novels in the volume, but I started it on the train and had to work my way through to the end. It was very reminiscent in some ways of Miller's Crossing, in terms of two rival gangs trying to run a city during the Prohibition era, and one influential man sort of dodging between the two and possibly double-crossing, possibly not, and so on. The problem is that it shows off all of Hammett's weaknesses as an author. Sam Spade's enigmatic 'not quite sure what he's doing' tone doesn't work here, as there's no-one to bounce off. You don't ever really like any of the characters. The hard-boiled covers over as - well, too hard-boiled, if that makes sense. It's not particularly exciting. It's sloggish and hard work and generally unpleasant - which comes as a real shock given the lightness of touch demonstrated in The Thin Man. So not a successful attempt, and not one I'd recommend anyone else read.
I am still trying to decide whether to read Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, the other two novels in the volume, if anyone has any opinions on either they'd like to share.
Imperium – Robert Harris
You knew this would be turning up sooner or later! This is Harris' next go at classical reception novels, following on from Pompeii (which I seem to have read before writing bibliography posts, which dates it). Now, as I recall, my impression of Pompeii was that it was all very well, but tried too hard. Plus the protagonist had a chip on his shoulder that was just a wee bit too large to be convincing. Now, in Imperium, Harris has clearly decided that people are more exciting than political events, and has gone with telling the story of Cicero.
This is actually an inspired decision, not least because he's decided to split Cicero's life up into a trilogy; the second book is called Lustrum and the third isn't out yet. I want to read Lustrum, which should tell you all you need to know. Cicero's life actually splits nicely into a trilogy anyway - fight for the consulate; Catilinarian conspiracy; the civil wars. Which I presume is the division Harris will be going for.
There's just something - easier about Harris' writing than I remember. I get the sense that he actually likes Cicero as a person, which means that he can write in the voice of Tiro, his secretary, in a way that reflects the fact the two men had a close personal relationship over a number of years that presumably involved some good will. Harris also deals in a semi-reasonable way with the institution of slavery, which is a good thing.
I could sit down and do a whole classicist's reading of this, and at one point I really should. But right now, I'm just going to say that Cicero deserves this; he deserves to be at the center of a trilogy, and he deserves to have the first part of his life told in prose that is this keen, this enthused, and this passionate about the material. Not to mention readable. No heavy-handed history lessons jumped out at me, although a couple of unfelicitous modern wordings did - and I'd much rather the latter than the former when I'm reading for pleasure, which this most definitely was. Far more successful than Pompeii, and I look forward to the next one.
The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova - Vol 1 - The Venetian Years
There have been a lot of Casanova films and television adaptations around lately. So, I thought I ought to actually read the source material, because when there's something about that I like the look of, that's what I do. What I hadn't realised before blithely adding 'Memoirs of Casanova' to The List was that the manuscript had quite a lively history and that non-abridged, it runs to twelve volumes.
The Rutgers library does have a copy of the memoirs, in six volumes alone, and I thought I'd basically give volume one a go and see how I felt about it. If it seemed worth reading, I'd carry on; if not, I'd shrug and give it up as a bad job. This edition, incidentally, was translated by Arthur Machen in 1902-ish, and while obviously that probably means a bit of subterfuge in translation, I don't think there can be a great deal given how rude he is about some of the French texts! There is also a rather lovely line at the end of the translator's preface; he mentions how the complete French text, naughty bits and all was printed for the first time, "containing a large number of anecdotes and incidents not to be found in the suprious version, the work was not acceptable to the authorities, and was consequently rigorously suppressed. Only a few copies sent out for presentation or for review are known to have escaped, and from one of these rare copies the present translation has been made strictly and solely for private circulation."
The whole thing is like a novel, honestly. Casanova has so far been a priest, a soldier, a magician and a rake-about-town. He has fallen in love with a castrato who turned out to be a woman in disguise; a woman in an Istanbul seraglio; various and sundry married ladies; and finally a French woman who dresses as a soldier and refuses to explain - well, anything, really. And that is the really, really heavily potted version. There are duels and gambling and defrauding people who believe in silly things and - just, gosh, really. It's all very rakish and daring do and the sort of silly nonsense I love from this period, with a good heavy dose of romantic intrigue and the occasional attack of The Pox which puts Casanova on his tried and tested six week diet to avoid making a present of it to any of his ladies. It is All Very Silly and makes me laugh out loud at the ridiculousness and sheer joi de vivre of it all, so I am definitely giving volume 2 a go.
