The Kindle so far….

My Kindle arrived about a week or so ago, and I’ve been playing with it ever since. I had one moment of frustration (accompanied by some swearing), but apart from that, using the Kindle has been fairly intuitive. It’s actually much easier to use than I expected. Basically if you know how to use a computer, the Kindle should be a piece of cake for you.

I spent the first few days loading the Kindle with free books from Amazon. At this point, I can see using the Kindle mainly for classics. As I mentioned in an earlier post, some of the Balzac I am interested in is not available commercially or only available as pricey, problematic paperbacks, so for me the Kindle fits a very specific use.

Trawling through the free books to download on Amazon was addictive, and I went mad. This is what I have loaded in the Kindle so far:

The Enchanted April—Elizabeth von Armin (free)

The Solitary Summer--Elizabeth von Armin (free)

Works of Jane Austen

Works of Honore de Balzac

Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister–Aphra Behn (free)

Run to Earth–M.E. Braddon (free)

Birds of Prey–M.E. Braddon (free)

Henry Dunbar–M.E. Braddon (free)

London Pride–M.E Braddon (free)

Lady Audley’s Secret–M.E. Braddon (free)

The Golden Calf–M.E. Braddon (free)

Phantom Fortune–M.E. Braddon (free)

Collected works of the Brontes

The Pilgrim’s Progress-Bunyan (free)

Evelina–Burney (free)

Works of Joseph Conrad

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets–Crane (free)

Jack–Alphonse Daudet (free)

The Nabob–Alphonse Daudet (free)

Tartarin on the Alps–Alphonse Daudet (free)

The Immortal–Alphonse Daudet (free)

Femmes d’Artistes–Alphonse Daudet (free)

Tartarin De Tarascon-Alphonse Daudet (free)

The Financier–Dreiser (free)

Sister Carrie–Dreiser (free)

The Titan–Dreiser (free)

Works of Alexander Dumas

Works of E.M. Forster

Castle Rackrent–Edgeworth (free)

The Absentee–Edgeworth (free)

Collection of Edith Wharton

 Collection of Dickens

Collection of Elizabeth Gaskell

Cecilia–Burney (free)

History of Tom Jones–Fielding (free)

The Beautiful and the Damned–Fitzgerald (free)

Tales of the Jazz Age –Fitzgerald (free)

This Side of Paradise–Fitzgerald (free)

Three short Works–Flaubert (free)

Collection of George Eliot

Clarimonde–Gautier (free)

Captain Fracasse–Gautier (free)

The Mummy’s Foot–Gautier (free)

King Candaules–Gautier (free)

The Cross of the Enemy–Gautier (free)

Collection of George Meredith

Collection of George Gissing

Collection of Thomas Hardy

Collection of Henry James

Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner–Hogg (free)

The Iliad–Homer (free)

Odyssey–Homer (free)

A Chance Acquaintance–Howells (free)

Their Wedding Journey–Howells (free)

The Rise of Silas Lapham–Howells (free)

A Modern Instance–Howells (free)

Indian Summer–Howells (free)

The Kentons–Howell (free)

Hazard of New Fortunes–Howells (free)

The Man Who Laughs–Victor Hugo (free)

The Memoirs of Victor Hugo (free)

The History of a Crime–Hugo (free)

Rasselas–Johnson (free)

The Water Babies–Kingsley (free)

The Room in the Dragon Volant–Joseph Le Fanu (free)

The Evil Guest–Joseph Le Fanu (free)

Carmilla–Joseph Le Fanu (free)

Our Mr Wrenn–Sinclair Lewis (free)

Babbitt–Sinclair Lewis (free)

At the Back of the North Wind-MacDonald (free)

The Princess and the Goblin–MacDonald (free)

Communist Manifesto–Marx (free)

Confessions of a Young Man–George Moore (free)

Esther Waters–George Moore (free)

A Mere Accident–George Moore (free)

The Lake–George Moore (free)

Vain Fortune–George Moore (free)

Muslin–George Moore (free)

Mike Fletcher– George Moore (free)

The Untilled Field–George Moore (free)

Memoirs of My Dead Life–George Moore (free)

A Mummer’s Wife –George Moore (free)

Sister Teresa–George Moore (free)

Evelyn Innes–George Moore  (free)

Spring Days–George Moore  (free)

Journal of a Voyage Across the Atlantic–George Moore (free)

The Pit–Frank Norris (free)

The Octopus–Frank Norris (free)

Letty and the Lady Moran–Frank Norris (free)

Vandover and the Brute-Frank Norris (free)

Blix–Frank Norris (free)

The Open Door-Oliphant (free)

The Unspeakable Gentleman–Oliphant (free)

A Journey to Katmandu-Oliphant (free)

The Perpetual Curate–Oliphant (free)

Old Lady Mary-Oliphant (free)

The Doctor’s Family-Oliphant (free)

The Rector–Oliphant (free)

A Little Pilgrim & Other Stories-Oliphant (free)

Phoebe Junior- Oliphant (free)

Clarissa Harlowe & Pamela-Richardson (free)

The Moneychanger-Sinclair (free)

The Metropolis–Sinclair (free)

The Jungle–Sinclair (free)

Collection of Walter Scott

Mount Music-Somerville (free)

The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy–Sterne (free)

Alice Adams-Takington (free)

The Two Vanrevels–Tarkington (free)

The Gentleman from Indiana–Tarkington (free)

The Magnificent Ambersons-Tarkington (free)

The Flirt–Tarkington (free)

Penrod and Penrod and Sam–Booth Tarkington (free)

The Supressed Poems–Tennyson (free)

Idylls of the King–Tennyson (free)

Collection of Thomas Love Peacock

Works of Anthony Trollope

With Zola in England–Vizetelly (free)

My Days of Adventure–Vizetelly (free)

The Castle of Otranto-Walpole (free)

Love and Mr Lewisham-H. G.  Wells (free)

Secret Places of the Heart–H. G Wells (free)

Tono Bungay– H.G Wells (free)

Ann Veronica- H. G. Wells (free)

Collected works of Thackeray

Night and day–Woolf  (free)

The Voyage Out–Woolf (free)

And with all this…I’ve used less than half of the space. Note that I avoided Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev collections as they are primarily either Garnett or Maude translations. Translations are a consideration. There’s no Kindle version of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground, for example (although Kindle versions for Anna Karenina and War & Peace are available, but I already have copies of these).  

On the down side:

You can ’sort’ your Kindle content by title, latest downloaded and by author. I chose the latter, but even so some of the items are out-of-order. For example, Wharton is filed under “E” for Edith, and while Fanny Burney’s Evelina is filed under “B” for Burney, Burney’s Cecilia is filed under “F” for Fanny. This is annoying.

I bought a free version of Clarissa and dumped it after seeing how it looked on the screen. It came free in three volumes, but I preferred to pay a tiny amount and get a better version with the hyperlink to the book’s content. This is ultimately why I decided to buy collections too. It’s nice to have an entire file of–let’s say–Trollope, so I can open the file and then select from within the alphabetised file rather than have everything listed individually. After reading some comments on Amazon, I made sure that I bought collections with hyperlinks.

It’s possible to sample a Kindle book before you actually buy it, and this is a nice feature and very simple to use. The free ones cannot be sampled prior to downloading. I did find one short story collection (free) that I was unable to open so I deleted it. I was curious about Alice in Wonderland and after downloading sample chapters of different versions, I discovered that a great many of them came without illustrations, so if you are going to buy Kindle books, it pays to check out the sample chapters before you buy.

