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1849946949
| 9781849946940
| 1849946949
| 4.09
| 15,111
| 1862
| Nov 11, 2021
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really liked it
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We’ve all heard the tales of the siren’s song leading men to their watery graves in pursuit of the mysterious attractive women, but what strange beast
We’ve all heard the tales of the siren’s song leading men to their watery graves in pursuit of the mysterious attractive women, but what strange beast would lure a woman in such a fashion. For Christina Rossetti it would be *checks notes* little goblins selling fruit. So begins her epic poem, Goblin Market, from 1862 in which Rossetti weaves a tapestry of poetry to dissect the Victorian culture around women as a sort of fairy tale that could enchant both children and adults about two sisters who either answer or avoid the goblins call . The poem hones in on the idea of the “fallen” woman with a metaphorical context of sexual temptation leading to one of the two sisters besieged by death for her transgressions while also subverting the general attitudes of the time with her approach to salvation and sacrifice. A rather bold poem for its time with a unique flair of moralizing, Goblin Market is often considered the most famous of works from poet Christina Rossetti and still stands as a fascinating and poetically pleasing read to this day. But beware if some frumpy little men start to sing… ‘Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: 'Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy’ Having recently read Toward Eternity by Anton Hur in which Rossetti’s work and this poem are integral to the story, I had to finally give it a read. I was pleased to find this rather lovely edition featuring illustrations by Georgie McAusland which really added to the reading like some sort of awesome illuminated manuscript. Check it out: [image] While Rossetti has initial success with her novella, she had difficulty with her works of poetry in larger publications. ‘Poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality,’ she wrote in a letter in 1854, ‘I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that which is true and right.’ Still Goblin Market was initially rejected by critic John Ruskin, being deemed ‘so full of quaintnesses and offenses’ and advised she ‘should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like.’ Needless to say he did not pass it along for publication, though when it came out in 1862 it became an instant success. She considered it a children’s poem, though dark as it is, but also found childhood to be a very intense period of experience and that the poem matched such an era of life. Like fairy tales for children, Goblin Market does have a great deal of moral messaging and shows self-sacrifice as a virtue to highlight the bond between sisters which, for its time, was rather unique to exclude men beyond periphery threats to the well-being of women. ‘For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.’ Rossetti’s defense of the idea of the “fallen woman” as shown in the poem was part of her life outside literature as well. In 1859, Rossetti began volunteering at St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a church penitentiary with the aims of rehabilitation for women that have been sent away for alcoholism, sex work, or for being unhoused. Many of her works from this period focus on the idea of the “fallen woman,” though Goblin Market is the most notable. In this story of sisters Lizzie and Laura, the goblins serve as a symbol of sexual temptation from which Laura suffers for giving in to eating the forbidden fruit despite Lizzie’s warnings. ‘Their offers should not charm us, / Their evil gifts would harm us,’ she tells her, and speaks of a woman in the past who met her end from eating such fruits. Rossetti had strong christian beliefs with religious devotion being central to many of her works, which offers a plausible interpretation of the goblin fruit as a parallel to the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden. Lizzie as the savior through self-sacrifice offers an interpretation as a Christ figure, with a woman as Christ being rather unique for the time. 'Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted For my sake the fruit forbidden? Must your light like mine be hidden, Your young life like mine be wasted, Undone in mine undoing, And ruined in my ruin' It was her depiction of women in society that really made this work stand out for its time, particularly exposing the double standards against men and women and offering salvation for Laura. While the women wither away once they eat the forbidden fruit, it should be noted that the men (the goblins) are not judged nor face any consequences for actions. Lizzie’s act, however, is able to restore Laura, offering a hope that rehabilitation is possible and that the strength of women to uplift each other can overpower the patriarchal oppressions society imposes on them. [image] A long poem, yet still a fairly quick and engaging read, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market remains a classic work. It has been interesting to see it alluded to or thematically relevant in several works I’ve read, most notably Seanan McGuire’s In an Absent Dream—the fourth in her Wayward Children series—in which a goblin market heavily based on Rossetti’s becomes the fantastical setting with extreme consequences from those who falter from their moral codes. I especially loved the illustrations in this edition and have quite enjoyed the experience. 4.5/5 ...more |
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Sep 05, 2024
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Sep 05, 2024
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Sep 05, 2024
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144947960X
| 9781449479602
| 144947960X
| 4.33
| 14,496
| Oct 24, 2017
| Oct 24, 2017
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really liked it
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[image]
Having recently absolutely ADORED L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables I was quite excited to finally check out this graphic novel adapta [image] Having recently absolutely ADORED L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables I was quite excited to finally check out this graphic novel adaptation of the classic work. Adapted by Mariah Marsden with lush and boldly colored illustration by Brenna Thummler, this is an excellent graphic novel that rekindled all my love for the story of Anne and the goings on of Avonlea. For those interested in thoughts on the narrative itself, I’ve written about it extensively here and I’d like to take a moment just to reflect on this adaptation. It does a fantastic job of using bright visuals to convey the story and manages to stay relatively faithful to Montgomery’s vision. All your favorite moments are here and the characters feel just as alive in this illustrated version as they did in the story. Plus there is some gorgeous artwork to look at, particularly the landscapes: [image] Brenna Thummler excels at color selection and texture to the artwork and I really enjoy the style. Save one thing. I’m sorry but WHY DOES ANNE LOOK LIKE A ROBOT WITH GLOWING GREEN EYES!? [image] This story takes one of the most pure and charming and lovable characters in all of literary history and makes her look sort of terrifying and plausibly evil. [image] Why you lumbering like the Iron Giant, Anne? Also why are your eyes always glowing in tiny green robot eye circles? [image] I kept being afraid this was going to turn into a sci fi thriller like so: [image] ANNE! DEACTIVATE! What would Marilla say about that!? Okay but jokes (and those eyes) aside this is really lovely and I do quite like the art. Except for this frame too, which there is nothing wrong with I just read What Moves the Dead and now rabbits staring at you is pretty menacing. [image] Fans of the novel or those who would like to experience the story for the first time are sure to love this graphic novel. It gets the tenderness and warmth that is the heart to the tale across quite effectively and makes for a lovely little read. Just watch out for those eyes…. 4.5/5 [image] ...more |
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not set
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not set
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Jul 12, 2024
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unknown
| 3.70
| 3,707
| 1921
| unknown
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it was amazing
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I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golde
I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golden timepiece that counts the heartbeats of life with impeccable precision to reveal the intricate innards of gears that must be adjusted to nearly impossible standards, the best classic stories make every word count, every word ricochet off each other towards an amalgamated effect of themes and ideas that make the small collections of words resonate far beyond the sum of their parts. And, like a cartoon watch, accurately assess the heartbeats of life. Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party is such a story. Based on her own extravagant childhood home in Wellington, New Zealand, The Garden Party juxtaposes the frivolities and festivities of wealthy society with the harsh realism of death and destitution as symbolized in the poorer families living just outside the Sheridan’s garden gates. With a bold examination of class consciousness and a sharp critique of upper class snobbishness where their extravagant gates secure them from needing to feel empathy as much as securing their property, The Garden Party is an extraordinary piece that brilliantly balances the darkness and light of life into its tiny package of prose. Having recently finished Ali Smith’s Spring in which Katherine Mansfield figures prominently, with Smith having also provided an introduction to her collected stories, I was eager to give Mansfield a read. I’d long been fascinated by her tumultuous friendship and rivalry with Virginia Woolf and while Woolf may have said Mansfield ‘stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking,’ she also admitted ‘I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ As we plunge into the warm, idyllic days of summer, what better story to try than one which begins ‘And after all the weather was ideal.’ This is a powerhouse of a short story that lulls you into its depiction of warm, slow joy amidst the happy anticipation of a garden party before it abruptly bashes you into a wall of death and the cold insensitivity of the wealthy for the lower classes. The story places us alongside Laura as she navigates the day, from her empathy and idolization of the working class aiding in the set-up of the party to her confronting her own family about the crassness of holding a party so near a grieving family and later visiting the house containing the dead man to offer sweets and condolences. The latter section reminded me a bit of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel Little Women with the sisters sharing their Christmas meal with the impoverished family down the road, which is likely an inspiration for Mansfield as the other Sheridan siblings, Jose, Meg and Laurie, share names with Alcott’s characters. ‘If you're going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you'll lead a very strenuous life.’ There is a sharp juxtaposition between classes present here, though Mansfield does well to remind us that distinctions are merely constructs enforced in order to oppress and depress those who do not hold power in order to retain control of it. While the happenings around the party are a celebration of beauty and life, we see how death is always creeping in and the two cannot be truly separated. Mr. Scott dies just outside the gate when thrown from a horse, but even the gate cannot keep the inevitably of death away, such as how, when singing a song to focus on how beautiful her voice is, Jose sings about death with lines like ‘this life is weary, hope comes to die’ which serve almost as foreshadowing. But best is the description of the wealthy cottages with the poorer homes, existing practically right on top of one another yet depicted as such opposites: ‘True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans' chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.’ The descriptions have you looking down your nose at them, so couched in the perspective of the Sheridan’s and their contemporaries. The juxtaposition is in everything, from the lushness and light of the garden party to the poorer homes always described in terms of darkness. While the Sheridan house is a world with trees ‘lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour,’ amidst ideal weather ‘without a cloud,’ the people at the Scott household are ‘a dark knot of people’ curling into a ‘gloomy passage’ or crowding a ‘wretched little low kitchen, lighted by a smoky lamp.’ Laura’s journey from the glow of the garden to the darkness of the Scott household seems like a journey into the underworld to see death firsthand and bestows an epic sense not unlike the Greek myths into the narrative. ‘People like that don't expect sacrifices from us,’ Mrs. Sheridan scoffs at Laura’s insistence their festivities are vulgar in light of Mr. Scott’s death, ‘and it's not very sympathetic to spoil everybody's enjoyment as you're doing now.’ Which is really the crux of this story–the working class must sacrifice everything to uphold the world of the rich but the rich will not lift a finger for them. To them the lives of those outside their circle ‘seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper.’ Worse, they validate their inhospitality and insensitivity by assuming the worst, such as Jose insisting the Scott family are drunks and blaming drinking on the accident despite any evidence. For the Sheridan’s even the rose bushes ‘bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels’ which touches on the idea that wealth was a sign of god’s grace and divinely deserved while the poor suffer out of sin. But this cruelty only pushes Laura towards empathy and embarrassment and her hat, a symbol of frivolity is suddenly garish in the space of death. ‘Forgive my hat’ she says, meaning forgive my family, forgive my class, meaning Laura has had her eyes opened. ‘What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things.’ A quick story, but one full of power and crackling with social critiques and class consciousness. Written in 1922 as Mansfield was slowly succumbing to tuberculosis, The Garden Party continues to impress and is a marvelous little story. 5/5 ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jun 24, 2024
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Jun 24, 2024
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ebook
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0785252991
| 9780785252993
| 0785252991
| 4.31
| 1,011,305
| Jan 01, 1908
| Aug 31, 2021
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it was amazing
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‘Dear old world,’ says Anne Shirley, ‘you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.’ Books like this, the long beloved Anne of Green Gables b