Many Servants: An Introduction to Deacons - Ormonde Plater
Just a quick note to say I have read this, in the revised 2004 edition. It is an excellent account of how deacons work in relationship to presbyters and bishops as a representation of the Trinity, and what the particular mission of a deacon is. It ends up as a timely read, not for myself but for pointing out to others. The diaconate is very much alive and well in the Episcopal Church, which is the context Plater is writing out of; there are diaconates in other Christian denominations, but not as healthy, I think. I need to do some thinking about how the vivid picture painted here of mission on the edges fits in with the current arrangement of the C of E - but not right now. This is another book in the repertoire, I think, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in finding out about this particular fluid vocation, but where it goes with me remains to be seen.
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Yes, I genuinely had not read this before. I don't quite know how, but I really, really hadn't. Given the recent run of vampire films that G and I have been consuming, it seemed only reasonable to finally fill in that particular gap in my reading experience. I am, it has to be said, jolly glad that I did so.
For a start, I think I agree with G that I have yet to see a decent adaptation of the film. (Notwithstanding Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I actually haven't seen in full yet.) There's a whole load of complicated personal relationship stuff and so forth that just gets elided or simplified out of most film narratives. Especially Lucy's complicated relationship with her three suitors, which is just fascinating and all Female Vampirism and stuff.
I think in the main, my impression of this book is that it's jolly good Daring Do, and I can see why it's held so much appeal for so long. It is profoundly silly, and the epistolary/diary nature of the book does require quite considerable suspension of disbelief. But it's well-written Daring Do, it's excitingly dangerous, it has compelling characters (even the women, who don't just get lumped into the Damp Squib category but actually have life and energy and action to them), and - yeah. I very much enjoyed this, as it's the sort of mildly ridiculous fiction that's right up my ally, and I suspect it might well enter the category of daft-but-decent comfort reading.
Eugénie Grandet - Balzac
Oh man, this was so sad. I'd got used to Balzac's light-hearted touch of depicting the vices and stupidities of Paris and the upper-class, and getting plunged down here into rural French life was just - ouch! Not least because of the book's protagonist, the eponymous Eugénie Grandet. Her father, Grandet, is phenomenally rich - but lives as if he didn't have two sous to rub together, measures out daily rations, won't let his wife and daughter have more than one new dress a year, won't have proper wax candles in the house... I mean, it's an epic portrait of sheer meanness and avarice, and it is absolutely horrid. Because his poor daughter has no idea that life can be lived with any modicum of gentleness or pleasure or light, and thus it's hardly surprising that she falls in love with her destitute cousin, one of the Parisan social set whose father's fall upon hard times is the catalyst for the son's arrival at Grandet's, the second she sets eyes on him. Equally, the tragic end of what she thinks is a great love affair is also entirely unsurprising; she honestly didn't stand a chance, given what she hasn't know and indeed has no way of knowing she doesn't know.
It's a heart-rending book. Really, really heartrending. In some ways, it's the inverse of Old Goriot; there, a father was willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of his daughters, whereas here a father has no regard for his daughter beyond being the heiress to the money he has worked so hard to collect, for no purpose other than the having of it. Honestly, chills ran down my spine - and it becomes abundantly clear why this is the book that really brought Balzac to public prominence as a writer, and gave La Comédie Humaine the kick-start that it needed.
The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett
You might remember that, some time ago, we were quite fond of the film version of this, for it was very silly. It came from a novel; there was also a recent piece in the New Yorker that touched on Hammett in passing. So I figured I would sit down and read the novel. It is, unsurprisingly, very silly.