Amazon makes a point to say that the voice feature is experimental. This is a understatement. The voice feature for the books I tried was poor. It has a robotic tone, well I expected that, but it simply can’t pronounce words like “marquis” and then the entire delivery is off. The wrong words are emphasized and the sentences broken up at the wrong places. The voice feature really shouldn’t be considered as a buying factor, and if I had bought the Kindle mainly for this feature, I would be disappointed.  The voice feature needs to improve substantially. But if I know Mr. Big  Bezos, he will have his tech. team work on the Kindle voice until it is improved.

Now for the reading part…how easy is it to read? Well, I’m, impressed. I slipped into the start of a Balzac and I didn’t even register that I was using a ‘device’. The Kindle is that good. I’m surprised by that. When I told acquaintances that I’d bought a Kindle, I had a range of reactions from: “what’s a Kindle?” to “nothing beats the print copy in your hands.” Well, I would agree with the latter statement but since many of the Balzac titles I am interested in are NO LONGER IN PRINT, the Kindle is great for me.

Eugenie Grandet by Balzac

I’ve been reading rather a lot of Zola during the past few years, and it occurred to me that I’ve neglected Balzac. There are probably all sorts of arguments that rage for the superiority of one author over the other–Zola’s novels, such as Germinal, and L’Assommoir have that social conscience aspect, for example. And then again Nana is one of literature’s enduring courtesans. While all those considerations are noted, there’s just something about Balzac….

Balzac’s bon vivant spirit tends to seep through in his novels–even when he’s writing about the nasty side of human nature. The man had a lively sense of humour (at least I think he did), and perhaps that is what makes his novels so enjoyable. And so deciding that I’d neglected Balzac lately, I pulled Eugenie Grandet off the shelf.

Eugenie, the heroine of the tale, is the only daughter of Monsieur Grandet. Grandet, who married late in life, is now quite elderly. Grandet worked as a cooper, and after marrying the daughter of a wealthy lumber merchant, he cashed in on the French Revolution by buying “for a song, legally if not legitimately, the finest vineyards in the district, an old abbey and several small farms.”

When the tale begins, the Grandets live  far from Paris in their house in Saumur. No one knows just how wealthy Grandet is these days, but everyone speculates that he must have “a private treasure, a hiding place full of louis, and that every night he indulged in the ineffable joys afforded by the sight of a large mass of gold.”

Grandet is a miser, and like most misers he possesses an almost unearthly ability to manage and make money:

“Monsieur Grandet inspired, then, the deferential esteem that was rightfully owed to a man who never had any debts, who as a skilled cooper and winegrower, could estimate with the precision of an astronomer when he ought to manufacture a thousand barrels for his harvest or only five hundred, who never misjudged a speculation, who always had barrels to sell when a barrel was worth more than its contents, and who could store his vintage in his wine cellars and wait until he could sell it for two hundred francs a cask, when the smaller winegrowers had to sell theirs for a hundred. His famous vintage of 1811, judiciously stored and slowly sold, had brought in over two hundred and forty thousand francs. Financially speaking, there was something of both the tiger and the boa constrictor in Monsieur Grandet: he knew how to conceal himself, lie in wait, watch his prey for a long time and finally leap on it; then he would open the jaws of his purse, gulp down a bellyful of gold and placidly lie down like a snake digesting its prey , impassive, cold, methodical.”

If Grandet has a ‘greatest’ treasure, then it is his only child Eugenie. Since she is an heiress, she is considered a great catch, but in the provinces, there aren’t many eligible men considered worthy of her. There are two rivals for her hand–a judge, Monsieur Cruchot, and 23-year-old Adolphe des Grassins. Both families have their factions, their supporters and their allies, and most of the townspeople take considerable interest in the subject of Eugenie’s possible engagement. In a town where not much happens, everyone eagerly watches for any sign that the Cruchot family is favoured over the des Grassins and vice versa.

Meanwhile “older inhabitants of the region maintained that the Grandets were too shrewd to let the money go outside of the family,” and that Eugenie will most likely be married off to her cousin from Paris, the son of her father’s brother. And then one day that cousin, Charles Grandet, arrives unexpectedly.

Charles Grandet is an elegant, spoiled young fop. This is his first trip into the provinces, and so he travels and dresses to impress and “overawe the entire district with his opulence.” Charles struggles to align the stories of his uncle’s wealth with the reality of a cold, ill-lit, shabby house fashioned more like a fortress (complete with a vicious dog) than the country chateau of a wealthy gentleman. He’s not so much appalled as unable to comprehend how these long-lost relatives live. While Charles stares at the unfashionable Cruchots and the des Grassins through his monocle, Eugenie’s provincial suitors sense a formidable rival. But Eugenie is entranced by her cousin–she’s never seen such elegance, and when Charles’s visit is extended by tragic circumstance, Eugenie struggles to provide him with a few extras–such as a wax candle. For the first time in her life, Eugenie feels the shame of her father’s raging obsession with money, and in time Eugenie’s relationship with Charles leads to a rift between Eugenie and her father….

Old Grandet is a marvellous creation. As is so typical with Balzac characters, Grandet is sharply drawn and detailed in such a way that he comes to life. Balzac shows how Grandet’s miserliness is a character trait that enters into every aspect of his life. He keeps all the food under lock and key, meting out sugar cubes, and in one hilarious scene, Grandet instructs his faithful servant, Nanon to make crow soup. Grandet has even developed a manner to further his business interests, and using selective deafness and periodic stuttering, he simply wears people down.

Grandet’s obdurate obsession with money gradually destroys his relationships with his wife and daughter, and while he’s by no means an evil man, his horrible flaw and ruling characteristic is his avarice. As Professor Milton Crane notes in the novel’s introduction: “For Balzac it was not love but money that made the world go round,” and we certainly see that philosophy freely at work in Eugenie Grandet.

Crane also notes that Balzac conceived of La Comedie Humaine, “the device to describe and analyze all French society” in 1842. Eugenie Grandet was published in 1834 and after creating the idea of La Comedie Humaine, Balzac slotted Eugenie Grandet into the Scenes of Provincial Life section (one of seven sections that comprise La Comedie Humaine. Crane argues that there is “something unavoidably synthetic about Balzac’s scheme, which he endeavoured to superimpose on books that had obviously been written without thought of a Comedie Humaine.” At the same time, Crane acknowledges that Balzac may “have been feeling his way instinctively toward this plan throughout his career.” 

The novel is rife with Balzac’s rich sense of humour, and some of the very best moments take place when Charles first arrives at his uncle’s shabby home. Charles imagines that he’ll impress the locals with his Parisian ways, and he poses “putting his hand in his vest and looking off in the distance to imitate the pose given to Lord Byron by Chantrey.” Everyone except Eugenie and her mother are appalled by Charles for a range of reasons. To Grandet, Charles represents possibly the worst affront to a miser: a spendthrift who doesn’t understand the value of money, and he can’t get his nephew out of the house fast enough. Meanwhile Eugenie’s suitors, sensing a “common enemy” scramble into action, and Eugenie and her mother scrape together items they consider luxuries to offer to Charles. Of course, he doesn’t appreciate these humble offerings one bit, and he fails to grasp the cost to Eugenie.

Grandet’s house could very well feature as one of the novel’s characters. The house is freezing and ill-lit, and its walls yellowed and covered with grime. Grandet’s office is “walled-up” with only one entrance and its windows are covered by iron gratings. The banister is “worm-eaten,” the floors are covered with carpets made of rags, and the bed coverings are full of holes. Charles even begins to wonder if he’s in the right house.