‘Dear old world,’ says Anne Shirley, ‘you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.’ Books like this, the long beloved Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, make me feel this sentiment deep in my bones. Despite it all, how can I not love a world and a humanity that brought this into existence. This book is perfectly splendid and I only wish I had read it as a child. Yet, traveling across Canada recently with this book, I was pleased to discover it could still build a bonfire in my adult heart to warm me with joy, still bring a frequent smile to my face and outbursts of gleeful laughter. ‘Anne with an ‘e’’ is an early ADHD icon who’s poetic ‘thoughts rove all over creation’ whom—as the rest of Avonlea soon discovers—is impossible not to love and I saw so much of my younger self in her. A coming-of-age tale wrapped in a sweet innocence that champions being yourself and embracing mistakes as an opportunity to learn and grow, what really brought this novel to heart for me were the ways in which Anne’s offbeat personality cracks the stale and rigid expectations of a community and allows everyone to grow along with her. Community and shared growth are central to this story and this is as much a story about Avonlea as it is the Anne who makes it her home. Still touching hearts young and old since it was first published in 1908, Anne of Green Gables is an endearing and enduring classic. ‘ I shall give life here my best, and I believe it will give its best to me in return.’ There is a lot to love about Anne of Green Gables, but also a lot of messages to take to heart. An aspect I am particularly fond of in literature aimed at children is how the most successful ones can distill important themes in accessible ways that can enter our hearts to bathe us in pure shining light that always feels so pleasantly positive and empowering. There's multitudes to learn from Anne. For instance: —Always embrace and learn from mistakes: ‘Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing.’ —Find the good and fun in everything: ‘Life is worth living as long as there's a laugh in it.’ —A positive attitude makes a big difference: ‘It’s been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.’ —Pay attention to the small joys and details in life: ‘All things great are wound up with all things little.’ —Give people a chance: ‘Miss Barry was a kindred spirit after all…you wouldn't think so to look at her, but she is.’ —Always prepare for setbacks: ‘There is always another bend in the road.’ —Start over fresh and don’t let setbacks get you down: ‘Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it.’ There are many more, such as the importance of friendship, admitting faults and embracing imagination not just for oneself but to help it flourish in others. Going through these got me thinking how delightfully quotable and altogether memorable this novel is and it is no surprise this novel has continuously been endeared as an enduring classic. Even those who haven’t read the novel are likely familiar with certain scenes or lines, like the often quoted ‘I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,’ which happens to arrive at the start of the same chapter in which the famous scene occurs where Anne accidentally gets Diana drunk on currant wine thinking she is serving raspberry cordial. The novel plays out in rather episodic moments such as this (which lends itself to the many tv series adaptations both animated and live action) with fairly contained action-consequence-resolution formats that build on each other to follow the course of Anne’s childhood into young adulthood. And it is a joy to watch Anne grow up. [image] Diana and Anne drink currant wine in the 2017 Netflix adaptation Anne With an E What makes this book truly great are the characters. Anne, of course, but Marilla and Matthew are just as charming and engaging. I love Marilla who is struggling but earnest about trying to understand Anne and comes to really love her. As Matthew tells her, raising Anne won't be difficult 'if you only get her to love you,' and watching the relationship grow between her and Anne is so heartwarming. While sometimes she just wants Anne to shut up and stop being weird she can't help but privately enjoy how offbeat she is. I suspect this is a novel where those who read it in youth will identify with Anne but those who read it as adults (and especially as parents) will have a real appreciation for Marilla much like how everyone talks about which daughter from Little Women they are until they reread it as an adult and realize how much Marmee speaks to them. That was the case for me at least. But also wow did Anne speak to my heart and remind me of my pre-teen self. 'There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.' The fictional town of Avonlea is nestled upon Prince Edward Island in Canada, which was also the birthplace and childhood home of author Lucy Maud Montgomery. While not an orphan as Anne was, Maud lost her mother at the age of two and when her father remarried she was sent to live with her grandparents. So one can see a twinkle of inspiration for the young Anne who (for those who don’t know the story), due to a misunderstanding, is sent to be adopted by aging siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert. ‘She’s been a blessing to us,’ they learn, ‘and there never was a luckier mistake.’ Maud was fond of reading as a child and, like Anne, loved poetry. ‘Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back,’ Anne states, and in Anne we find quite the poet as well with long rambling chatter that moves ‘from safe concrete to dubious paths of abstraction.’ In an essay Montgomery discusses how novels were banned in her grandparents house but she had access to all the poetry she liked, and in her own writing there is certainly an impressive and delightful sense of the poetic. Montgomery pops off with excellent consonance quite frequently with phrases like ‘the waif of the world,’ but her vibrant imagery is certainly pure poetry. A favorite moment occurs right from the start with the images of Avonlea in bloom with an enraptured Anne finally rendered speechless. It is a critical image because it is in Avonlea that Anne is also able to bloom into the amazing person she becomes. [image] Prince Edward Island ‘What good would she be to us?’ Matthew asks Marilla when she questions keeping Anne, reminding her ‘we might be some good to her.’ This idea permeates the text and we see how community is so important. ‘True friends are always together in spirit,’ Anne teaches us and there are few more lovely friendships in fiction than Anne and her ‘bosom friend’ Diana. To watch Anne grow up is also to watch Diana grow up and to watch them love and support each other (I quite agree with the more recent adaptations, such as the modern-setting graphic novel Anne that portray them as a sapphic romance, besides *nose in air*I don’t think Gilbert is good enough for my Anne). Anne also comes to think of others as ‘kindred spirits’—such as Aunt Josephine who essentially becomes her benefactor after taking a liking to Anne while she apologizes for jumping onto her in bed by accident—and that we can find kindred spirits everywhere if we are willing to get to know people. ‘Evidently she did not like talking about her experiences in a world that had not wanted her.’ Friends are also important to Anne as she never had them before, unless you count Katie Maurice (her reflection) or Violetta (her echo). Her attachment to them is rather telling because not only was it a sign of her strong imagination but also because they were simply an extension of herself–Anne only had herself and coming to Avonlea. But we also see how Anne struggles at concepts like religion, which Marilla realizes is not due to irreverence but rather how can Anne comprehend divine love if she’d never experienced love from another before (though her distaste for God for having given her red hair—a constant struggle that leads to a very humorous scene about dying her hair and also is a point of contention where Gilbert calling her “carrot” cuts far too deep—is quite amusing). Anne had to learn community in general. Over the novel we see she thrives at this due to her imagination, something she says is easy ‘if you’d only cultivate it.’ Anne perfects how to bring out the imagination in others, something that—following in the footsteps of her mentor, Miss Stacy—makes her career as a schoolteacher a perfect fit to utilize such abilities. Sure, sometimes imagination can backfire like when she becomes afraid of the haunted woods, but it is also a path through that fear. ‘Ever since I came to Green Gables I’ve been making mistakes, and each mistake has helped to cure me of some great shortcoming.’ Though one of the greatest lessons in this book, I think, is the rather optimistic approach to embracing mistakes and learning from them. Each moment of growth comes from something initially thought of as an error (getting Diana drunk, almost drowning in the river) and finding it to be a teachable moment for the self. Though this extends beyond Anne too, as some of the friction Anne comes up against in the community becomes an opportunity for growth for them as well, or even with the Cuthberts who quickly learn that adopting a child is more about the child being an asset to the farm but a person to help grow and cultivate love, and be loved in return. ‘We ought always to try to influence others for good.’ This is such a lovely novel, one that encourages imagination, friendship, love, and appreciation of the world around us. For Anne, simply being out in nature and basking in the light of life is enough to ‘feel a prayer’ and in our encounters with Anne we too can feel it within ourselves. Though this is also a story of hard work, finding joy in simply learning and not having to always be the best, and also the importance of persistence. Anne of Green Gables is a marvelous story for readers both young and old, and I greatly enjoyed my time in Avonlea. 5/5 [image] I also really love this edition of the book. ...more |
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May 23, 2024
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May 29, 2024
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May 15, 2024
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1947808966
| 9781947808966
| 1947808966
| 4.16
| 231
| unknown
| Sep 28, 2021
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liked it
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I’ve been having a bit of a Les Mis moment lately, which are some lovely tunes to have stuck in one’s head and a big epic story to really chew on. I s
I’ve been having a bit of a Les Mis moment lately, which are some lovely tunes to have stuck in one’s head and a big epic story to really chew on. I stumbled across this Manga Classics: Les Miserables and it was quite the lovely way to revisit the novel. Decently long enough to do the rather epic tale justice and with some rather eye catching artwork, at the end of the day it’s a worthwhile adaptation. [image] This manga adaptation by Crystal S. Chan and illustrated by SunNeko Lee does well with the narrative and remains rather faithful to Hugo’s novel. At least far more than any of the films and cover many of the smaller details usually left out or condensed in other adaptations. It does focus the story pretty tightly on Marius and Cosette but that’s to be expected I guess. I quite enjoyed reading this and felt it captured the vibes of the original and it’s fine, nothing special and occasionally feels a bit bland but also nothing worth truly criticizing. One would likely be able to discuss the novel with those who had read the full Hugo classic having just read this though, which is pretty cool. And the black and white art is quite nice. [image] I like how it sort of reminds me of Miyazaki films where it’s a pretty recognizable Japanese art style in a European setting. The character design is well done and Enjorlas is as dreamy as he should be before he and his friends all become empty chairs and empty tables, though Javert does sort of look like Vicious from Cowboy Bebop. [image] If you are a fan of the story, this is a nice little read. Nothing special, nothing awful, but a decent adaptation of the story into something you can read in the span of an hour or so with some pleasant visuals. 3.5/5 [image] ...more |
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not set
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not set
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Apr 02, 2024
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Paperback
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0375701877
| 9780375701870
| 0375701877
| 4.04
| 71,431
| May 18, 1953
| Sep 12, 2013
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it was amazing
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‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’ I found myself stranded in Chicago over the weekend due to a blizzard and sub zero tempera ‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’ I found myself stranded in Chicago over the weekend due to a blizzard and sub zero temperatures and kept busy doing what I love best: visiting art museums and bookstores. While browsing the basement of After-Words, I discovered a copy of Baldwin’s first published novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain stickered with Chicago’s One City, One Book initiative and figured no better time than to finally read this beloved classic by an author I’ve recently come to love. It was a perfect choice and companion as I read it traveling over the hills and everywhere for my harrowing journey home on various trains and buses that kept breaking down. To read the works of James Baldwin is to encounter prose that lingers like a prayer on your lips, prose that you’d suspect could be picked up on a seismograph for the way it shakes you deeply within, prose that could feasibly crack open the world. And to read Go Tell It On the Mountain is to bask in the bitter beauty of an undeniable classic of religious trauma, queer desires, and grappling with family legacy. Published in 1953 and introducing the literary world to a writer who would go down in history as an essential author, Go Tell It On the Mountain is a semi-autobiographical work that truly comes out swinging. Baldwin confronts issues of racism, sexuality, sin and the hypocrisy of religion being harnessed to uphold oppressive patriarchy and other abuses while flooding his pages with gorgeous passages on desire and struggles for selfhood. Brilliantly condensing decades of lives struggling to survive society and themselves all within the span of a narrative set over 24 hours, Mountain also condenses a vast American experience into the corridors of Harlem and the blocks around the aptly named Temple of the Fire Baptized. Here we experience 14 year old John’s internal tribulations to either accept the endless struggle up the mountain of holiness—‘ It’s a hard way. It’s uphill all the way’—or a rejection of the church altogether. Yet the scope of the novel rests beyond the boundaries of John and, through flashbacks and visions, the novel becomes one about the legacy of John’s family and the struggles of Black Americans everywhere in the 20th century. ‘There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.’ Taking its title from the popular spiritual tune, Baldwin immerses us in a family and community for whom the church encompasses the whole of their daily existence. In many ways this felt like a good companion read to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in its depiction of an insular community that uses religious devotion and fervor to justify incredible amounts of abuse and castigate not only queer desires but any sexuality outside of marriage. At the heart of the story is John who is expected to walk in the footsteps of his father—or so he thinks Gabriel is his father—and become a preacher. Gabriel is the personification of Christianity in the novel with Baldwin representing his criticisms of the organized religion through his portrayal of Gabriel as hypocritical, misogynistic and abusive. He is also very imaged-based, with his coming to God informed by the opportunities of social positioning as is his first marriage to Deborah—once she is considered the holiest of the community—a calculated move to be seen as holy himself. Baldwin represents religiosity as a false front, one that uses piety to mask abuse. ‘salvation was finished, damnation was real’ Baldwin demonstrates how religion is used for purposes of control within the community, or for Gabriel over his family. The fear of sin is pervasive, such as the novel opening with John feeling he will ‘be bound in hell a thousand years’ for his act of masturbation, and used to control behavior. Especially of women or young people, as we see in the early pages when Elisha and Ellie May are publicly shamed for ‘walking disorderly’ as evidence they ‘were in danger of straying from the truth.’ Gabriel sees it as his duty to uphold moral standings in his congregation, though not in himself, and John worries it may already be too late to be saved so he feels the need for salvation all the more intensely. However, he recognizes Gabriel as a gatekeeper to salvation and that he cannot ‘bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father,’ which is something he feels he cannot do having recognized Gabriel as a cruel abuser who beats his children and “fondles” his own daughter. ‘ The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.’ Baldwin also represents how Christianity upholds patriarchy through the rather misogynistic double standards against women. Sexuality is a taboo and while sex outside marriage is considered unthinkable, Gabriel had a child out of wedlock, Royal, who he discards feeling he is unholy and not worth his life, and thinks of the mother, Esther, as a ‘harlot’ for having accepted sex outside marriage and entered into ‘a forbidden darkness.’ Similarly, Deborah was shamed after having been the victim of sexual assault by a group of men—like the story of Medusa, the victim is the one who bears the punishment—and was only acceptable to society if she devote her entire being to holiness ‘like a terrible example of humility, or like a holy fool.’ She comes to hate all men and sees ‘they live only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs.’ The men hide behind claims of religious superiority, chastizing women for the things they do themselves, and thus religion only becomes another pillar reinforcing patriarchal abuse. For John there is the issue of ‘a sudden yearning tenderness for Elisha... desire, sharp and awful,’ a desire he has been taught is filthy and thus internalizes it to believe himself filthy and unworthy of salvation. ‘Dust was in his nostrils, sharp and terrible, and the feet of saints, shaking the floor beneath him, raised small clouds of dust that filmed his mouth. He heard their cries, so far, so high above him—he could never rise that far. He was like a rock, a dead man's body, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height; something that had no power of itself, any more, to turn.’ Baldwin probes at the long history of homophobia in religious communities, an issue that continues to this day and studies have shown a greater risk for internalized homophobia, rejection from family, mental health risks and suicide for LGBTQ+ youth in religious households. This theme of struggling to accept a gay sexuality as natural was explored in depth in Baldwin’s later novel, Giovanni's Room, where David’s internalized shame leads to self-destructive tendencies and outwards abuse to others. ‘The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.’ Still further we see how religion is used to justify greater atrocities, such as John’s vision of the biblical story of Ham was used to justify slavery. The novel also explores how the legacy of slavery still casts a vile shadow over the country and racism runs rampant. There is the unjust treatment of Richard arrested for theft despite being innocent and simply a Black man at the wrong place and the wrong time (not unlike the Dylan song) which leads to his tragic end. There is even internalized racism, with Deborah seeing Gabriel’s dark skin as a sin which nudges the long, racist legacy of associating Blackness with evil. This is all tied in with Gabriel being born from a former slave, showing how the cruelties and abuses of slavery continue to manifest themselves for generations to come. ‘You in the Word or you ain’t - ain’t no halfway with God.’ These experiences are the ones John considers in opposition to his need for salvation. His rejection of the church becomes, ultimately, a rejection of society at large and all the racism, homophobia, misogyny and abuse. Yet it is hard to imagine beyond the bubble of the church, which thinks of itself as a safe haven from all the sinners and “undesirables” they pass on their way. He feels trapped and helpless, and his frustrations with the futility of cleaning the rug—a never ending task—is symbolic of the path up the “mountain” to holiness. This is also symbolized in his climb to the cliff in Central Park: ‘He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him. But when he reached the summit he paused; he stood on the crest of the hill, hands clasped beneath his chin, looking down. Then he, John, felt like a giant who might crumble this city with his anger.’ He comes to see life as an endless struggle beleaguered by sin, yet runs down the “mountain” anyways. ‘If it’s wrong, I can always climb back up,’ he thinks. Yet still he must go to the threshing-floor to be judged, and hopes he can be found righteous. ‘It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.’ This is a powerful novel, one that devastates in theme, exhausts you in its moral burdens, yet utterly enchants you in pitch perfect prose. Go Tell It On the Mountain is a marvelous microcosm of society at large in the day-long drama of a mass and generational struggles of a family that put Baldwin on the map. He would fulfill this early promise time and time again. Personally I felt rather outside the novel, not having much experience with being immersed in a religious community, but I know many who’s stories of their own upbringing rang in harmony with the book. This is a harrowing tale that takes dead aim at society, hypocrisy and abuse and delivers heavy blows. 4.5/5 ‘Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot. For the world called to the heart, which stammered to reply; life, and love, and revelry, and, most falsely, hope, called the forgetful, the human heart. Only the soul, obsessed with the journey it had made, and had still to make, pursued its mysterious and dreadful end; and carried heavy with weeping and bitterness, the heart along. ...more |
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1
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Jan 16, 2024
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Jan 16, 2024
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Jan 16, 2024
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Paperback
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0358093155
| 9780358093152
| 0358093155
| 4.26
| 6,159
| Sep 28, 2018
| Sep 03, 2019
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really liked it
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Why are all the animals in this image smiling and singing, you ask? [image] Well it’s because they are about to have a… ANIMAL REVOLUTION. [image] Why are all the animals in this image smiling and singing, you ask? [image] Well it’s because they are about to have a… ANIMAL REVOLUTION. [image] The humans have been chased out and the animals are left to form their own perfect government…but there’s a reason for the saying “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and George Orwell’s 1945 classic is a searing look at how great and noble ideas can be hijacked by those hungry for power. Brazilian artist Odyr has adapted Orwell’s Animal Farm into this gorgeous graphic novel that upholds the integrity of the original story while delivering eye-catching visuals. It is a great story (I’ve reviewed it here for those looking for an analysis of Orwell’s work), though many previous adaptations have, not unlike the pigs in this tale, hijacked the message for their own purposes and propaganda. Orwell’s widow was eventually swayed to give film rights after being promised she could meet her favorite movie star, Clark Gable. The project, however, was secretly headed up by the CIA and they altered Orwell’s message to be a sweeping anti-socialist film. Later in 1999, a Hallmark adaptation completely took the teeth out of the story, having the farmer be even outcast from other farmers for being a bad animal owner and ending with a hip new farmer putting everything back to how it was. But here we see Odyr stick closely to the story, moving at a quick and exciting pace that really lets the visual medium shine. [image] I really love the art. The thick brushstrokes and acrylic artwork has a lovely classic vibe to it, but the lettering and the tattoo-style font for the chapter numbers makes it feel modern and edgy. Which enhances the message that this is an old tale that is still pertinent to the modern day, a parable about abuse of power and propaganda that I’m glad to see continues to fascinate minds nearly a century after it was written. [image] I’m always wary of reading adaptations of a book I just completed because the differences stand out in high contrast, but this really upheld the story and was a satisfying read. Some pages are a bit text heavy while other seem a bit too sparse (one of those illustrated full texts like they do with the Percy Jackson or Harry Potter series would be an ideal middle ground) but its just a delightful read that lets you see some of the best moments in the book. [image] Would recommend, and get a load of this asshole [image] ...more |
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not set
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Jan 11, 2024
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Hardcover
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0451531310
| 9780451531315
| 0451531310
| 3.44
| 129,678
| 1911
| Jun 02, 2009
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really liked it
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‘The passion of rebellion had broken out of him again.’ Once the holidays are over and the grey soaks into everything, winter can be a ferocious and ch ‘The passion of rebellion had broken out of him again.’ Once the holidays are over and the grey soaks into everything, winter can be a ferocious and chilly beast. Edith Wharton transforms this bleak atmosphere into her own icy novella, the trepidatious tragedy Ethan Frome, in which we find a man trapped by his own circumstances in a melancholic Massachusetts countryside under ‘pale skies’ from which ‘sheets of snow perpetually renewed.’ It is a tale of morals and duty conflicted by desire. A landscape of loneliness. A story where one is shook by the silence of internal screaming further muffled out by the falling snow. Yet, for all the heavy themes and dread, Wharton’s prose proves rather sprightly and gives the story a welcomed lightness that makes it a quick and engaging read. Sharply addressing the social suffocation from traditional gender roles and the temptations of desire, Ethan Frome is a chilling little book where a man’s dreams to escape his circumstances must run up against the beleaguering external forces of life and duty. It's a disaster we see coming, yet you won't want to look away. ‘He lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access.’ A big thank you to emma and her review for recommending this one to me. Ethan Frome novel serves as a sort of character study of the titular character, Ethan Frome, one that is slowly sussed out by a narrator who has taken an interest in the slow, sullen man. It is an engaging framing that invites a sense of mystery as we wonder how the hard-working Ethan came to be such a ‘ruin of a man.’ They hear whispers and half-stories but ‘I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps,’ and it isn’t until being forced by a snowstorm to spend the night on Ethan’s farm that they learn his history and how falling in love with his ailing wife’s cousin led to tragedy. ‘I began to see what life there—or rather its negation—must have been in Ethan Frome’s young manhood.’ There is a sense of Ethan as the literary “everyman,” being a stand-in for a humanity in his quest to break out of the harsh hand life dealt him, to assert a sense of free will against determinism. Ethan ‘with something bleak and unapproachable in his face’ is practically a mirror of the harsh world he lives in. ‘He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe,’ Wharton writes, ‘with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.’ Ethan’s father died young, his mother grew ill from loneliness and before she died had a young girl (Zeena) serve as her nurse, to whom Ethan would marry out of a sense of duty to keep the farm and family legacy going. But with Zeena—a city girl who resents their farm&now ill, bitter and aloof like his mother, Ethan’s desires turn to 21 year old Mattie, his wife’s cousin brought on as a live-in nurse. In Mattie and her vivaciousness, Ethan sees an escape from the cold farm and cold marriage, but Zeena may have taken notice and drops subtle hints of his burning desires for infidelity. The color red is highly symbolic in the novel. A bright fiery color against a pale, grey landscape to symbolize life and passion. We see it in Mattie’s scarf, which signals to Ethan she is different from the rest, or in her red ribbons, and these flashes of red mark their growing intimacy. Though Zeena’s prized dish is also red, and Mattie’s accidental destruction of it is a nod to her presence shattering the long untouched and faded marriage between Zeena and Ethan. And Ethan’s attempts to glue it together don’t pass Zeena’s inspection, a rather clear metaphor of his attempts at subverting their marriage in secret being less discrete than he thought. ‘They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.’ Wharton explores how Ethan is pulled in two directions, one in his desires for Mattie but also towards his duty to his wife, the farm, and social expectations. Leaving an ill wife is not going to look good, and not just because they are in a religious community but because it's a pretty shit thing to do. Wharton does attempt to soften the reader to this moral conundrum by making Zeena rather harsh, though it should be remembered that mentions like ‘she had taken everything else from him’ is from a narrator, presumably male, that is empathetic to Ethan. And it is fairly ironic that Ethan tells Mattie ‘I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome,’ when this is exactly what he will be denying his wife (though the sense of duty feels less begrudging when given to someone one chooses for themselves instead of by social needs). Still, Zeena serves as a personification of all the external forces that have worked against Ethan his whole life. ‘All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.’ We see a sense of determinism winning out, that ambition leads to folly, that one is confined by their circumstances and all attempts to escape lead to further disaster, though we also can detect a message that this need not be the only way. That society has set us up for this failure and society is itself a creation of ours. This is most prominent in the way we see traditional gender roles as stifling here. Women are set up to fail and have no choice but the drudgery of household chores and servitude to a man. Mattie has no education beyond the ability to be a servant and women at the time were still not encouraged to seek higher education. And so, like her cousin before her, she had to serve a family and hope to be married into a reasonably liveable situation. Women were made to rely on a man, essentially. But also the traditional views of marriage, one made for “smart matchmaking” of being able to keep a farm and have a support instead of for love, also was often a path to resentment and loneliness. And divorce was still a huge social taboo. There is also some slight social class criticism, with Ethan bound to his low-income feeling resentment towards Denis Eady, a rich young man who positively invited a horse-whipping.’ Wharton shows how our lack of access to freedom and free will was largely at the mercy of a society that we can and should criticize to push public opinion towards progress. Ethan Frome is a chilly little novel, but one that captures an incredible sense of icy atmosphere and dread in order to better juxtapose the burning desires of Ethan at the heart of this tale. Much different than Wharton’s usual, more comedic novels, this is still a sharp story gorgeously written that delivers quite the punch. A great little winter read. 3.5/5 ‘They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.’ ...more |
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Jan 11, 2024
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Jan 11, 2024
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Mass Market Paperback
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0147514010
| 9780147514011
| 0147514010
| 4.16
| 2,283,458
| Sep 30, 1868
| Nov 17, 2023
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it was amazing
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Some books read like a lifelong friendship, each page a warm or comforting embrace as you laugh and weep along with the characters. Little Women by L.