The best bit, I think, was discovering that the heiress/ex-gumshoe dynamic that existed in the film also exists very powerfully in the book. Nora Charles is completely laid back with her husband Nick's shady past and lifestyle; Nick does manage to do all the business-running stuff at the same time as being involved with a murder investigation. It is all jolly good fun, told in just the right tone - there's a sardonicness to Nick Charles that really works as a narrative voice, especially when bounced off Nora, who is so other and yet so right that it creates a beautiful dynamic. The plot moves easily and elegantly; there's a lot of Daring Do without too much unbelievability; and it's generally a convincing set-up in an elegant New York including trips down to the mean underbelly. Definitely worth taking the time to read, and I'm pleased I did.
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
Alright, so The Thin Man came in an elegant collected volume of Hammett's novels from the Library of America, and when I put two and two together, I couldn't resist reading The Maltese Falcon as well. Plus, we were in San Francisco! Where the Falcon is set! It was appropriate holiday reading material! Right? Right.
Anyway. This shows off different strengths of Hammett as a writer, I think. Sam Spade, that notorious anti-hero of anti-heroes, never does what you expect him to; you're never quite sure who he's going to double-cross or where his morals lie. Nobody's ever quite telling the truth, much like the fog that surrounds the city. Spade's laconic and angry stance at the world lashes out at everyone - the police, his clients, his enemies (who are often the same people), his employees. His personal life is convoluted and messy, and he seems too distracted by other things to care much about it staying that way. His priorities are strange and unpredictable, yet he seems to have a sixth sense about putting information together to get a true picture of whatever situaton he's in.
The plot, as I'm sure most of you know, revolves around a falcon statue, which may or may not be the fabelled one of legend, and the murder of Spade's partner in connection with said falcon. It all ultimately ends up with a bit of an anticlimax, but it feels right - the overarching story of the falcon is left unresolved, but Spade's individual story in relation to it is neatly concluded. Of course, there are plenty of other complications out there concerning Spade's story when we leave him, but that doesn't matter - we feel we've seen a glimpse, enough to get this A to B, but not to understand the man and the bigger story that we're being told. It's very compelling, and I actually rather enjoyed it, despite the obvious doses of blatant misogyny.
That said, the male female protagonist, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, is absolutely spine-chilling. She has this ability to claim one story, be caught out in a lie, wiggle her way into another story until she is caught out in that one... and all the way through claim this dewy-eyed sort of innocence and distance from blame that is just - wow. She has this ability to step back from any kind of moral responsibility and look kind of stunned anyone would expect her to take any (which only really appears in the closing section of the novel) that just leaves you utterly flabberghasted at her sheer nerve. Except she doesn't think it's nerve. She thinks it's completely reasonable and she doesn't understand why anyone else would think that what she's done deserves anything more than a slap on the wrist. As a creation, she is just. Man. Hammett's genius here is not actually revealing this until the very end of the novel, so you are sat there gasping at her sheer audacity, and almost kind of on her side, as the novel closes. It's pretty darn impressive craftsmanship, and very film-friendly.
The Glass Key - Dashiell Hammett
This was not such a good decision. I don't quite know why I went with this one rather than one of the two other novels in the volume, but I started it on the train and had to work my way through to the end. It was very reminiscent in some ways of Miller's Crossing, in terms of two rival gangs trying to run a city during the Prohibition era, and one influential man sort of dodging between the two and possibly double-crossing, possibly not, and so on. The problem is that it shows off all of Hammett's weaknesses as an author. Sam Spade's enigmatic 'not quite sure what he's doing' tone doesn't work here, as there's no-one to bounce off. You don't ever really like any of the characters. The hard-boiled covers over as - well, too hard-boiled, if that makes sense. It's not particularly exciting. It's sloggish and hard work and generally unpleasant - which comes as a real shock given the lightness of touch demonstrated in The Thin Man. So not a successful attempt, and not one I'd recommend anyone else read.
I am still trying to decide whether to read Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, the other two novels in the volume, if anyone has any opinions on either they'd like to share.