Eugenie Grandet  isn’t the greatest Balzac heroine by any means. She’s acted upon in most instances, and while she maintains dignity and admirable integrity, ultimately she has learned some lessons from her father and some of her final transactions between Eugenie and Charles Grandet are delivered with the sort of cold unemotional delivery that remind me of Catherine in the Henry James novel, Washington Square.

Translated by Lowell Bair.

McTeague by Frank Norris

This 2009 reading of Frank Norris’s McTeague was the third reading for me, and I returned to this American classic novel of Old San Francisco after watching Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent film version with its appropriate title: Greed. McTeague is one of my favourite American classics, and it’s a favourite for its dark undertones of lust, violence, murder, sadomasochism, and obsession. No wonder literary critics were outraged when McTeague was published in 1899. On the West Coast, a reviewer for The Argonaut argued that “Norris riots in odors and stenches,” while The New York based monthly journal, The Review of Reviews called McTeague “about the most unpleasant American story that anybody has ventured to write.” Of the liberal amount of invective launched at the novel by literary critics, the latter quote remains my favourite as it is quite true, but that’s the point. Norris’s novel is unrelentingly bleak and grimy, but it’s also wonderful.

The novel’s plot concerns a San Francisco dentist named McTeague. McTeague, the blockish son of an alcoholic miner worked as a car-boy at the Big Dipper mine in Placer County when he left to become the apprentice of a traveling dentist. The dentist is a “charlatan” but McTeague doesn’t understand this, and after watching the dentist pull out teeth for a few years, McTeague sets up his “Dental Parlours” (a rented room where he works and sleeps) in San Francisco’s Polk Street. This is where the novel begins with McTeague spending a typical Sunday in San Francisco: he eats a heavy meal, returns to the Dental Parlours , drinks beer and plays the handful of tunes he knows on his concertina. At “six feet and three inches,” McTeague is a “young giant”:

“McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient.”

McTeague doesn’t stop to think about his life, but he’s considered a success, and since he’s hauled himself up from manual labour at the mine to the professional classes, this is justified. McTeague’s simple life changes when he’s introduced to Trina, a beautifully made, tiny young woman who is brought to McTeague for dental care by her cousin and sweetheart, Marcus, McTeague’s best friend. The problems begin when McTeague, in a fit of lust, kisses Trina while she’s asleep under the effects of ether. McTeague then wants to court and marry Trina, and Marcus, who wasn’t that committed to the relationship anyway, agrees to step aside. McTeague’s slow, methodical and predatory courtship is darted with instances of lust, and at these moments, Trina panics and quails with fear at McTeague’s brutal onslaught.

The plot thickens when Trina buys a lottery ticket that turns out to be the winning number, and so when Mac (as she calls him) and Trina marry, she brings with her a ‘dowry’ of $5,000, and this money becomes the root of their problems. At first, their marriage is satisfactory, but gradually Trina becomes obsessed with money, and then their luck turns sour….

It’s impossible to read McTeague without thinking about and comparing it to Zola’s novel L’Assommoir, published in 1877. L’Assommoir, one of Zola’s greatest novels, and part of the Rougon-Macquart twenty-volume series is the tale of a Parisian laundress named Gervaise. Gervaise’s story is a study of poverty and working-class life tainted with alcoholism. Zola’s naturalistic novels examine the themes of hereditary and environment, and Norris who was heavily influenced by Zola, considered L’Assommoir to be the “prototype of McTeague.” Certainly literary critics made the connection, and as the introduction by Kevin Starr explains, one critic “castigated Norris for reintroducing the corrupting moral vogue of Zolaism” onto American shores.

Both L’Assommoir and McTeague feature main characters who rise from the minionship of the working class to the next level. Gervaise becomes an employer when she opens her laundry shop, and McTeague leaves the physical labour of the mines behind when he becomes a dentist. McTeague never really grasps the idea that he is supposed to go to university and get a diploma–to McTeague, his dental career is eventually stolen from him by forces he cannot understand. Both Gervaise and McTeague’s destruction are engineered and accelerated by alcoholism and jealousy. But it’s where McTeague is different from L’Assommoir that things really become interesting.

While L’Assommoir is concerned with a lack of money, McTeague is about the misuse of money. If Gervaise has money, she spends it, and eventually of course, she spends money she doesn’t have and bankrupts herself in the process. In contrast, in McTeague Trina hordes money and becomes a miser–at one point she even ignores her mother’s request for help. Although she and McTeague are wealthy by late 19th century standards, Trina would rather eat rotting meat than disturb her nest egg. Having money corrupts Trina and McTeague. It’s not their salvation, it’s their nemesis. It’s the acquisition of money, the hording of money that becomes their destruction–compounded by hereditary and environmental factors.

“Trina had always been an economical little body, but it was only since her great winnings in the lottery that she had become especially penurious. No doubt, in her fear lest their good luck should demoralize them and lead to habits of extravagance, she had recoiled too far in the other direction. Never, never, never should a penny of that miraculous fortune be spent; rather it should be added to. It was a nest egg, a monstrous, roc-like nest egg, not so large, however, but that it could be made larger.”

The idea of the corrupting force of money appears throughout McTeague–from the endeavours to extract gold from the Big Dipper mine to the brutality of Zerkow, a neighbourhood junk shop owner who marries his wife, Maria simply because she entertains him with fantastic tales of long-lost gold plate. These stories drive Zerkow to insanity–just as Trina’s horde leads to a sort of madness too. Gold appears throughout the novel–at the mine, in McTeague’s crude dentistry, and at one point in the tale, Trina buys a model of a huge gold tooth to hang outside of Mac’s Dental Parlours. To own and display this gold tooth is a long-held dream of McTeague’s, and it’s one of the last things he refuses to part with–at one point the couple even use it as a table in the squalor of their rented room. Symbolically, even McTeague’s canary spends its sad, trapped little life in a gilt cage.

Norris based McTeague on a real-life crime that took place in San Francisco in 1893. He was a student at Berkeley at the time, and he began to be fascinated by bourgeois and working class life. After failing to get a degree, there followed a period at Harvard, various overseas adventures in South Africa, and then Norris returned to San Francisco and the Big Dipper Mine to recuperate his health. San Francisco is one of those cities that has a great deal of character–just watch Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear or Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage to get a sense of how characters’ lives are shaped by the city they live in. Norris’s pre-1906 earthquake San Francisco is raw and new but still pulsing with life, and the novel’s characters mesh with their landscape. There’s the colourful street life of Polk Street, Cliff House, Union Street, the Presidio Reservation, the Golden gate, the ferry, the variety show at the Orpheum, and the magnificent views of the Pacific Ocean.

McTeague is not a perfect novel, and parts of the story seem rougher than others. Sections which move away from McTeague and Trina as individual characters and instead convert them into types are poorer than the main narrative. For example at one point, Norris describes Trina’s growing sexual awareness as “The Woman is awakened.” Other sections include Trina’s German relatives speaking broken English–and this sort of dialogue is always a problem for writers. Norris turns it into a phonetic event. Also while Zola’s influence is clear in McTeague, there are two characters–veterinarian Old Grannis and spinster Miss Baker–who could very well have lost their way from a Dickens novel. This dark tale is frequently interrupted with sentimental details of the relationship between the elderly couple. Perhaps Norris intended this romance to provide a counterbalance against the dark destruction of the McTeagues.

McTeague hints at a tremendous talent that is not yet fully developed. Norris was a mere 29 years old when he finished this novel. Tragically, Norris died at the age of 32 from a ruptured appendix and kidney failure in 1902. Coincidentally, Zola died the same year.

Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery

There are times when you know that you are the wrong sort of reader for a book, and in the case of Gourmet Rhapsody, this is one of these instances.

In 2006, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the second novel from French author and one-time philosophy teacher,  Muriel Barbery became a phenomenal success.  The book hit the top of the French sales charts and was subsequently translated into twenty languages. A film adaptation (Le Herisson) was released in France this summer, and in September 2009 Europa Editions published Gourmet Rhapsody, an earlier book by the same author. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which is a good novel, by the way, is told through alternating viewpoints of the building’s middle-aged concierge and a precocious child. I would have much preferred the novel if it stuck with the concierge, but that’s another story…..

Gourmet Rhapsody has the same sort of format as The Elegance of the Hedgehog–very short chapters told through multiple points of view. The story takes place in a posh Parisian building–the same setting as The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Anyway, in Gourmet Rhapsody one of the building’s residents, “the greatest food critic in the world” Monsieur Pierre Arthens is dying, and he’s been told that he only has 48 hours to live:

“After decades of grub, deluges of wine and alcohol of every sort, after a life spent in butter, cream, sauce, and oil in constant, knowingly orchestrated  and meticulously cajoled success, my trustiest right-hand men, Sir Liver and his associate Stomach, are doing marvellously well and it is my heart  that is giving out. I am dying of cardiac insufficiency. What a bitter pill! So often have I reproached others for a lack of heart in their cuisine, in their art, that never for a moment did I think that I might be the one lacking therein, this heart now betraying me so brutally, with scarcely concealed disdain, so quickly has the blade been sharpened…”

 Bed bound, Arthens is fixated on a single taste. He’s spent his adult life stuffing himself with food and writing about it for a living, but here, facing death, he’s tormented by the idea of a taste that he is unable to put a name to. Arthens believes that “this particular flavour is the first and ultimate truth of [his] entire life,” that it is a “flavour from childhood or adolescence” and that if he can remember the taste and experience it one more time, he will die a happy man. It’s impossible, of course, to read about this dilemma without recalling Proust, and indeed at one point Arthens directly refers to Proust and his famous Madeleines.

The problem is that Arthens cannot remember the taste he longs for, and many of the book’s short chapters are devoted to memories of a life spent with food. Arthens isn’t a very nice man. He’s loathed by competitors and most of his family members while his wife, neglected for a great deal of their married life, adores and worships the man to the point of irrationality. Several of the chapters end with the thought that Arthens should hurry up and die.

The chapters told by Arthens dominate this novella, and pages are spent on his descriptions of various feasts he’s consumed, and he can remember details of extensive menus with terrifying precision:

“Menu. 1982. A Royal of Sea Urchin with Sansho, saddle of  hare, rabbit kidneys and liver with winkles. Buckwheat pancake. 1979: Cod in an agria macaire; violet maco from the Midi; plump Gillardeau oysters and grilled foie gras. Mackeral bouillon laced with leeks. 1989: Thick chunks of turbot cooked in a casserole with aromatic herbs, deglazed with home-made cider. Quarters of Comice pears with cucumber greens. 1996: Pastis of Gauther pigeon with mace, dried fruit and foie gras with radishes. 1988: Madeleines with Tonka beans.”

Other passages linger on the sensation of food in the mouth–the physical sensations of mastication, the explosion of flavour, and “taste buds already subjugated by the virile rigor of [the] meat.” While the author shows great skill in the endless descriptions of food (at one point spending about a page describing the pleasures of eating sashimi), unfortunately I do not relate at all to the subject matter. Most of the descriptions of food were wasted on me as so many things Arthens consumed sounded revolting, and others are, well, unconscionable  (rabbit kidneys and foie gras!).

The novel, however, is not without its humour. Arthens approaches food as many seducers would approach a conquest–each meal is an encounter, full of rituals, and Arthens lingers over every sensation, anticipating flavours as one might anticipate an orgasm. The best part of the book is the memory of a trip to America. I anticipated Arthens being appalled by McDonald’s and I eagerly read the chapter when he went for his first American meal. The author ambushed me with the food critic’s reaction to a gargantuan American breakfast.

For anyone on some sort of diet–either restricted or reducing, Gourmet Rhapsody may be the book that sends you off the wagon. But I’m not that mesmerised by food, and so I remained rather unengaged by the story or its characters. These detailed descriptions of food are wasted on me; I eat rice cakes precisely because they taste like cardboard.

In a Dark Wood by Amanda Craig

I’m not a professional writer, so I don’t know what it feels like to write a novel and agonize over every word, each chapter, and the final product. One thing that I wonder about though is just how much attention some authors put into the first few pages. I’ve noticed that Hard Case Crime  titles, for example tend to be page one attention grabbers. And this brings me to Amanda Craig’s novel In a Dark Wood. The novel successfully grabbed my attention with its opening passages, and from that moment I was committed to the end. This was the first Craig novel for me, so I had no idea what to expect. I don’t want to give away too much of the book’s plot, but I will say that the author led me down the garden path, and I throughly enjoyed every minute of it.

The story is told through the eyes of Benedick Hunter, an unemployed actor who is on the brink of middle age. His wife, successful author Georgina, has taken the children and moved in with her lover. When the book begins, Benedick has sold the family home and is packing to leave. He is engaged in the gruesome, depressing  task of separating his books from those that belong to Georgina. This is a perfect passage that will be fully understood by readers who’ve ever had to break up personal libraries. Books collected over the years represent a life spent together and to separate books into two piles feels like an amputation:

“I was trying to separate my possessions from those of my wife, Georgina. A biography in books, this is why some people scan your shelves, in the manner of a Roman seer gazing at entrails. There were duplicate editions of T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare, of Beckett, Pinter and Joyce. My own copies of Conrad, Dostoevsky, and Waugh jumbled up with her Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes–the male versus the female canon. The plays I had been in, with my parts underlined in lurid orange. Her university texts, with notes scribbled in pencil or biro. Then single volumes, signifying union: paperbacks stained with the oils of lost summers, whose cracked spines still released cascades of fine sand or faded blades of pale grass: hardbacks generously inscribed to mark birthdays or Christmas, passed from one to the other at bedtime as a preliminary to love; bound proofs of new books, battered ghosts of old ones. All of these, left for me to divide and put into boxes. She had taken the children’s books , as she had taken the children. We had been separated now for over a year, and were getting divorced.”

Sifting through the books, Benedick comes across North of Nowhere, one of several books of fairy tales written by his long-deceased mother, Laura. Although most of Laura’s books are now out of print, she has become, in death, a “minor cult figure” and a favourite with academics with a feminist bent. In spite of Laura’s slight celebrity, Benedick knows remarkably little about his mother. She committed suicide when he was a small child, and he has no memories of her whatsoever.

Following the sale of the house, Benedick moves in with Ruth, the mother of one of his long-time childhood friends. Benedick  indulges in days spent in self-pitying mode, and with a good amount of time on his hands, he begins to ask questions about his American mother. Those who knew Laura have only the sketchiest details of her life before she arrived in London. Benedick meets various people who were connected with his mother in some way, and their  memories evoke a different world–the world of 1960s London. But instead of finding answers, Benedick uncovers contrasting, fragmented memories of Laura. Some people loved her and considered her extremely talented; others disliked Laura, and instead of a solid image of Laura emerging, it seems that she was a complex woman no one really understood. Benedick’s father, the bombastic Howard, now remarried, doesn’t want to discuss his long dead wife, and squashes any discussion of the past.

