Book Review: The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Centuries before our story opens, Colonel Pyncheon set his sights on land that was already occupied by another man, Matthew Maule. In order to get rid of his rival, he accused him of witchcraft.  During Maule's execution, Maule is said to have cursed Pyncheon and his line.  Pyncheon builds the house of seven gables on Maule's former property, employing the son of the rival as head carpenter.  As the years pass, the Pyncheon line is struck by many tradegies, until only an old spinster, Hepzibah, and three other relations still live.  A teen girl, Phoebe, is one these relations, and her sunny presence in the old, foreboding house seems to promise that the family curse will finally be lifted...

This is a twisted tale of greed and its consequences. Though the basic plot is engaging enough, Hawthorne is exceedingly loquacious, and even pauses at times to apologize for his tangents.  For example, after a pages long description of the activities of chickens in the seven gables garden, Hawthorne writes: "The author needs great faith in the reader's sympathy, else he must hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden life."  Indeed!

Hawthorne's prose is also very ornate.  I often would read a line or two aloud to Daniel, and then "translate" it into plain English.  Here's a line describing a boy eating a gingerbread whale, after having eaten quite a few other gingerbread animals in the days before: "The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him."

While the journey was often arduous, and the ending wrapped events up rather predictibly (though I am still not 100% sure what happened to cousin Judge Pyncheon), I am glad I read it.  Not only because it is the first completed novel of my Classics Monthly Challenge, but also because my mother tried to get me to read it for years (even to the point that she sent it to me to Ecuador to read). 

A Classic Monthly 2011

Inspired by Amanda at The Zen Leaf who plans to read a classic weekly, I decided to put together a list of classics I want to read next year - one a month - at least.  I have also come up with a list of alternates in case I can't bear to finish one of my choices or I feel like reading even more classics.

January

The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
What it is about: The powerful gothic novel of a house blighted by a terrible curse.
Why I chose it: My mother tried to get me to read this, one of her favorites, for years. She even sent it to me in a package to Ecuador when I was an exchange student. I still have the same copy, so in honor of my mother’s birth month, I am finally going to read it. Then we can discuss it in the afterlife.

February
Utopia by Sir Thomas More
What it is about: Utopias!
Why I chose it: For Dystopian February, I thought it would be fun to read this popular treatise on what makes a Utopia.

March
Les Miserables Victor Hugo
What it is about: The story of a man trying to redeem himself set against the backdrop of the French Revolution.
Why I chose it: I LOVE the musical version of Les Miz and was obsessed with it all through high school. I saw it live for my 18th birthday. I’ve started this before, but never finished. High time!

April
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
What it is about: You mean you don’t know?!
Why I chose it: It’s a bit incomprehensible to me that I’ve never read this one. I loved Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair.

May
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
What it is about: A married couple from New York travels to Algeria.
Why I chose it: I’ve long had an interest in the European/American experience in North Africa, and this one is set in the Algerian desert, which Daniel visited years ago.

June
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
What it is about: Looks at the lives of the poor in Monterey, CA during the Great Depression
Why I chose it: I’ve not read much of Steinbeck – The Pearl, Of Mice and Men and the first few chapters of East of Eden. A friend left this at my apartment years ago, and I’ve been eyeing it ever since.

July
Death in Venice Thomas Mann
What it is about: An older man develops an obsession with a beautiful teen boy.
Why I chose it: Mann is pretty much my literary nemesis. He’s the one author I could never really get into on my high school required reading list. It’s a short novella, and my father-in-law’s favorite book, so I want to give it a chance.

August
We Yevgeny Zamyatin
What it is about: D-503 lives in the One State, an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which allows the secret police/spies to inform on and supervise the public more easily.
Why I chose it: It’s a well-regarded dystopian classic – perfect for Dystopian August!

September
The Judge and His Hangman by Friedrich Duerrenmatt
What it is about: A policeman must solve the murder of his colleague.
Why I chose it: It’s a (Swiss) German classic that Daniel gave me as a gift. I’m going to read it in the original German.

October
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
What it is about: A married couple’s family life is strained with the arrival of their fifth child.
Why I chose it: I’m interested in reading more by Lessing after the superb short story collection To Room Nineteen, and since it’s spooky, it’s perfect for October. Plus it comes highly recommended by a friend.

November
Silas Marner by George Eliot
What it is about: A tale of a reclusive weaver.
Why I chose it: I asked for recommendations on twitter, and I liked this suggestion. Middlemarch was such a great read, I’ve been meaning to try more George Eliot.

December
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
What it is about: The multi-generational story of the Buendía Family in a fictional town in Colombia.
Why I chose it: I have enjoyed many of GGM’s works but have never made it past page 50 in this one. I need to remedy that.