Imperium – Robert Harris
You knew this would be turning up sooner or later! This is Harris' next go at classical reception novels, following on from Pompeii (which I seem to have read before writing bibliography posts, which dates it). Now, as I recall, my impression of Pompeii was that it was all very well, but tried too hard. Plus the protagonist had a chip on his shoulder that was just a wee bit too large to be convincing. Now, in Imperium, Harris has clearly decided that people are more exciting than political events, and has gone with telling the story of Cicero.
This is actually an inspired decision, not least because he's decided to split Cicero's life up into a trilogy; the second book is called Lustrum and the third isn't out yet. I want to read Lustrum, which should tell you all you need to know. Cicero's life actually splits nicely into a trilogy anyway - fight for the consulate; Catilinarian conspiracy; the civil wars. Which I presume is the division Harris will be going for.
There's just something - easier about Harris' writing than I remember. I get the sense that he actually likes Cicero as a person, which means that he can write in the voice of Tiro, his secretary, in a way that reflects the fact the two men had a close personal relationship over a number of years that presumably involved some good will. Harris also deals in a semi-reasonable way with the institution of slavery, which is a good thing.
I could sit down and do a whole classicist's reading of this, and at one point I really should. But right now, I'm just going to say that Cicero deserves this; he deserves to be at the center of a trilogy, and he deserves to have the first part of his life told in prose that is this keen, this enthused, and this passionate about the material. Not to mention readable. No heavy-handed history lessons jumped out at me, although a couple of unfelicitous modern wordings did - and I'd much rather the latter than the former when I'm reading for pleasure, which this most definitely was. Far more successful than Pompeii, and I look forward to the next one.
The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova - Vol 1 - The Venetian Years
There have been a lot of Casanova films and television adaptations around lately. So, I thought I ought to actually read the source material, because when there's something about that I like the look of, that's what I do. What I hadn't realised before blithely adding 'Memoirs of Casanova' to The List was that the manuscript had quite a lively history and that non-abridged, it runs to twelve volumes.
The Rutgers library does have a copy of the memoirs, in six volumes alone, and I thought I'd basically give volume one a go and see how I felt about it. If it seemed worth reading, I'd carry on; if not, I'd shrug and give it up as a bad job. This edition, incidentally, was translated by Arthur Machen in 1902-ish, and while obviously that probably means a bit of subterfuge in translation, I don't think there can be a great deal given how rude he is about some of the French texts! There is also a rather lovely line at the end of the translator's preface; he mentions how the complete French text, naughty bits and all was printed for the first time, "containing a large number of anecdotes and incidents not to be found in the suprious version, the work was not acceptable to the authorities, and was consequently rigorously suppressed. Only a few copies sent out for presentation or for review are known to have escaped, and from one of these rare copies the present translation has been made strictly and solely for private circulation."
The whole thing is like a novel, honestly. Casanova has so far been a priest, a soldier, a magician and a rake-about-town. He has fallen in love with a castrato who turned out to be a woman in disguise; a woman in an Istanbul seraglio; various and sundry married ladies; and finally a French woman who dresses as a soldier and refuses to explain - well, anything, really. And that is the really, really heavily potted version. There are duels and gambling and defrauding people who believe in silly things and - just, gosh, really. It's all very rakish and daring do and the sort of silly nonsense I love from this period, with a good heavy dose of romantic intrigue and the occasional attack of The Pox which puts Casanova on his tried and tested six week diet to avoid making a present of it to any of his ladies. It is All Very Silly and makes me laugh out loud at the ridiculousness and sheer joi de vivre of it all, so I am definitely giving volume 2 a go.
Many Servants: An Introduction to Deacons - Ormonde Plater
Just a quick note to say I have read this, in the revised 2004 edition. It is an excellent account of how deacons work in relationship to presbyters and bishops as a representation of the Trinity, and what the particular mission of a deacon is. It ends up as a timely read, not for myself but for pointing out to others. The diaconate is very much alive and well in the Episcopal Church, which is the context Plater is writing out of; there are diaconates in other Christian denominations, but not as healthy, I think. I need to do some thinking about how the vivid picture painted here of mission on the edges fits in with the current arrangement of the C of E - but not right now. This is another book in the repertoire, I think, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in finding out about this particular fluid vocation, but where it goes with me remains to be seen.