As the novel develops, Benedick gradually unravels. Aggressively pursed by single, desperate women, unable to get another acting role, and pressured by Georgina to take the children, Benedick finds that instead of getting over the divorce, he’s much less able to cope. Turning increasingly to his mother’s stories,which are weaved into the plot,  he feels compelled to uncover the mystery of Laura’s death. 

Bitterly funny in spots, the peevish Benedick (called Dick Hunter by some), is too busy wallowing in self-pity to realise that he has a problem. Everything wrong in his life is someone else’s fault–from his failed auditions, and his feeble attempts at fatherhood,  to his soured marriage–someone else is  always to blame:

“Just before she left me, she had been writing a column about her life, in which I featured largely as a neurotic layabout who spent all our money on absurdities and left her to cope with the ensuing disaster.”

While on one level the book is the tale of one man’s disaster of a life, on another level, Craig effectively creates a subtle, dark,  and slightly twisted modern day fairy tale with Benedick as the unlikely, sometimes nasty protagonist whose quest is to uncover the truth about his mother. But that said, don’t underestimate this excellent novel….

Using the male-point-of-view, Craig very capably creates the world through Benedick’s eyes, and this is rather curious as in many ways Craig’s subject matter reminds me of Fay Weldon. Craig, however, is definitely a post-Weldon author. In A Dark Wood is reminiscent of the best of Weldon but without the between-the-sexes savagery and customary male bashing. While Benedick’s parents, Howard & Laura, could easily slip into the plot of a Weldon novel with its themes of infidelity, feminism, gender inequality, and the battles between the sexes,  Benedick is absolutely a post-Weldon, post-feminist creation– a man who’s overwhelmed by his children and who battles with a sense of failure while shamed by his wife’s success.

I bought a Kindle and it’s Balzac’s fault.

About a week or so ago, I finished the Balzac novel Eugenie Grandet. As I’ve focused on Zola lately, it had been some time since I’d read Balzac . I throughly enjoyed the novel and found myself laughing out loud at several points. I asked myself: “Is there anyone who understands human nature quite like Balzac?” And then at that moment decided it was high time to read more Balzac.

So I ordered A Woman of Thirty from Amazon. The book is long out of print, but Amazon’s subsidiary BookSurge has a copy. Imagine my HORROR when the book arrived and I noticed they’d spelled the author’s name WRONG!! According to BookSurge,  A Woman of Thirty  is written by Honroe de Balzac.

Sighing heavily, I turned back to Amazon and looked at other Balzac books. So many are not in print and are only available as rather expensive reprints or print on demand paperbacks. Given the lack of demand for these books, it’s wonderful that someone is republishing them, but if I start considering the sheer number of books Balzac wrote…well it adds up.

I began looking at what was available for Kindle–Amazon’s wireless reading device. Many classic titles (not just Balzac) are free. One giant collection of over 150 Balzac works is available for a pittance. True some of them are not the best translations, but then many of his minor works have not been re-translated for decades anyway. My choice–as far as the more obscure Balzac goes–is to pay for paperbacks or to go for  the Kindle….

And then at this point I decided to take the plunge….I’d been thinking about a Kindle for some time, but the desire to read more Balzac pushed me over the edge.

I envision my usage to be narrowed down to the classics. I see myself listening to it in the car on the drive to and from work. I don’t know if that noble goal will materialise or not.

The excellent blog A Kindle World has all sorts of tips about downloading Project Gutenberg books (free). The blog also has some interesting posts re: Amazon’s problem with too many public domain versions–some of which are sub-standard and lack, for example, hyperlink Table of Contents.

The Kindle arrives Monday. So starting next week, I am going to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” A gross exaggeration, of course, but the point is that I expect there will be a great deal of wrestling and swearing involved until I learn how to master the device. What price progress?

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

I haven’t watched every film ever made by Alfred Hitchcock, but of the ones I’ve seen, my favourite is Strangers on a Train. I have a thing for trains, and then the plot–meeting a perfect stranger–a complete pyscho–and living to regret your little chat…well it appeals to me. And so it was probably just a matter of time before I got around to reading the book the film is based on. I don’t know what I expected really–probably a good tale, but in Highsmith’s psychological crime novel, I got more than I bargained for.

Highsmith (1921-1995) is what I term a lurker. By that I mean her books are just out of sight–off in the periphery, but then we come across her name in unexpected moments. Many of her novels have been made into films–including the phenomenal Purple Noon (Plein Soleil)–a terrific film starring Alain Delon. This film is based on Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley–a film that spawned a Hollywood remake in 1999. As a consequence of the resurgence of interest in Ripley, Highsmith novels are receiving a little more attention, and deservedly so.

Strangers on a Train begins with young, promising architect, Guy Haines, travelling from New York back to his home town, Metcalf, in Texas. He’s received a letter from his estranged wife, the chronically adulterous Miriam, asking him to return to discuss a matter of some  importance. Miriam is pregnant with another man’s child, and Guy hopes that she is finally ready to discuss a divorce. They’ve been separated for years, and Guy now has a love interest–Anne, the daughter of one of New York’s finest families. Things are looking up for Guy. His career is about to take off and once free of Miriam, he’ll marry into wealth and mingle with New York’s high society.

On the train, Guy meets a man about his age named Charles Anthony Bruno, the scion of a wealthy family. Bruno is on his way to Santa Fe to join his doting mother for a holiday. The two men appear to be complete opposites. Guy is serious, hard-working, educated and withdrawn whereas Bruno is unpredictable, spoiled, impulsive and clearly emotionally unstable. Bruno begins a tirade against his father and ends with the question: “Ever feel like murdering somebody?”  While it’s definitely one of those ‘step away from the looney’ moments, Guy allows himself to be bullied and manipulated by Bruno. Trapped in the same railway carriage, the two men strike up a conversation, and Bruno, who’s the pushy type, won’t take no for an answer when Guy refuses to have dinner with him. During dinner and after a few drinks, Bruno confides that he hates his father and wishes he were dead. Bruno also questions Guy about his soured relationship with Miriam. Emboldened with highballs and the thrill of confiding in a total stranger, Bruno goes on to confess more:

“And I did a robbery.” Bruno stared at Guy rigidly. “Good one. Out of an apartment.”

An incredulous smile started on Guy’s lips, though actually he believed Bruno, Bruno could be violent. He could be insane too. Despair, Guy thought, not insanity. The desperate boredom of the wealthy, that he often spoke of to Anne. It tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime as easily as privation.

Bruno proceeds to expound on his theories of murder–a subject he’s clearly given a great deal of thought to. Apart from the fact he considers everyone capable of murder, he also admits that he has  “A lot of ideas for perfect murders.” During the course of the evening, Bruno reveals his plan for a perfect murder:

“We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train , see and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis!”

In Metcalf, Guy meets Miriam and is appalled by her schemes for reconciliation. Disgusted and depressed, he travels to Mexico to join Anne’s family. A few weeks later, he receives the news that Miriam has been murdered. While he hopes Miriam’s murder is a random act or the result of jealousy from an abandoned lover, Guy’s unease grows. Did Bruno murder Miriam? At first Guy reassures himself that it’s coincidence and that Bruno had nothing to do with Miriam’s murder, but then the letters and the phone calls begin….

While Strangers on a Train is ostensibly a tale of murder, it’s really the story of the relationship between Guy and Bruno. There are definite strains of supressed homosexuality between Bruno and Guy. Bruno wants to shower Guy with gifts and resents Guy’s relationship with Anne, for example. Bruno pursues Guy rather as an ardent, persistent lover might, but the relationship between Bruno and Guy is far more complex.