Alternates:
The Ambassadors by Henry James
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

What classics do you think I should add to my alternates list? Which classics would you choose if you were to do the challenge?

50th Anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird - My Thoughts

To Kill A Mockingbird 50th Anniversary

It was August 2003. I had just discovered the tiny library in my Frankfurt, Germany neighborhood had an even tinier section of English books, mostly classics and Oprah Book Club picks. I was hungry for books in English, and buying enough to satisfy me was not an option due to the high price of imports.

The first novel I checked out was Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. I'd heard a ton about it, but I'd never commited to reading it. I vividly remember opening it, and just getting lost in the story. I loved Scout's voice, her innocence. And I loved Atticus Finch - how tender he was with her. I know the characters are very idealized, but that's part of their charm. I remember putting the novel down at the end with a satisfied sigh. And then grabbing my library card and going back to that single bookshelf tucked away in the back and gathering up other gems.

All the rest of that summer and fall I kept going back for more. It was my classics renaissance. I read:

THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath
THE POWER AND THE GLORY by Graham Greene
OF MICE AND MEN by John Steinbeck
DAUGHTER OF TIME by Josephine Tey
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKESS by Ursula LeGuin
ON THE ROAD by Jack Keroac
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD by Thomas Hardy
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
MIDDLEMARCH by George Eliot
THEM by Joyce Carol Oates
THE TIME MACHINE by HG Wells
THE TURN OF THE SCREW by Henry James

with a few of the Oprah approved books mixed in. Then I found the main branch of the library, with its rows and rows of books in English, and started reading more modern literary fiction. But I still remember that reading period fondly. And it all started with TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

Find out more about the 50th Anniversary of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and share your own thoughts about the novel at the official 50th anniversary website.

Book Club Report: Persuasion by Jane Austen

Last Thursday my book club got together and discussed Jane Austen's last novel, written while she was sick and published after she died.

Short summary: 27 year old spinster Anne Elliot regrets ever being persuaded not to marry her first love Frederick Wentworth - especially when he shows up 8 years later.

The group's verdict: We all enjoyed this one, even if it wasn't our favorite Austen (Pride & Prejudice and Emma fill that slot for us). We had a lively discussion. We listed many reasons for hating Anne's sisters and father (all very self-absorbed), and wondered why teenaged Anne would defer her own happiness for the likes of them. We pointed out that Anne's "loss of her bloom of youth" was probably due more to her sorrow over a bad decision than aging (because 27 is so totally NOT old). And we reasoned that if Jane hadn't died after writing her first draft, she probably would've written a much better scene at the end where Anne and Wentworth walk back to her house after he writes her that letter (and oh! that letter!). As it is, it seems like a place holder to be fleshed out during the revision process.

Up next: We're taking a break for July, and then reading Anne Patchett's THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS for August. I actually read this title years ago and didn't much like it...but I do have a lot of friends who loved it. So it should be an interesting one to discuss!

Book Review: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Former student Raskolnikov commits a crime and then goes through a lot of psychological melodrama as punishment.

I’d been meaning to read this one forever. I loved THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND back when I read them a decade ago. I actually thought, for some reason, that this one was much more about someone serving a sentence in Siberia, so I was surprised when the novel just went on and on with Rasky trying not to incriminate himself, his mental breakdowns, and his long (looooong) conversations with various people including his mother, his sister, the nasty man his sister is engaged to, his best friend, a random drunk he meets in a bar, random drunk’s daughter, and a handful of policemen. Not that all that wasn’t interesting… it was. It just wasn’t what I expected.

It’s worth a read just for Dostoevsky’s keen insight into human nature and his masterful use of language that makes you feel like you yourself have entered Rasky’s mind to feel the same nervousness and fear he does. Not for the impatient reader, but for those who long to be intellectually engaged.

Book Essay: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Banned Books Week

FAHRENHEIT 451 is really an ideal book to read during banned books week, since it presents an empty, unfulfilling dystopian world in which censorship has won.

In it, Guy Montag is a fireman who sets fire to books because books are banned by the government. Guy goes about his job without much thought until a chance encounter with an unusual teen girl gets him interested in finding out why books are considered so dangerous.

Guy lives in a purely consumer culture where diversity and individual thought are squashed. As his fire chief explains, firemen were given the job “as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.” If no one is more knowledgeable than anyone else and no one is encouraged to debate, there can be no controversy, and thus everyone is “happy”.

The fire chief fully acknowledges the slippery slope of censorship. Once you start banning content one minority doesn’t like, you set a precedent making it easier to ban content another minority doesn’t like. And so the process continues until you have “a nice blend of vanilla tapioca” and books that are so boring, no one wants to buy or read them anyway.