Some books read like a lifelong friendship, each page a warm or comforting embrace as you laugh and weep along with the characters. Little Women by L.M. Alcott is an enduring and endearing classic that will nestle its way so deep into your heart that you’ll wonder if the sound of turning pages has become your new heartbeat in your chest. To read the novel is a magical experience, and we are all like Laurie peering in through the March’s window and relishing in the warmth within. I have long loved the film adaptations and make it a holiday tradition to ensure I at least watch it every December (it has Christmas in it, it counts), so it was fascinating to finally read the actual novel and return to character I feel I’ve always known yet still find it fresh and even more lovely than ever before. Semi-autobiographical, Alcott traces the lives of the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, and their struggles to make their own way in a society that offers little use for women beyond the household. An emotional epic and moving family saga full of strong characters, sharp criticisms on society and gender roles, and a beautiful plea to dispense with the worship of wealth and find true purpose and value in simplicity, nature and generosity. ‘I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.’ Little Women will leave your heart full and your pen dry from underlining the seemingly endless lovely passages. I’d like to thank Adira and her wonderful review for convincing me to finally actually read this and not just watch the movie again (I did last night though, because who doesn’t want to relive the joy of yelling “Bob Odenkirk?!” in a theater and later sobbing) because, just when I thought I couldn’t love this story more, now I’m fully engulfed by it. Surely enough has been written about this book already, but i like to ramble about things I love so here’s a more I guess (I’ll try to keep it shorter than usual [having finished writing it now, I failed]). But how can you not be with such incredible characters? Jo is of course the favorite, but I think part of loving this book is wanting to be Jo and realizing you are Amy, but each character touches your heart in their own way. Mr. Laurence and Beth’s connection with the piano and lost daughters makes me teary just writing this. Alcott based the story on her real family and one can read a genuine love for the characters pouring from every page. ‘Wealth is certainly a most desirable thing, but poverty has its sunny side, and one of the sweet uses of adversity is the genuine satisfaction which comes from hearty work of head or hand, and to the inspiration of necessity, we owe half the wise, beautiful, and useful blessings of the world.’ Alcott was a transcendentalist and many of her beliefs shine through in the novel. Much of this came from her father and one will be pleased to learn that the real Mr. March—Amos Bronson Alcott—was as radical in his time as his fictional counterpart. An abolitionist who also advocated for women’s rights, Amos became a major transcendentalist figure along with his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alcott’s mother was equally radical for her time too, and many of their teachings arrive here through Mrs. March to her children. There is, of course, the belief in nature as the ideal, such as when the March girls, having little jewelry, adorn themselves in flowers instead. Even Laurie states ‘I don’t like fuss and feathers,’ another instance of a return to simplicity over flashy status symbols. There is also the belief in generosity, which is seen throughout with the March family always involved in helping others, and the belief that hard work is important, but not for profit reasons but because it leads to spiritual and emotional happiness and freedom. ‘Then let me advise you to take up your little burdens again; for though they seem heavy sometimes, they are good for us, and lighten as we learn to carry them. Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for every one; it keeps us from ennui and mischief; is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence better than money or fashion.’ Towards the start of the novel, the mother advises the children to be like Christian from John Bunyan’s allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Progress and we can see how Little Women follows a similar fashion of Pilgrim’s being knowledge gained through the travel of a life lived, and each daughter is shown to face certain trials and must learn to bear their burdens, like Jo’s anger, Amy’s desire to be liked, Meg’s desire for vanity, Beth’s passivity. But the largest burdens here are those of love and labor. ‘Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.’ The relationship to work is threaded through the entire novel. We have Jo and Amy who wish to be great and break from the traditional mold for women in society. Jo wants to be a writer, though she only publishes scandalous stories under a false name, and Amy desires to be a painter. And neither will settle for anything less than greatness ‘because talent isn't genius, Amy states, ‘and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.’ Meg and Beth, on the other hand, show different routes a woman can take. The novel questions if women can find happiness outside marriage and caring for a household, and these struggles bash against social expectations along the way. ‘ I'll try and be what he loves to call me, 'a little woman,' and not be rough and wild; but do my duty here instead of wanting to be somewhere else.’ ‘ I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy,’ Jo quips, and a major part of Little Women is a critique of gender roles and how they stifle people in society. Laurie is an excellent foil to Jo, in many ways, but is also a way that Alcott addresses and subverts gender expectations. Jo and Laurie both use shortened versions of their name that seem to cross gender expectations (even though Laurie didn’t like being called Dora) and in many ways Jo tends to represent more masculine behavior while Laurie often a more feminine role. While Meg dresses in finery and tries to fill the traditional role of a woman, Jo prefers to romp in nature in simple or dirty garments and behave, by her own admission, like a boy. Recently there has been a lot of discussion on the author’s gender and sexuality, with even the New York Times writing an opinion piece wondering if Alcott or Jo was a trans man. I know that frustrates some people but personally I find it interesting to think about, even if a bit anachronistic, but it seems to be a genuine question people investigate about authors who subvert gender expectations (think how often it was avoided to discuss Virginia Woolf’s sexuality in the past and now we have letters and look at scenes in Mrs Dalloway and think “oh yea, that makes total sense”). Honestly, I say Jo is whatever you want Jo to be. Trans, lesbian, ace, or just a girl pushing back on gender norms. I think the key detail is that Jo was breaking out of the mold, so let that empower you as you best see fit. Personally I thought the marriage to Friedrich felt tacked on anyways (I enjoy the way the Gerwig adaptation addresses this) but, side note, I do see how Alcott weaves in the transcendentalist notion of the “universal family” and belief in learning about and supporting other cultures here. Friedrich is German, Meg marries the English John, and Laurie is said to be half-Italian, which all comes as a rebuttal to the anti-immigration sentiments of the times. ‘I like good strong words that mean something,’ Jo says and that appeals to my love of language as well. This book deals with love in many ways, but feels like a romance between book and reader as you enjoy every page. Little Women was ahead of its time and still stands proudly today as an endearing work that dares challenge social convention. But most importantly, it feels like a friend. Finishing is hard as now I’ll miss the days with the March sisters, and I find books that take you from childhood to adulthood often hit the hardest because you feel as if you’ve grown up together. An emotional read, also a genius one, Little Women is a favorite now forever. 5/5 ‘ Watch and pray, dear, never get tired of trying, and never think it is impossible to conquer your fault.’ ...more |
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Dec 04, 2023
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Hardcover
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0345806565
| 9780345806567
| 0345806565
| 4.33
| 177,077
| Jan 01, 1956
| Jan 01, 2013
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it was amazing
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‘[N]ot many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it
‘[N]ot many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.’ Sometimes a novel comes along that completely overpowers you. It sends your heart soaring to great heights on wings of perfect prose and then plummeting towards destruction on the rocks below. It crushes you and then rebuilds you from the wreckage then sends you out into the world, electrified by the experience, to contemplate the themes that are now humming through your entire body and mind. Giovanni’s Room is such a book. It’s perhaps too good. My emotions are just bleeding in a corner wanting to ask Baldwin “what the fuck is wrong with you, this was amazing.” For really thought, this second novel by James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room adroitly addresses love, guilt, and our inner battles with ourselves over the two through a story and impeccable writing style that will have the reader exhausted from feeling all the feelings and thankful for it. It comes alive in the streets and bars of Paris as David, an American expatriate living in Paris (not unlike Baldwin himself at the time), struggles to accept himself and his feelings for Giovanni, nestling us into the titular room where they hide away from the world much like David is trying to hide his sexual identity. We experience how people who feel cornered often react in destructive ways. A powerhouse of a short novel that takes a sharp aim at the constricting social expectations of gender and sexuality while also exploring shame, expatriatism and the elusiveness of freedom, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room feels perfect in all its design and execution. ‘He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.’ Feeling distraught by the US and its prevalent racism, James Baldwin left for Paris in 1948 where he hoped to be able to see himself outside of the context of American prejudice. ‘Paris is, according to its legend,’ Baldwin wrote in his 1954 essay A Question of Identity , ‘the city where everyone loses his head, and his morals, lives through at least one histoire d’amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Puritans—the city, in brief, where all become drunken on the fine old air of freedom.’ It was in Paris he wrote his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953 and then, later, Giovanni’s Room in 1956, the latter featuring an American expatriate in Paris that allowed him to discuss many of his thoughts about the two countries juxtaposed by travel. While Baldwin would argue it was far from autobiographical, Room was in part inspired by a real man Baldwin had met which he discusses in a 1980 interview: ‘We all met in a bar, there was a blond French guy sitting at a table, he bought us drinks. And, two or three days later, I saw his face in the headlines of a Paris paper. He had been arrested and was later guillotined . . . I saw him in the headlines, which reminded me that I was already working on him without knowing it.’ What he would work on became a perfect little novel, though his US publisher, Knopf, was not interested in it because they wanted him to write of the Black experience. Baldwin had done so quite successfully in his previous book but with Room felt he could not address this as well as themes on homosexuality together. ‘The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book,’ he admitted, ‘there was no room for it.’ In another interview, Baldwin says Knopf told him publishing a queer novel would alienate his audience and ‘will ruin your career,’ stating they would not even publish it ‘as a favour to you.’ So ‘I told them, ‘Fuck you’,’ he says, and Giovanni’s Room was instead published under Dial Press. We are all lucky for it, as this is a gorgeous book and it is a shame to think it almost never happened. Especially with how strikingly gorgeous the writing is, navigating the emotional currents with such poetic finesse that we, the reader, find ourselves totally at it’s mercy, gleeful and grateful to be caught in the tumultuous undertow as Baldwin sweeps us out to the sea of destruction with these characters. His dialog is pitch perfect and his atmosphere is so encompassing and vibrant we are there with David shivering in shame through the streets or awash in boozy, conflicted confidence in the bars. Baldwin handles words with the best of them. ‘I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.’ The novel almost feels like something from Ernest Hemingway at the outset, and perhaps this is what makes the subversion of the traditional concepts of masculinity play out even more effectively. David is living in Paris spending time with Hella, a girl he ‘thought she would be fun to have fun with,’ and drinks his time away with friends while she is gone to Spain to consider his marriage proposal—something that seems more going through the motions of expectations than a heartfelt desire for marriage. The idea of an expatriate in Paris has been a frequently romanticized theme in US literature, and through the characters we get a taste of the idea ‘you don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.’ This is true of Giovanni as well, who has left Italy after a personal tragedy and also uses travel as a means of escaping who one was to discover who they will become under a new geographical context. However, we see how ‘nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,’ and the characters find themselves feeling dislocated and unmoored more than anything, perhaps running to their own destruction in search of having anything to grasp. ‘ Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.’ ‘The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever,’ Baldwin reflects. ‘They do not recognize doom when they see it,’ and right from the start we are keenly aware everything is careening towards imminent doom . The story is framed on the final day of Giovanni’s life before he faces the guillotine (the guillotine was last used in 1977 and then France outlawed capital punishment in 1981) and mostly told reflecting on the story of the time David and Giovanni spent together until Hella returns and everyone must face-up for their actions. There is a tone of dread permeating every facet of the novel, even worming its way into the nooks and crannies of desire so that we feel nearly suffocated by its imminence. ‘The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places? With this fearful intimation there opened in me hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.’ This suffocation seems to impart the social forces that impose the shame and dread, largely because David struggles with a sense of identity that is outside the socially enforced expectations of gender and sexuality. In his childhood he hears arguments between between his widower father and Aunt Ellen, with his Aunt chastizing his drunkenness and womanizing as setting a bad example while his father expresses his desires for David to be a ‘true man’ and ‘when I say a man, Ellen, I don’t mean a Sunday school teacher.’ The expectations of what is masculinity haunt him, causing his early gay experiences to be a mark of shame and self-hatred in him. ‘I couldn't be free until I was attached—no, committed—to someone.’ There are some very misogynistic moments in the novel—be advised—though Baldwin seems fairly aware of them as such and the comments by both David and Giovanni seems a reflection of the social conditioning they are struggling within. Not that this excuses their comments or behaviors. Though we also see how the gender expectations are even more oppressive for women, such as Hella’s discussion on how it is a ‘humiliating necessity’ that women are disregarded unless she is attached to a man, ‘to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven strange before you can begin to be yourself.’ This doubles into the theme on how when chasing a sense of freedom, you often find yourself more constrained or oppressed. ‘I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms’ The expectations of heteronormativity cause David great internal suffering and he can never fully give himself to Giovanni. We see this play out in David’s symbolic impressions of Giovanni’s room, seeing it as both a haven for love but, due to his shame and disgust with himself, begins to despise the room. His desires come chased with loathing and diffidence which is a destructive force that wounds not only the one who swallows it down but all those around them as well. As if they are bystanders to the blast. It becomes a betrayal, not only to the self, but to love in general. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying moralities. And you--you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?’ If one is caught up trying to play the role of who society thinks they should be, they can never be who they truly are and the dissonance between the hidden self and the public self brings only trauma. This becomes more intensely felt as one slips away from youth where playacting is more easily digestible. ‘Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore,’ David is warned. Warnings from older men appear all throughout the novel, with a particularly chilling moment in the bar when a man appears like a haggard and horrid seer from myths to broadcast David’s doom. Self-deception becomes a major theme of the novel in this way. ‘People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception,’ Baldwin writes and we witness how David’s acknowledgement of his own self-deception but unwillingness to fully depart from it becomes his own undoing. Similarly, the frustrations of others that become seemingly hopeless and unbearable destroys them in turn. ‘People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.’ But it is also why we all must fight for a more welcoming and empathetic society that allows space for such things. The thing about social expectations is we are all complicit in them by perpetuating them instead of dismantling them and Giovanni’s Room is a call to confront this in life. We’ve come a long way, but there is still a lot to be done. ‘If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.’ I could rant forever about the power and beauty of Giovanni’s Room and Baldwin as an author in general. This is an emotional ride that will shake you to the core while dazzling you with pure poetic intensity. This is a novel full of incredible social and interpersonal criticisms that bruise you but make you better for it and I cannot wait to read literally everything Baldwin wrote. Giovanni’s Room is not only a queer masterpiece but an all around amazing and essential novel. 5/5 ‘No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.’ ...more |
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Aug 31, 2023
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Aug 31, 2023
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Aug 31, 2023
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1645178226
| 9781645178224
| 1645178226
| 3.70
| 56
| unknown
| Jul 18, 2023
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it was amazing
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So this absolutely slaps. I mean, how could Frankenstein in a faithful graphic novel adaptation not, especially when its a pop-up book? Check this out
So this absolutely slaps. I mean, how could Frankenstein in a faithful graphic novel adaptation not, especially when its a pop-up book? Check this out: [image] Mary Shelley’s classic comes to life in this lovely book. I really enjoy Anthony William’s artwork here, which has sort of a throwback comic approach that really works for this tale. It’s almost a bit flat but in a way that brings out the old timey gothic vibe and I enjoyed it. But lets be honest, we are here for the pop-up features and they are so cool. Like I said, check this out: [image] I like that each page also has a flap that folds open to sometimes contain multiple pages underneath and the whole book is full of additional little pop-up features or sliding panels or other flaps to open up. It’s just really fun and makes a fantastic conversation piece. But ALSO the story is done quite well. Probably not as in-depth as it would have been had this been a traditional graphic novel with much more space but for what it is it is quite well done. This makes a great gift for younger readers who want to check out Frankenstein for the first time but might not make it through the full book (Frankenstein seems to have had a revival lately?) or a great collectors piece for fans of Mary Shelley or just pop-up books in general. [image] ...more |
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Aug 03, 2023
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0358359929
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| 0358359929
| 4.23
| 5,613
| Sep 14, 2021
| Sep 14, 2021
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really liked it
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I often think that art is the closest thing we have to magic. Just words or images on a page can transport us to imaginative worlds, instill strong em
I often think that art is the closest thing we have to magic. Just words or images on a page can transport us to imaginative worlds, instill strong emotions that overcome us and make us laugh, cry, love and dream. While I tend to find graphic adaptations of “classic” novels to be rather hit or miss, Fido Nesti’s 1984 is a real success that brings Orwell’s beloved and eerie novel to life and truly immerses us in the frightening dystopia. This is an artistic journey that stays faithful to the story and delivers uneasy imagery that adds to the story instead of seems just an excuse to have a graphic novel as I sometimes feel these adaptations tend to go. This would be great for hesitant readers who still want to experience Orwell’s work but fans of the original novel (I won’t get into the plot much but I have reviewed it at length here) will find this a rewarding visual plunge into the darkness of the tale. [image] Fido Nesti has a really engaging style that is rather cartoonish in a way that doesn’t soften the blow but rather makes it almost more distressing through the grotesque caricatures. Much of the story is done in grey-scale that captures the grimness of the society with light uses of reds and yellows. It gives a very “cold war” vibe while also feeling futuristic and very very dystopian. I particularly liked the use of frames, having many small frames with tight angles on Winston to help express the small, fleeting and dangerous spaces the idea of individuality can occupy. Juxtapose this with the large panels of crowds, particularly the Two Minute Hate or other moments that show the masses as threatening. [image] This is a very eerie and unsettling rendition and for that I quite enjoyed it. There are long passages from the novel threated through the book, which was a bit jarring but does show much visual and visceral the actual text is without the need of images (though, then it almost seems to ask what is the point of a visual adaptation?) which is cool I guess. Though I had just read the book so it felt unnecessary to me. Still, Nesti manages to dazzle and really bring this story to life in a lovely hardbound edition that is quite large and lovely to hold. Worth the trip, but be careful because Big Brother is watching… [image] ...more |
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Jul 19, 2023
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0141036141
| 9780141036144
| B006QNC5VC
| 4.19
| 4,784,474
| Jun 08, 1949
| Jul 03, 2008
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really liked it
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‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’ ‘History stopped in 1936,’ George Orwell once said to fellow a ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’ ‘History stopped in 1936,’ George Orwell once said to fellow author Arthur Koestler. During his time in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell observed the pervasiveness of propaganda as a pillar upholding authoritarianism, from censored newspapers to lies perpetuated for political convenience and began to fear that ‘the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.’ This fear presented itself across the whole of his works during his short life, culminating in his famous 1984 where he warns ‘who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ Published in 1949 and written as Orwell was dying from tuberculosis, he didn’t live long to see how 1984 and his dire warnings against authoritarianism would have a lasting effect even to this day, often being used by all sides of the political spectrum as a cultural touchstone. And while this is mostly owing to the broad criticisms showing how any ideology can become oppressive when hungry for power, it also exemplifies his own dread that words will be twisted and quoted as cudgels to fit a desired purpose as truth is washed away. A harrowing story of dystopia, surveillance, manipulation and resistance being crushed underfoot, 1984 still chills today with its themes on collective vs individual identity under totalitarianism and controlling all aspects of reality to eliminate all those who step outside the boundaries of orthodoxy. ‘We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.’ When we read sci-fi, words like “prophetic” and “warning” often get applied. 1984 continues to remain relevant due to its warnings against irresponsible use of rhetoric, which almost makes the references to it amusing or ironic. Such as the Apple computer commercial in 1984 that uses the novel for the sake of marketing (and what is “marketing” but a euphemism for propaganda) a product that would lead to all sorts of concerns over government surveillance for which people would quote 1984 in addressing them. I think the term prophetic often frames a book in a way that causes us to consider how close it came true, which seems beside the point because when we look at the ways it didn’t, that often becomes an excuse for delegitimization or ignoring the warning. Born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal in 1903 and passing in 1950, Orwell’s short life left a lasting legacy from his works like Animal Farm being classroom staples in the US and terms like “Orwellian” being blithely applied to anything that brushes against government use of technology and surveillance. Hardly a political cycle goes by in the US without 1984 coming up. In the US alone in the past decade we saw it returning to the paperback bestseller list under the Trump administration when the term “alternative facts” was being tossed around, and a few years later it was being referenced by the GOP to claim the government was denying an election victory and inventing the January 6th terrorist attack to arrest people. Though with a president making statements like “What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening,” naturally one is reminded of Orwell writing ‘the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,’ and we are reminded of the power of literature and how we often turn to great works for guidance during uncertain times, though often, as Orwell warned, using it as propaganda shorn of context. Orwell did live long enough to see the novel used improperly, having to put out a statement almost immediately for those who wished to use the novel as an example against the British Labor Party. ‘My recent novel is NOT an on Socialism or on the British Labor Party (of which I am a supporter),’ he wrote, and an introduction to the book states: ‘every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.’ Which becomes a pretty important distinction, as Orwell believed in better form of governing yet also was suspicious of anyone who would seek out power in order to change it as he writes in the novel ‘we know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.’ I feel 1984 is best read with an openness to nuance and in good faith, which is often glossed over for the sake of political identifying which is, ironically or not, the exact thing he was warning against. Which is to say, call out problems even if it’s your own “side” and don’t create further divide by abusing rhetoric for the sake of scoring quick political points. I think there is a tendency when trying to score quick political points that things need to have some sort of unassailable pure aim to them. 1984 is critical of any regime that seeks to keep power, but narrowing it to a pointed attack against an opponent without seeing how it might apply to your own political "team" (US politics is so much cheering for your "home team" than actually hashing out politics, especially lately, though I also find the whole "both sides" angle to often be used less for establishing nuance than trying to delegitamize any efforts for progress too, but hell who am I to say I'm just as bad as anyone) is more convenient. But even Orwell himself isn’t a “pure” figure, having been an informant for the British government delivering a list of names of people suspected of communism (the list includes John Steinbeck and many have observed that there is a strong presence of gay people on the list which makes many of Orwell’s rather homophobic comments seem all the more menacing). He also, as A. E. Dyson observed in his book on Orwell, that he ‘had a very English dislike of intellectuals, supposing that anyone willing to wear such a label would be diminished or depraved.’ Which is all neither here nor there, but goes to show how one can create a narrative out of anything, and that is what 1984 taps into. So let’s move on to the novel and head on down to Room 101. As I said earlier, 1984 can be read as a culmination of a lot of his themes and ideas across his short career. Warning of totalitarianism arrives everywhere with Orwell, such as Burmese Days when he describes the town as ‘a stifling, stultifying world…which every word and every thought is censored,’ not unlike 1984 because ‘free speech is unthinkable.’ And one can read in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, with Comstock (a name derived from Common and Stock similarly to how the terms in 1984 are often truncated phrases) bemoaning ‘I’m dead, You’re dead. We’re all dead people in a dead world,’ as a precursor to the pivotal moment when Winston and Jane declare ‘we’re dead’ right before being exposed as having been set up. For Orwell, speech and language is very key. Language itself is fallible and can be morphed to meet many purposes—it’s the medium of poets for a reason—and in 1984 Orwell examines how this can be used to negate truth and establish entirely fictional histories that become generally accepted as a means to upholding power. ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’ Winston’s job is to rewrite history to fit the purpose of the party. Within his department we find all sorts of nefarious linguistic play designed to control the masses because it is thought that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ We can argue that we see this notion reflected in our modern day, where books exposing history that can be seen as a blemish on the US are banned or dismissed as unpatriotic or trying to rewrite history (the irony in the latter is thick) and many have spoken on the suppression of queer books as an effort to erase the language people need to assess their own identities. What Orwell is looking at is the way language and propaganda is used to control. I enjoy the way he makes creative use of language to compile entire terminologies used by Ingsoc (the party in control that is pretty blatantly a nod to Soviet Russia) to create a propagated history that fits whatever they need, even erasing the history of entire wars to portray other countries as allies and erase the recent memory of them as enemies. ‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’ To step outside the orthodoxy of the Party’s version of history is to become an enemy of the Party and society and find yourself “vaporized” and erased from history. ‘Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think,’ Orwell writes, ‘Orthodoxy is unconsciousness,’ and when the truth we know conflicts with the truth of the Party, it must be edited. ‘Lies,’ writes Rebecca Solnit in her book Orwell's Roses, ‘the assault on language -- were the necessary foundation for all the other assaults.’ Afterall, ‘the first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianisms.’ “Doublespeak” comes into play here, where one can hold conflicting opinions in their mind and just accept them, and the Party finds that fear is a great tool for ensuring willing erasure of truth. ‘Truth is not a statistic,’ Winston argues, claiming that just because the masses agree doesn’t make it true, though over the novel we see how the power to rewrite “truth” can potentially eviscerate anyone who says otherwise until it becomes the only known “truth.” Returning to Rebecca Solnit, she observes: ‘To be forced to live with the lies of the powerful is to be forced to live with your own lack of power over the narrative, which in the end can mean lack of power over anything at all. Authoritarians see truth and fact and history as a rival system they must defeat.’ It is in this way the Party keeps people subservient. ‘A hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance,’ and Winston, upon reading Goldstein’s book (the book serves as an insert into the narrative that provides a LOT of exposition about the world and its structures as well as being a sort of Marxist-esque handbook, though it only offers the how things came to be and never the why, much to Winston’s interest), Winston realizes that the proles (the working class) are the possible solution. However he realized the proles can only revolt if they become conscious of their conditions and only can become conscious of their conditions if they revolt (not a far cry from Orwell’s own statement ‘we cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war.’), and worries this may never happen. There is also the issue that a revolution will only put a new Party in power that will inevitably oppress again, just in different ways. ‘The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.’ So without giving anything away because this book is full of surprises (though one may guess if they have read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which Orwell “borrows” heavily from—as does Huxley’s Brave New World—and still remains my favorite of the three), across this novel we see a spirit of resistance rise and the forces of power come to meet it with a heavy boot and the power of erasure. While much of the novel focuses on the individual versus the collective, the biggest act of betrayal comes at the end in choosing to protect oneself, the individual, and asking for the harm of others in order to enter the “protection” of the collective Party by erasing any part of oneself outside their orthodoxy. Where once was the belief ‘to die hating them, that was freedom,’ we see ‘in the face of pain there are no heroes’ and fear keeps people in line. Reminding the people of the frailty of being an individual drives them towards compliance. Yet, in another way, we see the collective existing because of the desire of individuals to protect themselves at the expense of everyone else: nobody will revolt out of fear for themselves and in doing so allows the oppression of all to continue. I think this is what Ursula K. Le Guin is getting at when her books look at the need to integrate both the individual and collective by refusing easy binaries and hierarchies. She also, especially in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia argues that history can never become stagnant and that, like Orwell argues, an revolution will try to uphold power and oppress leading to the necessity of another revolution. While Le Guin sees this as the natural course of history (the double meaning of revolution as a revolt and a constant turning cycling through) Orwell sees this as a constant erosion of truth due to the weaponization of language as propaganda that will inevitably erase reality in place of a false, collective reality where truth is sent to the grave. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’ One might find 1984 to be a rather bleak book, but it is also intended as a warning. There are many minor warnings building up to the larger, main point—such as the paperweight symbolizing a past now inaccessible where art could be beautiful for the sake of beauty, as well as symbolizing the frailty of the individual—and that we must take care to use language responsibly lest we hold the door for open propaganda. We can even do this on an individual level, such as not perpetuating misinformation (funny political memes are easy to share but dilute the severity of problems when we poke fun at, say, the looks or mannerisms of a politician instead of focusing on their policies) and not giving in to easy attacks instead of respecting the nuances. And so that's my rough rant on 1984, a book that lives on for both its relevance and its political convenience and maybe we should all remember that truth is more important than winning an argument or scoring political edgy points. I fail at it too, we all do, but Orwell reminds us to do better. ⅘ 'A nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face.' ...more |
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0007173040
| 9780007173044
| 0007173040
| 4.38
| 421,331
| Oct 12, 1957
| Oct 04, 2004
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it was amazing
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Lo, good people, here is the hagiography of the Grinch and his Christmas miracle that canonized his tumultuous tale of midnight mischief. With each re
Lo, good people, here is the hagiography of the Grinch and his Christmas miracle that canonized his tumultuous tale of midnight mischief. With each returning of the festive season, the tale of the Grinch is told again and again, bewitching the minds of children nestled in their bed as a message on the meaning of the season to cut through all the packages, boxes and bags that clutter our hearts and homes during this time. For the Grinch, a foul creature who stomped about in his chilly cave and—upon his 53rd season of the Who Standard calendar cycle—engaged in a great act of mass larceny, is not unlike St. Godric of Finchale as is put down in the book of Godric) by Frederick Buechner. Yet upon the dawning of the Christmas Day, with his faithful beast Max in tow, his heart grew not just one size, NAY dear reader! not even two, but THREE, THREE sizes that Christmas morn! An expression of the trinity perhaps, a great christmas miracle and so we, too, grew with that great heart! I move to petition for immediate canonization of Sainthood for Ethan Grinch of Whoville, a beast not unlike ourselves who demonstrates the power of a change of heart and a return to tenderness. Okay but all jokes aside, are the Who’s celebrating the birth of Human Jesus or is there a Who nativity story? Or perhaps this is some Who Saturnalia? I love this book. It is one I have read or seen so many times I can recite it from memory, which I have done so on several occasions. Those who remember my time as Barnes and Noble storytime leader can attest. There are slight differences between the book and animated film (red vs black thread, and the book doesn’t contain whimsical Who-world presents) though I’ve found that the changes in the animated actually read much smoother and I see why the alterations were made (the “it was merry! VERY!” part reads very clunkily in the book). A holiday classic for sure. ...more |
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Dec 19, 2022
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4.08
| 1,218,549
| Oct 30, 1811
| Apr 29, 2003
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really liked it
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'Know your own happiness. Want for nothing but patience -- or give it a more fascinating name: Call it hope.' What does it mean for one to be 'sensible 'Know your own happiness. Want for nothing but patience -- or give it a more fascinating name: Call it hope.' What does it mean for one to be 'sensible'? As we are all individuals, with our own needs, is it sensible to always act according to our countenance (to steal a lovely phrase from Austen), to keep true to ourselves, or is there a code of manners that we should adhere to in order to maintain a proper course of action? Austen’s aptly titled Sense and Sensibility, a staggeringly impressive first publication from 19 year old Austen, probes the very ideas of it’s title. Told through the juxtaposition of two sisters forging their own sensible rationalities as they find themselves in a society fueled by social standings and money, they discover that love does not always fit pleasantly into such a world. An impressive feature of the Jane Austen novels is her ability to construct a broad scale society to immerse her heroines. She juggles a large cast of characters, each with a uniquely rounded personality and varied level of likeability, which gives a realistic scope and portrayal to the story. Just like in our own lives, we see Elinor and Marianne dealing with friends, rivals, busybodies and outright scoundrels. Austen manages to flesh her characters out with positive and negative traits, giving even the despicable ones a moment to plead their case. The reader is left to either accept or reject such justifications on their own terms, and, in a way, if even the ‘villainous’ act in what they see to be a sensible manner, Austen calls into question our own ideals and interpretations on the matter. She is clever at keeping an ironic flair to her characters, offering a dark side to ones you initially thought amiable, and bestowing grief of less-than-Prince-Charming characteristics to those who should be the true champion of hearts. The actions of each character show the variety of ways one can interact and react within society, offering a wide number of actions to decide between when declaring what is ‘truly sensible’. The two sisters experience near-mirrored heartbreak and respond in polarizing manners. Is it more sensible to keep your feelings buried, suffering in solitude, always appearing calm and collect at the risk of seeming cold, or more sensible to wear one’s heart on their sleeve, falling into self-pity while drawing the attention of those who can care and offer support? Even the smallest characters can be looked at in this ways. Is sensibility, to toy with hearts, to stick your nose in another’s business, to marry for love with no money or for money with no love? Perhaps a proper title could have also been Cents and Sensibility, as Austen takes careful aim at the dominating social constructs. The opinions on money, and it’s unavoidable, necessary power over society and the not-so-well-off Dashwood’s particularly, is a crucial element to what is sensible. The social commentary is thick and delicious. We witness many broken hearts in the name of money, and many hearts set on love faced with crippling financial consequences. The final results of the novel however, goes to prove the lyrics 'you can't always get what you want, but when you try sometimes, you'll find you get what you need.' While I began reading the Austen/Bronte novels feeling like it is something I should know going into a literature degree, thinking ‘oh well, I guess I should know these’, I’ve come to discover I really enjoy them. Especially reading them alongside so many post-modernist works of genius; Austen has been the anchor keeping me from being lost in the Zone. Occasionally it is nice to escape the bells and whistles of modern lit, to step out of the multi-layered metafiction and swirling narratives that I so love, and read a novel that is just as incredible on a powerful but elegant voice, ironic wit, and an acute sense of society alone. I highly recommend Jane Austen to anyone. I want to show up with flowers for Elinor and spend all day sipping tea with her from dainty cups and sighing about weather and society. However, I would be doing a great disservice to you and two the two fine reviewers I am about to speak of, to continue keeping your time and not sending you to these two outstanding reviews: Liberty’s, who I’ve come to consider my professor in all that is Austen/Bronte/Woolf, etc, and the wonderful Kelly, who has said everything I wanted to say and more, but far better. Austen’s world makes us all question our morality and actions, and the world is a better place for it. 4/5 ...more |
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Sep 14, 2012
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Oct 05, 2012
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Sep 14, 2012
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Paperback
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0140449264
| 9780140449266
| 0140449264
| 4.30
| 937,996
| Aug 28, 1844
| May 27, 2003
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it was amazing