Highsmith drops many references to Bruno and Guy being “opposites,” and when they connect they create a toxic, dangerous combination. At the same time, there are instances when Bruno and Guy seem to be halves of the same person, and again the author brings this idea forward in several conversations. As Bruno explains it there are:

“Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.”

As Bruno unleashes the ‘ unseen part’ of Guy, Guy tries to go on living his old life by compartmentalizing one “self:”:

“But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.”

 A few minutes in Bruno’s company reveal his instability, but Guy is a much darker horse. He works, he has relationships, he has a career, but what lurks under the surface? The first clue that there’s something off with Guy comes in his relationship with Miriam. He’s continually manipulated and pressured by a woman who’s pregnant with someone else’s child. Even his attraction to Anne seems motivated to some degree by her firmness, self-confidence and resolve. Guy’s passiveness covers a type of pathology, and indeed Highsmith uses Guy to extrapolate on this issue making a larger statement about the nature of totalitarianism:

“I was broken down. Bruno broke me down with letters and blackmail and sleeplessness. He drove me insane too. And listen, I believe any man can be broke down. I could break you down. Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keep the totalitarian states going?”

This fascinating character study is far darker, far more complex and far more disturbing than the film version, so it’s one of those familiar instances when the book is much better than the film. Highsmith’s exploration of the relationship between Bruno and Guy raises some intriguing questions about passive behaviour and human motivation that lingered after I turned the final page. The book’s cover says it perfectly–two interchangeable suits. Is Guy so different from Bruno? Are they opposites or is Bruno Guy’s Doppelganger?

“He was like Bruno. Hadn’t he sensed it time and time again, and like a coward never admitted it? Hadn’t he known Bruno was like himself? Or why had he liked Bruno? He loved Bruno. Bruno had prepared every inch of the way for him, and everything would go well because everything always went well for Bruno. The world was geared for people like Bruno.” 

The Spoils Of Poynton by Henry James

Henry James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton was first published in 1896.  James’s work is often divided stylistically into the early and late periods–with anything written after 1900 falling into James’s late period. Other critics argue that The Spoils of Poynton is the first novel of the late period. Could we describe it then as late-early period or early-late period? I’m being facetious here. But the fact that The Spoils of Poynton leans towards James’s late period does explain the novel’s sometimes convoluted and murky sentences.

So while you can mark me as a Henry James fan, even I will admit that some novels by James are excellent, and then others are much more difficult to read. And whether or not you make it through one of the latter novels may depend on just how determined you are. And it also explains why I find reading too much James in a row rather exhausting. Author Louis Auchincloss states that “the uninitiated” should approach James “in the right order,” and that it’s a mistake to start off with the later novels. Auchincloss divides James into the “first period,” “the Balzac period,” and his “final style.”

The Spoils of Poynton is a wonderful story, but I can see Auchincloss’s point that it’s a novel that shouldn’t be tackled first. Nonetheless, readers who tend to have a fascination with human nature will find  The Spoils of Poynton a worthy read that plumbs the depths of human behaviour and motivation.

The story begins at  Waterbath, the home of the widowed Mrs. Brigstock and her daughters. The Brigstocks are entertaining house guests–Mrs. Gereth, her son, Owen, and Miss Fleda Vetch. Mrs Gereth suspects that her son, Owen is attracted to the eldest Miss Brigstock, Mona, and she doesn’t really find this too surprising since he has two terrible character flaws: a “monstrous lack of taste” and “exaggerated prudence.” While Mrs Gereth bridles at the idea of accepting Mona as a daughter-in-law, she is drawn to Fleda Vetch, and they find themselves bonded in a mutual dislike of the Brigstock home:

“What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate ugliness of Waterbath, and it was this phenomenon these ladies talked about while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal natures of the Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated instead, with consequences that took the form of universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience, but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving mercy was beyond them; they smothered it with trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with such strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for the maid-servants and nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered them almost tragic”

While I love the idea that it takes a special sort of talent  to create decor of such monstrously bad taste, the author’s innate snobbery seeps through with the unfortunate reference to the tastes of the working class and the blind–after all not everyone can afford expensive objets d’art, and to knock the tastes of the blind…well it’s a low blow. And there again, for some of us, a cup that sports the slogan “a present from Margate” may signify a gift that represents priceless sentimental value. (I should add that Mrs. Gereth’s thoughts peek through in that same paragraph, but the quoted passage seems to be the author’s description–rather than Mrs. Gereth’s opinion). The working classes are not the subject of James’s interest here. No, he’s fixed squarely on the valuables, the antiques, and the exquisite irreplaceable furniture of Poynton, and the war that takes place over possession of The Spoils of Poynton between the well-mannered upper class ladies, Mrs.  Gereth and Mona Brigstock.  For, you see, Mrs. Gereth’s home Poynton is the pride of her existence. She has a “passion for the exquisite” and this passion is manifested through the love of Poynton and her painstaking, lifelong drive to fill her home with beautiful, unique and rare objects.

After sharing opinions of the Brigstocks’ bad taste, Mrs. Gereth invites her new friend to see her house and its treasures. Fleda falls in love with Poynton. She admires Mrs. Gereth’s exquisite taste while recognizing that “Poynton was the record of a life.” Each item has been carefully selected and has its own story and precious memory. At this point, Mrs. Gereth, faced with the news that Mona will be the new mistress of Poynton, and that she will have to move to a small, comparatively drab little house, concocts a plan to throw Fleda into Owen’s path. She reasons that while Mona will ruin Poynton, Fleda will preserve its treasures and carry on tradition. And so a battle rages.

While the battle seems to be over Owen’s affections, the true war is for Poynton and its contents. What Owen wants–or thinks he wants–fades next to the fact that he owns Poynton and controls its destiny, and within a short time Mona and Mrs. Gereth are battling with a no-holds-barred style that promises irrevocable damage to any future relationships. Is it a coincidence that Owen choses Mona for his bride? He’s the son of an incredibly strong-willed woman, and he’s chosen one of the few women who can not only stand up to his mother but may also very possibly win the battle for Poynton? And what of Fleda? She seems mousey and just another tool for Mrs. Gereth’s plan to annihilate Mona while ensuring that Poynton remains untouched by bad taste. Mrs. Gereth and Mona are formidable adversaries, but as the battle rages, Fleda too shows a spine of steel. While her stubborn choices dictate the fate of Poynton, is she doing the right thing to take the moral high ground? Or does her behaviour cover a sexual reticence?

The Spoils of Poynton is a glorious tale. James very cleverly creates scenes that encourage our sympathies to sway back and forth. At one point, there’s a strong sympathy for Mrs. Gereth–a woman who’s spent a lifetime creating a shrine to her life with her husband, and now she must endure the pain of seeing it pass away while she moves into a small house nearby. But is her love for possessions healthy? As the story develops, Mona and Mrs. Gereth show their fangs as they play a dangerous game for Poynton, and what Owen wants simply doesn’t matter. Owen’s weakness in the face of these three strong-willed woman dictates that he will fall to the victor–his mother, his fiancee or Fleda.

This great story was occasionally marred by James’s wordy, self-interruptive style, and there are times when I had to stop and reread sentences several times in order to make sense of them.

“No severity of moral law could have taken a higher tone in this implication of the young lady who had not the only virtue Mrs. Gereth actively esteemed.”

I’m still not sure about that sentence. Or this one:

“This admonition had been for her maid, with whom Fleda conferred as at the door a death-chamber; but the girl, without either fatuity or resentment, judges that, since it could render Mrs. Gereth indifferent even to the ministrations of disinterested attachment, the scene had been tremendous.”