Of course, since there is some sort of deadly war going on in the background, the reader must assume that not everyone in Guy’s world is a mindless consumer sitting all day in the parlor surrounded by a big screen TV walls shouting nonsense – the big guns must still have access to meaningful, thought provoking books.

And then there are those intellectuals of the older generation that Guy meets on the run outside the city after succumbing to his curiosity and stealing a book to read. They keep literature alive by memorizing it and reciting it often and dream about a day when the human race goes back to being creators instead of mere consumers – giving something back instead of just taking.

In my favorite passage of the novel, one of the intellectuals says, “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched in some way so when you die and people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. [….] Grandfather’s been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, in the convolutions of my brain you’d find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me.”

And may books continue to be allowed to touch us – all of us.

A love letter to some favorite classics

As I like to say, classics are classics for a reason - they are excellent literature. Even when it takes a big dose of will to actually start one, once you do, they invariably draw you in with their masterful plots and characters. Today I want to talk about a few of my favorites.

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene

I still have an old 1966 Compass Books edition (only $1.65) that was my mother's with her notes in the margins. This was one of my mother's favorite books and is in my father's top 10. It's set in Mexico and follows a drunk priest on the run from anti-catholic forces who want to erradicate the church. It is a dark adventure story with a wonderfully complex and flawed main character, and though a bit slow in the beginning, it's a beautiful book that gets even better with subsequent readings.

The Awakening - Kate Chopin

I always say that every woman should read this, because it speaks to the female experience so eloquently. I was disturbed to see several one star reviews of this around the web that say essentially "Spoiled woman gets bored with her life and commits suicide" because that's exactly the sort of superficiality that Edna wanted so badly to escape. She says, "The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth." She tries to be a "bird with strong wings" and her affair with another man gives her an understanding: "She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality." But tragically, she is not as strong as she needs to be in the end.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

I've read this numerous times and I'm always fascinated by the idea that when people live in a "civilized society" and never develop any personal morality beyond external restraints how quickly they succumb to "the horror" of total lawlessness. I have trouble understanding why anyone would think Conrad is racist here - he seems to me to hold the african natives in the Congo in higher regard than the Europeans who try to bring their "light" into the darkness (the narrator mentions an image of a blindfolded woman with a candle to drive this point home). A must read.

Middlemarch - George Eliot

The subtitle to this 19th century novel is "A Study of Provencial Life" and it really does go into the minutiae of ordinary lives which on the outset may sound kind of boring, but somehow Eliot manages to make us care so much about the characters that the narrative becomes excitingly suspenseful and incredibly moving. The main character, Dorothea, also struggles with adapting to the role that society has allotted her and is refreshingly aware of her failures but still tries to make the best of life.

The Stranger - Albert Camus

An ordinary man attends his mother's funeral in Algeria, accidently murders a man, and is sentenced to death - none of which seems to emotionally impact him. The court judges this lack of emotion harshly and the reader sees the whole thing as absurd. This is an experiment in existentialism and is ingenious in its seeming simplicity. Not a comfortable book to be sure, but certainly profound. (And by the way, this is another book that I have in English and in German - read that discussion from Tuesday here).

What are some of your favorite classics?

Book Review: Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

“You’ll soon find that the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client.” A lot has changed about advertising since this book was published in 1933, but considering this quote, obviously a lot has remained the same as well.

I read Murder Must Advertise as the first of my ten books for the 1% challenge – it’s one of the 1001 Books to Read before you Die. I’ll be totally honest though – I didn’t have that much fun reading it.

Plus points: Set in an advertising agency, fun facts about advertising in the 1930s (most ads were in newspapers, smoking was a big ad money maker), main characters were copywriters (or pretending to be copywriters), crime was actually pretty ingenious.

Minus points: Too many characters to keep track of or care about, pacing is very slow and some scenes are too long and drawn out (especially a scene near the end where the agency plays cricket for an entire chapter) and none of it seems terribly urgent.

I’d only really recommend this to patient readers who work in advertising or who just love old school mysteries.

The quote I used to start this review got me thinking about one of my favorite German commercials that could have been:

The TV spot features a father and son on a hike. They see a goat licking some moss covered stones. The boy asks his father why goats do this and his father tells him “It’s to get the minerals he needs to be a healthy goat”. The boy asks the father, “Should I lick stones to get the minerals I need?”

Now, in my ideal world (mind you, I do tend toward the absurd), the spot would have ended with the father telling the boy “Yes”and the boy licking the stones while the father winks and drinks the mineral water being advertised. But alas, the client (this is speculation since I don’t know anything about the making of this campaign) decided to take the conservative route and end the spot with the father saying “no” and them taking big swigs of the mineral water from the bottle.

What a perfect crime!