Bibliography
Apr. 14th, 2012 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyLucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
One of those books about academic life which it has taken me a long time to read. My main conclusion - Amis really didn't like women very much at all. Just... at all. The protagonist, the titular Jim, is a deeply unpleasant character with whom I had very little sympathy, particularly given the obvious alcoholism.
There are some interesting touches and I can see why this became something of a cult read, but I think that in order to make that acceptable you need to heavily interrogate the misogyny that focuses Jim's engagement with the world. It's not quite a madonna/whore dichotomy, but it's the same sort of division - perfect and imperfect women, looking after women whom one doesn't actually like, and who (what a surprise!) end up being lying neurotics after all in the last few pages. It's Very Nasty. And I'm very glad I've read this at this stage, when I can look at that and say 'yes, this is really quite unpleasant' rather than assuming it must be a masterwork of literature.
Possession: A Romance - A. S. Byatt
Cor, this was brilliant. I'm going to have to read more A.S. Byatt in general. This is a novel about academic life that captures precisely the obsession that gets into an academic's head when they have a particularly wonderful or interesting subject in hand. The plot surrounds the discovery of new evidence that proves a famous poet had a hitherto unknown relationship with a mystery woman; the plot follows the academic who discovers these letters following the trail to find out what happened.
The format of the book is strangely frustrating, because Byatt shifts from narration in the 'present' day to large chunks of poetry and the sources themselves (letters, diary extracts), passages from secondary literature on the primary sources, and some scenes set back in the Victorian period. It's a weirdly frustrating experience because while the overall trajectory of the plot keeps on moving forward, Byatt chooses to pick up a new thread just at the point where you want to know what's going on in another timeline. But it's a good sort of frustrating - you keep reading. I don't remember being this drawn into a novel for a while.
There's also some other fun meta stuff going on with the lives of the researchers imitating the lives of their subjects, which just adds to the sense that academics are so heavily implicated in their subjects. Definitely a good read.
One of those books about academic life which it has taken me a long time to read. My main conclusion - Amis really didn't like women very much at all. Just... at all. The protagonist, the titular Jim, is a deeply unpleasant character with whom I had very little sympathy, particularly given the obvious alcoholism.
There are some interesting touches and I can see why this became something of a cult read, but I think that in order to make that acceptable you need to heavily interrogate the misogyny that focuses Jim's engagement with the world. It's not quite a madonna/whore dichotomy, but it's the same sort of division - perfect and imperfect women, looking after women whom one doesn't actually like, and who (what a surprise!) end up being lying neurotics after all in the last few pages. It's Very Nasty. And I'm very glad I've read this at this stage, when I can look at that and say 'yes, this is really quite unpleasant' rather than assuming it must be a masterwork of literature.
Possession: A Romance - A. S. Byatt
Cor, this was brilliant. I'm going to have to read more A.S. Byatt in general. This is a novel about academic life that captures precisely the obsession that gets into an academic's head when they have a particularly wonderful or interesting subject in hand. The plot surrounds the discovery of new evidence that proves a famous poet had a hitherto unknown relationship with a mystery woman; the plot follows the academic who discovers these letters following the trail to find out what happened.
The format of the book is strangely frustrating, because Byatt shifts from narration in the 'present' day to large chunks of poetry and the sources themselves (letters, diary extracts), passages from secondary literature on the primary sources, and some scenes set back in the Victorian period. It's a weirdly frustrating experience because while the overall trajectory of the plot keeps on moving forward, Byatt chooses to pick up a new thread just at the point where you want to know what's going on in another timeline. But it's a good sort of frustrating - you keep reading. I don't remember being this drawn into a novel for a while.
There's also some other fun meta stuff going on with the lives of the researchers imitating the lives of their subjects, which just adds to the sense that academics are so heavily implicated in their subjects. Definitely a good read.