A few years ago, I read David Lodge’s novel Author, Author, a book that explored the life of Henry James. The novel presents a sympathetic portrait of Henry James and also explains why some of Henry James’s novels are so good and some so well…difficult to read. Lodge depicted Henry James’s struggles as a novelist, his obsession with writing plays, his depression, and his inability to judge his own work effectively.

As a reader, my fondness for Henry James far exceeds the difficulties I sometimes have with some of his sentences. He’s worth a struggle. And on a final note, even James recommended taking The Ambassadors  (1903) “very easily and gently: read five pages a day…but don’t break the thread.”

The Masterpiece by Emile Zola

The Masterpiece  (L’Oeuvre) is the fourteenth novel in Zola’s twenty-volume Rougon- Macquart series, and it is the most autobiographical. The Rougon-Macquart series was planned in 1868 and written over the course of the next twenty-five years, the series was intended to be a “natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire” with the family in question being split into two branches–the Rougons (wealthier, upper class and supposedly more respectable) and the lower born Macquarts. The family line is tainted with madness, a relentless quest for wealth, obsession, and drunkenness. While Zola seems to leave the idea of hereditary at the door for The Masterpiece, actually the taint is still to be found in the protagonist’s single-minded drive to self-destruction.

Set in the 1860s and 1870s, The Masterpiece is the story of artist Claude Lantier. To place Claude in the Rougon-Macquart family, he is the brother of Etienne Lantier (Germinal), half brother to Nana and the son of the laundress, Gervaise (L’Assommoir). Claude appears as a small boy in L’Assommoir, and later in that novel, he’s unofficially adopted by an elderly art dealer from Plassans. Claude then makes an appearance as a young artist in The Belly of Paris. Just as Germinal explored the lives of French miners, The Masterpiece explores the lives of a group of French artists. But while Zola went to his grave admired by grateful miners who never forgot that this writer championed their plight, The Masterpiece costs Zola friendships.

Zola grew up with artist Paul Cezanne in the town of Aix-de-Provence and according to the book’s introduction, the character of Claude Lantier is thought to be an “amalgram of Cezanne, Manet…and Monet.”  After the publication of The Masterpiece, Cezanne never spoke to Zola again. But Cezanne wasn’t the only artist upset with Zola. According to the book’s introduction Claude Monet was “troubled and uneasy,” and even organized “a dinner of protest” for like-minded artists to attend and share their collective disgruntlement.

Why were they so upset?

The Masterpiece is the story of the artist Claude Lantier and his circle of friends. Claude, Pierre Sandoz (a thinly-disguised Zola) and Louis Dubuche are known as “the three inseparables” back in Plassans. While Claude dreams of becoming a famous artist, Pierre has literary ambitions, and Louis, the son of a baker, is enrolled in an architecture course at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Claude lives on a meagre inheritance, Pierre earns money from a menial job and Louis does the occasional odd job for architects he meets. Once in Paris, these young men mingle in the bohemian artistic set, and throughout the course of the novel, the plot not only follows the fortunes of these three characters but also various artists in their circle as they seek fame. The possession of true talent is no indicator of future success. Some artists succeed and others trade talent for regular meals.

The story begins with a meeting between Claude and a young girl named Christine during a rain storm. Over time a relationship develops between them, and Christine even agrees to model for Claude. As an artist, Claude is a nonconformist and he much prefers to paint what he terms “Open Air.” Unfortunately the French Art world is controlled by the Academie des Beaux Arts and its annual Salon.  The conservative judges of the Academie des Beaux Arts dictate the artistic taste of the age, so not being accepted for the Salon is a major blow to an artist’s career, and so conversely, being accepted for the annual Salon and having one’s art displayed there is a goal of all artists.

While Claude admires Delacroix and Courbet as innovators who moved the art world forward, he considers most of those ‘accepted’ artists as hacks. He feels that the art world is ready to move on to “something else” and over the course of the novel, just what that “something else” consumes and eventually destroys him.

Some of the very first scenes of Claude at work predict his doom as a painter. He’s working on a painting he calls “Open Air” and the painting which is eventually exhibited at the Salon des Refuses (Exhibition of Rejects) becomes the laughing-stock of the exhibition. After this humiliation, Claude decides to live with Christine and together they move to Bennecourt in the country, far from Claude’s humiliation and the cruel judgment of the public.

Throughout the novel, Claude’s creative genius is torn between painting for himself and his ideals and the goal of being accepted by the Salon. He’s never happy with a painting and constantly tinkers with the canvas and newer versions are not usually an improvement. As the book continues, Claude’s projects become increasingly impractical as he tackles huge scenes and enormous canvases, but his discontent with the finished project usually leads to the painting’s violent destruction.

The novel follows Claude’s pitiful decline and decent into madness. Art is seen as a harsh mistress as other characters in the novel self-destruct or abandon art in favour of more profitable endeavours.  Dubuche, one of the three original “inseparables”  is seen as a complete sellout. At first he imagines that he can create conformist-style buildings and then ‘move on’ to his own projects later. In reality, he marries for money, is harnessed in a loveless marriage and basically becomes the nursemaid for his two invalid children. Sculptor Mahoudeau and dilettante journalist Jory (another Plassans-ite) are caught up in a competitive menage-a-trois, and Jory turns out to be some sort of sex addict who is totally dominated by the rather revolting Mathilde.

As usual with Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola is the master of the vivid, Naturalist scene, and there are several examples in The Masterpiece–the crowd at the Salon des Refuses, the selection committee as they bicker about paintings, and then the scene as Claude searches for his painting on display at the Salon. The latter is an example of Zola at his very best, for in this scene, Zola captures the vulnerability of Claude as an artist. Claude attends the Salon and standing with his back to a wall full of Salon paintings, he experiences, vicariously, what it must be like to exhibit a painting that has the admiration of the crowd. And in this scene Zola simultaneously creates an amazingly alive tableaux, and he describes the crowd through Claude’s eyes almost as though Claude is surveying a painting. This gives us a brief glimpse into the mind of the artist–the artist rejected and the artist’s vision of his subject:

“The thought of all the admiration rising from the sea of rounded shoulders and craning necks so exasperated Claude that he felt he must see what sorts of faces go to make a triumph. So he worked his way round the fringes of the crowd until he was able to stand with his back to the picture. There he had the public in front of him, in the greyish-light that filtered through the sun-blind, leaving the centre of the room dim, while the bright sunlight that escaped round the edges of the blind fell sheer on the pictures on the walls, putting the warmth of sunshine into the gilt of the frames. As soon as he saw the faces, Claude recognized the people who had once laughed his own picture to scorn; at least, if it was not the very same people, it must have been their brothers, now in serious mood, enraptured, graced by their air of respectful attention. The malignant looks, the marks of overstrain and envy, drawn features, and bilious colouring he had noted earlier were all softened and relaxed in the communal enjoyment of a piece of amiable deception. Two very stout ladies he saw simply gaping in beatitude, and several old gentleman narrowing their eyes and trying to look wise. There was a husband quietly explaining the subject to his young wife, who kept tilting her chin with a very graceful movement of the neck. There was admiration on every face, though the expression varied; some looked  blissful, others surprised or thoughtful or gay or even austere; many faces wore an unconscious smile, many heads were plainly swimming in ecstasy. The shiny black toppers were all tipped backwards, and the flowers on the women’s hats all drooped well down towards their shoulders, while all the faces, after a momentary halt, were pushed along and replaced by others in a never-ending stream, and all exactly the same.”