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While revenge is a dish best served cold I prefer my Monte Cristos to be toasted and warm. But maybe thats why he's the Count and I'm the customer. All While revenge is a dish best served cold I prefer my Monte Cristos to be toasted and warm. But maybe thats why he's the Count and I'm the customer. All jokes aside, this book is incredible, reads at lightning pace, and is full of great and nuanced looks at concepts of redemption, debt, happiness and the limits of Justice. A novel that dives into the the gaping cracks in legal and societal justice only to discover a path of personal vengeance is less fulfilling than desired, Dumas weaves an intricate tale of crime and punishment that nets multiple generations in its narrative and delivers a book truly worth its status as an enduring classic. It plays out with the sensibilities of a swashbuckling adventure ripe with treasure and death at the end of a blade amidst the fraught political landscape during Napoleon’s island exile. It is a time where ‘the difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates,’ where loyalties are advantageous but leave you vulnerable and betrayal festers even in the hearts of those you hold dear. Dumas extols the virtues of education, training and persistence but advises that true retributive Justice is beyond the scope of humans. Ultimately, it is a big book worth every word that will fill your heart. Read it, you’ll love it. ‘ Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you.’ ...more |
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Aug 29, 2012
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0241953235
| 9780241953235
| 0241953235
| 4.09
| 487,042
| Nov 1972
| Oct 04, 2012
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it was amazing
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‘Rabbits live close to death and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.’ These rabbits don’t ‘Rabbits live close to death and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.’ These rabbits don’t just fuck, they fuck each other up. I mean this is an absolutely wild, banger of a novel. When caught up in the action and anxieties of an epic tale, we, the reader, often find ourselves feeling epic as well. It’s a marvelous feeling, the whole world seems to hum with purpose and while we feel there is danger closing in all around we also feel empowered in the knowledge that it can be overcome. That one would find this sort of epic engagement in a novel about rabbits may come as a surprise, yet Richard Adam’s Watership Down becomes an endlessly engrossing tale of heroism, leadership and survival that reveals itself to be much more beyond a story of rabbits and is rife with social and political insights applicable to the human world as well. Watership Down engulfs you in it’s world complete with rabbit language—Adam’s invented language Lapine—and lore, transforming what would otherwise seem a mundane landscape into a near mythic realm that elevates the predators and perils to epic proportions. An absolute page-turner where the escape and resettlement of a rabbit community becomes a lens to examine ideas of social organizing and leadership theories, Watership Down completely conquered my heart. I even cried a bit. This was a whole event and I highly recommend it. ‘All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.’ Richard Adams liked to claim this was just a story about rabbits, though one can discover far more between the lines here and it opens up an incredible look at survival, leadership, power, violence and more. For the uninitiated, Watership Down follows the adventures of Fiver, Hazel and Bigwig as they lead a group of rabbits to a new settlement after Fiver has a vision of impending doom for their burrow. It is a story that has been adapted into a film that has long traumatized children—myself included, those bloody-ass bunnies scared the hell out of me—and I gotta admit, even as an adult this story got under my skin. The eeriness of Cowslip’s cult-like warren, munching carrots fed to them by a farmer and saying “this is fine” as death is screaming all around them; the tales of The Black Rabbit Of Inlé—the death rabbit of their lore—and his silent warren; the totalitarian violence of Efrafa and their militant society; the clashes and constant fear of death; Watership Down is full of terror, trauma, incredible violence and I absolutely LOVED it. [image] The Black Rabbit Of Inlé will haunt me forever Adam’s writing truly pulls you down to rabbit size, seeing the world through their eyes, fearing the shadows, feeling the weird of a whole world full of teeth that tear and the incredible violence from human’s that hardly give a thought to the ways their action lead to mass death and destruction. ‘ It was just because we were in their way,’ the rabbits must accept after a scene of slaughter, ‘they killed us to suit themselves.’ In a way, we see how the violence of the animals—while still often awful—is one of survival and natural order compared to the violence of humans. There is violence everywhere, though we also see a difference of violence for survival and violence for the sake of power (the WWII parable ideas are strong here): ‘Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.’ Adams does well, however, to complicate situations. Humans are awful, yet the same human who keeps rabbits as pets is also the savior of a key character at a key moment. Character’s are fairly nuanced and have flaws and faults to overcome, some ideas come to failure, lessons are learned, lives are lost, and all the glorious chaos of life and death come alive in these pages. ‘My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.’ I love the language and lore of this book though. The animal language, Lapine, gives a rather mythical element that makes reading this feel akin to the joys I had reading J.R.R. Tolkien as a kid. I love how the terms come to read rather natural and adds a fun dynamic to the world (also I’ve been referring to patrons and customers as “elil” while reading this). The world feels so vast and mysterious and weighty with the heavy legends and folklore as well, and I love how they are integrated into the overall narrative (plus shoutout to the storyteller rabbit, Dandelion, for being cool). Central to these tales is El-ahrairah, the Prince of Rabbits, who’s tales are used to pass down lessons on the importance of wit, speed, and embracing the trickster ways of rabbits. When we see Cowslip’s warren reject the traditions and folklore, all the general unease of the warren slides into place and the horrifying truth of their existence reveals itself, thus fulfilling the warnings of the rabbit’s deity, Lord Frith, that it is through their cunning that rabbits will survive. The various warrens become an excellent example on the function of leadership and the various rabbit leader’s style comes to dominate the lifestyles of the rabbits in their care. The biggest contrast, of course, is between Hazel and General Woundwort. While Hazel leads through cunningness and care, putting the whole of his society first and allowing them to participate, Woundwort leads through fear and intimidation and creates a highly regimented warren motivated by avoidance of punishment. It is clear Adams favors a democratic society to an authoritarian one and the crew of Watership Down are shown to value their differences and see them as unique skillsets that can all collaborate to the betterment of all. This even includes giving aid to other species, such as a mouse and bird, and thriving on the mutual aid they receive in return. It is a call for sustainable community over power. ‘I’ve come to suggest something altogether different and better for us both. A rabbit has two ears; a rabbit has two eyes, two nostrils. Our two warrens ought to be like that. They ought to be together — not fighting. We ought to make other warrens between us — start one between here and Efrafa, with rabbits from both sides. You wouldn’t lose by that, you’d gain. We both would. A lot of your rabbits are unhappy now and it’s all you can do to control them, but with this plan you’d soon see a difference. Rabbits have enough enemies as it is. They ought not to make more among themselves. A mating between free, independent warrens — what do you say?’ While Hazel’s community organizing and pluralism is shown as their greatest strength, Woundwort’s zero-sum thinking is shown as his weakness. Power only respects power, and when the strongest rabbit, Bigwig, reveals he is not the chief, it is something Woundwort can hardly process. Speaking of, shoutout to Bigwig. Easily my favorite character. But it all comes down to leading in a way that helps everyone, and while a major plot point being that they need to convince women away from their warrens in order to breed new generations for their own comes off as a bit odd, it is in keeping with the nature of rabbits. But this sequence also functions as a great insight into Hazel’s leadership where he allows others to have ideas instead of simply being an iron rule, and learns that his rash decisions that are aimed at personal glory over community safety are not desirable. ‘To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse—the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.’ This was an absolutely incredible read that will linger with me forever. So much adventure and anxiety, so much terror and trauma, and so much grief and sorrow come from these rabbits. It manages to read as serious as a grave despite being about rabbits and comes strong with genuine emotion. I’d also like to believe this exists in the same universe as Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH so all my favorite dark animal tales can coincide. I put off reading Watership Down for too long and I am so glad I have finally fully experienced it and fallen in love with these characters because this is a novel I want to read again and again. 5/5 ‘Underground, the story continued.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 18, 2023
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Dec 18, 2023
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Jul 02, 2012
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Paperback
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1841594148
| 9781841594149
| 1841594148
| 3.87
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| Oct 11, 1928
| Nov 23, 2023
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it was amazing
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‘I contain multitudes,’ wrote the poet Walt Whitman, a nod to the contradictions and selves that bud and grow from the branches of the self as we ‘pro
‘I contain multitudes,’ wrote the poet Walt Whitman, a nod to the contradictions and selves that bud and grow from the branches of the self as we ‘proceed to fill my next fold of the future.’ It is a fluidity of life and personhood which Virginia Woolf observes as ‘these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand’ as she crafts the long shifting arc of personalities and gender in the titular character of study in her 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography. Orlando, who starts the novel denoted as a ‘He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it’ in a gorgeously poetic reimagining of the Elizabethan age, to later awaken ‘she’ in a life that stretches into the 1920s. As accomplished a novel as Woolf ever wrote, the density of its vibrant prose delivered through a playful tension of biographical writing with stream-of-consciousness is held aloft by a witty humor while soaring on wings of obvious joy and love for both her craft and the novel’s inspiration, Vita Sackville-West, to whom the book is dedicated. It is a sharp criticism of society, particularly the restrictions of women under obdurate patriarchal norms which Orlando’s transition into womanhood holds up in stark contrast to their life as a free-spirited young man. Transcending the binary of gender and interrogating the fluidity of self, time and biography that flourishes once we crack the crust of their socially imposed constructs, Orlando: A Biography is a poetic portrait of perfection and philosophical insights that bore itself deep into my heart for a reading experience of pure bliss. ‘Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.’ Having long loved the works of Virginia Woolf—I have her face tattooed on the inside of my left arm—I was thrilled to finally read a book that was not only dear to the writer but also a formative novel for many of my other favorite authors. Most notably Jeanette Winterson who provides the introduction to the most recent edition (a variation of the introduction can be read HERE). It has now, too, become one of my favorites. Winterson discusses Orlando as not necessarily the first trans novel—Ovid, for instance, has the story of Iphis—but an early one that was already far ahead of its time in sexual and gender politics. And one that has lasted a century, published at a time when censoring novels over sexuality wasn’t unheard but, as Winterson explains, ‘Woolf, because she can write, smuggled past the censors and the guardians of propriety the most outrageous contraband.’ This is a historical novel in many ways, one Woolf adopted a prose style reflecting that of the Elizabethan age for the start of her book, though it is also highly steeped in Woolf’s own personal history. While homosexuality remained illegal until 1967 in the UK between men, there was never legal limitations between two women though it was highly frowned upon. It was under this social culture that Virginia Woolf was famously involved with Vita Sackville-West who is a major inspiration for the character Orlando (the title character name, however, is likely derived from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It where Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, teaches Orlando how to love). For starters, Orlando realizes after becoming a woman that the pleasures of life are suddenly gatekept, such as being unable to own property or having any social mobility without a husband, a harsh reality Woolf had to face knowing that being without a husband and in a relationship with another woman would be a near social impossibility. Woolf, similarly, addresses these issues in A Room of One’s Own, though the groundworks of thought are already present in Orlando, and is the sort social barriers Simone de Beauvoir decries in The Second Sex writing: ‘Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.’ I was reminded of how, in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, we see the character Hella criticize the ‘humiliating necessity’ that women are disregarded unless she is attached to a man, to ‘be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself,’ which Orlando now must experience. Sackville-West, for instance, was unable to inherit her home in Kent as a woman, and so Woolf begins Orlando’s journey growing up in the very home at Knole. We also see Sackville-West’s inspiration in Orlando knowing that she would dress in men’s clothing and go by the name Julian in order to escort her lover, Violet, around Paris. [image] Woolf (left) with Sackville-West (right) ‘Different sex. Same person.’ Along with the various avenues of society now closed as a woman, Orlando observes variations of judgment as well. For instance, as a boy, sleeping around was acceptable but as a woman it would be outrageously scandalous, a man writing poetry is one thing but a woman writing is another, such is the meaning behind what Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,’ and the obstacles she faces in her own life. ‘Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence,’ Woolf writes about, ‘as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking’ and Orlando feels closed in this society where, as Beauvoir writes ‘marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by society’ with little else. Suddenly Orlando sees that women are thought to exist as accessories for me, or, as Woolf writes in Room: ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.’ This is the issue with gender roles as we are shown here, something Orlando aims to be free of through her fluidity and seeing them as falsehood. Judith Butler addresses this in her book Gender Trouble asserting that gender is performative, formed through repetition plus performance but not synonymous with it. Performative, by means of saying ‘that it is real only to the extent that it is performed’ and thereby not binarily fixed, but also gender roles are largely culturally influenced rather than biologically and tend to be construct labels assigned to maintain a hierarchical society. Such a society, Woolf and Beauvoir would argue, is orchestrated toward maintaining dominance for men at the cost of women’s social and financial agency. But through moving between genders, Orlando shows a freedom from it, such as Sackville-West did in dressing as a man. ‘Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm,’ Woolf writes, ‘they change our view of the world and the world's view of us.’ So what does the change of social attitudes in a change of outward appearance say about the internal self? ‘I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’ While thinking of the use of clothes as a symbol here, I realized how reading Orlando became a full literary event for me as I began to see the influence of it in many novels I’ve loved and how it is such a touchstone for Winterson’s early works. When Orlando meets Sasha with the entourage of the Russian embassy at the Frost Fair, Orlando is first unsure if she is a man based on her dress, a scene that Winterson would reimagine as one of my favorite moments in all of literature in The Passion when Villanelle first kisses and falls for her lover during the festivities of the Venice casino while dressed as a man. The implication that Villanelle feels most assured sexually when in the role of a man, reflected in her choice of outfit but still undeniably the same self— ‘was this breeches and boots self any less real than my garters?’—is a predominant theme in Orlando’. Clothes are shown by Woolf as a symbol of the construct of gender, representing it as a sort of exterior performance: ‘Clothes are but a symbol of something hidden deep beneath…often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.’ Orlando observes how women are highly scrutinized and judged over their dress, with the frivolity of clothes assumed to fill their lives in place of all the society denied to women. But the performance of clothes are also a way to code switch, something we see Winterson similarly adopt in Sexing the Cherry where, when around women, protagonist Jordan reflects that ‘in my petticoats I was a traveler in a foreign country…I was regarded with suspicion.’ and therefore chooses to wear women’s clothes and pass himself as a woman. It is a reversal of expectations as we tend to encounter stories in which a woman dresses as a man to liberate their social movements and gain access to patriarchal privileges. Woolf shows clothes as a sort of gender hierarchical uniform, something Orland notices prominently: ‘it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck that she realized, with a start the penalties and the privileges of her position’ However, these are all constructs Woolf sees as false barriers. ‘At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.’ A powerful statement indeed. ‘The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.’ Fluidity is inherent in this entire novel, even the idea of linear time. I’ve long believed that, when we move into a meaningful part of life, when something feels it is being written into the book of the self, our perception of time slows down. When once months could pass like weeks, suddenly a week feels like a month as it slows to let the nuance breathe. The way encountering love will expand the calendar of your days which stretch out like a narrative arc, slow the season and let the summer sunlight in. Woolf commonly plays with this idea of the ‘extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind’ which she refers to in Orlando as ‘the shock of time.’ ‘For what more terrifying revelation can there be that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another. But we have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already.’ We see time represented by Orlando’s poem, “Oak Tree”, the only poem not immolated in response to insult to his play from Nicholas Greene, due to it being ‘his boyish dream and very short.’ It is with Orlando their whole life, changing with them. Time has a sense of fluidity though, with Orlando able to understand a sense of continuity between the many selves across their lengthy lifetime, yet the jumble of memories which arise through the timeline into a series of loops and disorder. In a life of many selves, memory plays timekeeper but also opens up portals unstuck from time. ‘Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind…’ It is only through narrative in retrospect that we are able to view time and person as a linear progress. ‘The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.’ In this sense we must consider the novel’s aim as a “biography.” In a sense, it is a mock biography mocking the concept of biography. The book, however, blends the “real” with moments of magical realism in an attempt to show how, through metaphor, we can often get a better sense of the lived experience of “reality” than through cold facts. It is also a jab at her own father who wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography, and the sense that confining a life to dates and facts does little to allow the magic of existence to be felt. That there is truth in subjectivity, in the blend of ‘rainbow and granite,’ that the poets can find as valuable of meaning in life as the biographers, that there is more to a map of life than the boundaries. ‘some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.’ In short, Orlando is a brilliant book. Perhaps a bit dense, Woolf employs an achingly lovely prose that lulls you in and engulfs you with its beauty. It is quite ahead of its time, addressing concepts such as ‘what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self’ in terms of gender roles while also cracking through the illusions of social constructs to let the fluidity of life flow free. A marvelous read from an extraordinary writer. 5/5 ‘By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 03, 2024
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Jul 03, 2024
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Jun 25, 2012
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Hardcover
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3.89
| 1,859,257
| Dec 1847
| Jan 29, 2003
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really liked it
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not set
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Jul 31, 2012
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Jun 25, 2012
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Paperback
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4.05
| 907,160
| Dec 23, 1815
| May 06, 2003
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it was amazing
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‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mi
‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.’ Emma Woodhouse, the heroine and namesake of Jane Austen’s last novel to be published within her lifetime, spends her days of leisure playing matchmaker and offering the reader her keen eye for the character of the locals of Highbury. However, this keen eye may not be as accurate as she would wish it to be. Through her inaccurate impressions of those around her, and of her own feelings, the reader is able to construct a strikingly accurate and detailed portrait of the events and players at hand. Emma is a comedy of social errors that displays Austen as an expert novelist exercising her careful control over the ironies and implications of ambiguous observations and Emma Woodhouse is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. Austen has a charming method of careful show and tell at work in Emma, and stands back from any authorial instruction to allow the reader to piece the evidence together through the deductions revealed by Emma. She is able to place events out in the open, yet lead the reader astray down a path of thinking that will turn out to be hilariously false and embarrassing for all those involved. Emma, who fancies herself quick witted and wise – which she truly is, although prone to a gross misdiagnosis of events – sets many of her friends and family up for failure and blunder by trying to position their hearts in the direction she sees best. However, these goals of hers rarely work out and, as usually explained by Mr. Knightly, are wholly unrealistic. Take her first blunder for instance, when she tries to place a match between Harriet, a pretty yet not...necessarily known for being particularly sharp woman of unknown parentage, with Mr. Elton, a handsome and handsomely wealthy bachelor with an eye for business. Emma, living a life in high society with no concern with finances or needs, is blind to the notion that matches of the time must be ‘smart’ and that a man of his stature couldn’t fathom marrying a girl such as Harriet. Austen uses these mistaken beliefs and faults to highlight the truths of her society, truths that are never fully expressed or detailed other than as the negation of these misdirected observations. Throughout the course of the novel, Austen paints a portrait of perfection strictly through brushstrokes of imperfection. Characters are revealed primarily through their annoying faults, and often come across as exceptionally irritating at first. There is Mr. Woodhouse and his painfully narrow-minded opinions, who sees marriage as ‘dreadful business’ because it affects a change in the fabric of his society (the governess at Hartfield is married in the novels opening, which causes her to move from Mr. Woodhouse’s home to live with her husband. Although this is a happy match, he only speaks of her as ‘poor Ms. Taylor’ through the entire novel as if his burden of being left behind should blanket over anyone’s happiness and that she should be looked at as being a victim for having to leave his side), and views any aberration from spending a quiet night before his fire as an inconceivable offense. We also have Ms. Bates, who cannot stop talking to save her life, John Knightly who finds pretty much everything in poor taste, Harriet and her lovesick ways, the list goes on. Yet, despite the annoying habits of virtually every character in the book (Emma must also be included, but her flaws are so lovable and I like that she is just a messy character we love for that) the reader will learn to love them, especially when juxtaposed with characters whose faults are truly unbecoming and unforgivable. Mrs. Elton, who arrives in the second half of the novel, is pompous, arrogant, conceited and, worst of all, passive aggressive. All the faults of characters that initially aggravate the reader will melt away under the brute force of the truly annoying characters. Plus, as Emma learns, the reader will begin to see these characters as real people, who bleed when cut and grieve when offended. Much like the real people around us, we must learn to accept people for their good qualities, which added up, outweigh the bad ones, i.e. Ms. Bates may not be able to shut her mouth, but she has a good heart and cares for all those around her. Through only seeing faults, we are able to understand the goodness of others: ‘“Perhaps it is our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another!’ When Mr. Knightly scolds Emma for her insult to Ms. Bates, Austen is using him to directly scold the reader for their ill-feelings of such a kind hearted women (but also its a man telling the woman what to think perhaps?). We are asked to check ourselves and behave with proper respect that we expect from the characters. There is a very positive message about treating one another right that underlines this novel. We watch Emma falter and fall, but eventually the real satisfaction came from watching her get back up and carry on with dignity. Plus her mistakes remind us we are all human and all make errors in judgement and can rise above our own shortcomings. We are presented with a very unique vision of perfection with this novel. Even the eventual happy wedding which closes this novel is described primarily by its shortcomings, and the ways it failed to meet any quality of standards in Mrs. Elton's eyes. This conclusion offers a perfect summation of the novel in two ways. First, that perfection is attainable despite flaws, and that if in the end we are left with a happy instance, or a character who's positive qualities outweigh their flaws, then we have achieved the sense of perfection allotted to humans beings, a flawed species by nature. Secondly, we see that this wedding was a failure based on Mrs. Elton's opinion, a character depicted as always insisting upon their opinions, style of dress, manners, acquaintances, vacation places, former homes, etc. as superior to anyone else's. This insistance of 'being perfect' of hers is her ultimate flaw, and for something to not meet her expectations makes it seem all the more amiable simply for irritating her (as she is sure to be a source of constant irritation to the reader as well as Emma). Austen shows us that we should aim for what makes us happy and is fitting with our character than for what is truly perfect, a utopian notion that if actually aimed to meet, as in the case of Mrs. Elton, will only appear as snobbery and faulty. All in all, Austen shows us to embrace our flaws as what makes us unique and endearing. Misdirection is the name of the game in Emma, and it is quite funny to watch how so many different inferences can be deduced from the same set of observations. Austen exploits the double entendre quite masterfully here. The reader must be wary when setting foot out in Highbury, as things are not always what they seem (they must also have pockets full of gold as there is a bit of disdain for anyone not wealthy enough. The characters show a bit of snobbery. There is a scene when Harriet and a friend come across the Roma and it can more or less be understood as "oh no! Poor people!" And also Emma often puts forth the belief that farmers are trashy illiterates, though we see a lot of growth in Emma and this opinion is eventually overturned.) This is quite the novel to laugh along with, and I think I even liked it more than Pride and Prejudice. This book seems to still feel relevant and translate well to modern events. Check out the movie Clueless (well okay, 90's events), and you will find the plot cleverly satirized. One would do well to keep in mind that Austen meant much of this novel as satire, so when characters become too irritating or too high and mighty, it helps to realize Austen is poking for at these cliches in the world around her. It is quite fun to laugh at these events along with Austen. I would highly recommend this to anyone, and it would make a great introduction to this wonderful author. 5/5 'One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other' ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jun 10, 2012
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Paperback
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