The Masterpiece is Zola’s homage to the Impressionists. The Impressionists may not have appreciated it at the time, but now in the 21st century, and at a safe distance, Zola’s novel is a vital record of their struggles and their sacrifices for the art they wanted to paint. Zola explores the relationship of the artist and his audience through the marvellous Salon scenes that record the great paintings ignored by an unappreciative crowd, the crushing blows of poverty suffered by those who struggle for art, and the parasitic hangers-on who feed from the artists’ failure. The novel is also a powerful testament to the nature of conformity and the seductive power of the Establishment. Zola’s greatest fault (and it’s not a literary fault), it’s a fault of ego,  is his own thinly disguised portrait of himself as Sandoz– the urbane, saintly, humane and totally rational man amongst the frayed minds of many of the artists in the novel. I can see Zola proudly handing out copies of The Masterpiece and feeling flabbergasted when Cezanne, his lifelong friend dropped him. In its exploration of the vast, unfathomable space between the creative idea and its supreme execution, The Masterpiece succeeds, and it succeeds admirably.

My copy is published by Oxford World Classics and is translated by Thomas Walton, then the translation was revised and edited by Roger Pearson.

Dr Haggard’s Disease by Patrick McGrath

John Self over at The Asylum recently urged me to pick up a Patrick McGrath novel, and since I’d already read and enjoyed Spider and The Grotesque, I took Self’s advice and picked up Dr. Haggard’s Disease.

It’s difficult to know just where to start with this book. But I might as well start with the statement that I am still chewing over the story and its possibilities even as I write this post. For, you see, Dr. Haggard’s Disease is told by an unreliable narrator, and so after closing the cover I am left questioning the accuracy of the presentation of events.

The book generated all sorts of lively discussion in this house: Is love a disease? Well it can be. Thwarted love and obsession certainly are unhealthy mutations, and in Dr Haggard’s Disease, love falls squarely into the unhealthy variety, but then again Dr. Haggard’s disease could refer to something else entirely….

The unreliable narrator in this story is Dr. Haggard, and as the novel begins it’s WWII and Dr Haggard is living a reclusive life as a country doctor. Haggard’s constant companion is referred to as ‘Spike.’ There’s a certain amount of mystery about Spike and it may seem possible that Dr Haggard has some loony locked in the basement, but those of us who have Spikes of our own recognise Spike for what he is.

One day, Haggard unexpectedly receives a young visitor, RAF spitfire pilot James Vaughan. James opens the conversation with the statement “I believe you knew my mother.” It’s a harmless enough sentence–6 simple words that open a dark chasm of pain, thwarted love and obsession.

Some years earlier Dr. Haggard worked as a surgical intern at St Basil’s Hospital in London. His bleak shrunken little life is split between grueling, exhausting shifts at the hospital and his meagre, inhospitable little room in a boarding house on Jubilee Road. One day while at a funeral, he spots Fanny Vaughan, the bored, beautiful and dangerously neglected wife of St Basil’s senior pathologist, Ratcliff Vaughan. Then, as fate would have it, Haggard meets Fanny at a dinner party. While Haggard is lonely, socially inhibited and sexually naive, Fanny is confident and bold. And the very first time they meet, Fanny turns the conversation to the subject of passion when Haggard states:

“But tell me an idea that isn’t worn out.”

She looked away, apparently contemplating the question. The frown persisted, a delicate vertical wrinkling of the white skin of her forehead.

“Passion,” she said.

“Passion?” I was something of a stranger to that idea! “I should have thought that passion, at least was about pleasure—?”

“Oh no,” she said quickly, “it’s not about pleasure at all. Passion is very serious. I know you take it lightly, but you’ll learn someday what a responsibility it is. It’s the best we’re capable of, civilized human beings.”

And so begins a brief, passionate affair between Haggard and Fanny, and the affair becomes–for Haggard–an addiction.

The novel goes back and forth in time–from Haggard’s present life in his isolated country home of Elgin to his exquisite and ultimately painful affair with Fanny. As the tale unfolds, Haggard is revealed as an unhealthy man–both physically and mentally. Some of this unhealthiness is a direct result of the affair, but the rest…well that’s up for grabs, and it’s also where the issue of unreliable narrator comes into the scheme of things. Is Haggard (a morphine addict) delusional? Can we trust his version of events?

McGrath’s novel delves into the sheer seductive, obsessive physicality of Haggard’s elicit, stolen moments of passion: the irresistible urge for union, sinking into heady physical sensation of total pleasure , the luxury of running his hand along the cool, alabaster skin of his lover, the hints of perfume that remain long after the encounter and then the long, unendurable wait until the next:

“I was desperate to see her again. I needed to nourish my love upon her being, as though my love were a ravening parasitical creature which if it could not feed upon her would feed instead upon its host, causing agony. Missing her was no state of tranquil melancholy, it was active, it was fiercely energetic.”

Haggard’s description of his addictive obsession for Fanny as a “ravening parasitical creature” that must “feast” upon its object “instead [of] upon its host” is similar to Haggard’s morphine addiction that also demands to be fed: 

“The morphia had silenced Spike, replaced his ache with that pervasive vital warmth that seemed somehow always to compose me.”

So morphine addiction is similar to passion–both need to be fed, both are addictive, and both can be destructive. And this leads back to Fanny, Haggard’s vibrant yet ultimately elusive lover who notes: this is a story about “passion not pleasure.” Two entirely different things.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel  is the book’s presentation of the medical profession. Haggard is at first seen (through his own narration, of course) as a humane, caring alternative to Fanny’s husband the Pathologist and the bombastic, boorish surgeon Vincent Cushing. Both Cushing and Dr Vaughan carve up the dead with ghoulish relish, and Fanny ponders “what is it that makes men spend their lives poking through the diseased bits of dead bodies?” This question echoes throughout the novel and begins to haunt Haggard after Fanny complains that the smell of formaldehyde lingers in her husband’s repulsive touch.

But while Dr. Haggard is different from his London counterparts, he isn’t much better. His ‘humanity’ towards patients translates to shooting them up with morphine and selling them coloured water in medicine bottles. He buys the country practice partly because it’s stuffed full of elderly patients with a “fair bit of cancer,” and just like his predecessor, Peter Martin at Elgin, he has no faith in the power of medicine. He covers his lack of faith in his own profession by telling himself that the quackery he peddles promotes the body’s own healing power. Oddly enough at one point in the novel he notices a woman’s “yellowish-greenish tinge” and silently wonders if she suffered from “jaundice.” When the woman becomes his patient, however, he resorts to his usual quackery and chalks her “neurotic” ailment up to an unhappy marriage.

For me Dr Haggard’s Profession is the best McGrath so far. Although this is a novel that explores the destructive powers of obsession, on another level there’s a subtle layer of menace that permeates the pages. After all it’s rather terrifying to explore the idea that suited ‘professionals‘ who are supposed to oversee and manage our health can be closet loonies eyeing our diseased bodies while contemplating the excitement of an autopsy.

I should add here that I am not a fan of dizzy romances. In fact I’m suspicious of the word ‘romance’. But Dr Haggard’s Disease is no romance, and if you’re already familiar with the psychologically complex novels of Patrick McGrath, you won’t need to be convinced about that. McGrath’s favourite themes are mental illness and adultery, and both are amply represented here. McGrath’s psychiatrist father was a medical superintendent at Broadmoor, so it’s easy to connect the dots concerning early influences on this author’s life.

On one final note, I now continually imagine Jeremy Irons in the film role of Dr Haggard. He does those tortured parts so well….