Proust is lauded for his pioneering insights into the relationship of the human mind with time. This is when he's his most inspired and dazzling. But Proust is lauded for his pioneering insights into the relationship of the human mind with time. This is when he's his most inspired and dazzling. But I've spoken about that in my reviews of the other parts. What I liked a lot less was - 1) The social climbing. A lot of the book deals with social hierarchies and the jockeying for position. Reading between the lines it's clear Proust himself was something of a social climber. And probably wasted a good deal of time and energy in the pursuit. He's writing about what he knows. Potentially there was a feast of fabulous comedy to be had and sometimes he did find it but mostly I found his tapestries of social snobbery boring. 2) Love. Proust also has a lot to say about love. Or rather he talks about love a lot. I found it's usually when he's at his most irritating. He isn't the great seer on love he parades himself as. In life one might say there is active love and imaginative love. Proust is knowledgably incisive about imaginative love (desire and jealousy essentially) but knows next to nothing about active love. So when he makes these sweeping statements about the nature of love he sometimes sounds like the drunk at a dinner party. He's also oddly disparaging of same sex love. If there was irony I missed it. (And not only can he seem a homophobic homosexual he also veers close to being an anti-semitic Jew.) 3) The biggest problem of all I have with Proust is I don't like the way he constructs his sentences. Too often for me they're like overpacked suitcases. You have sit on them with all your weight to get them to close. In part no doubt because I can't read him in French and because my intellect isn't quite up to the task of always following him. For me it never again reached the dizzying heights of book one with Swann and Odette....more
Call it an act of heresy but I’m abandoning this. I’ve got to page 600 which means I’ve only another 150 pages to go but I’ve completely lost interestCall it an act of heresy but I’m abandoning this. I’ve got to page 600 which means I’ve only another 150 pages to go but I’ve completely lost interest. The characters are too one dimensional and you can see the plot coming as if it’s daubed in road marking paint. I’ve read all of Dickens’ novels except the early ones and mostly loved them except for Tale of two Cities and the reason I’d never read this was I believed, mistakenly, it was another early one. However it reads like an early one, so I wasn’t completely mistaken. By which, I mean it’s lathered with sentimentality.
It was Dickens’ favourite of his novels which I find odd and doesn’t say much for his critical faculties but explains to me why he never quite excised the sentimental strain in his writing: he simply couldn’t see it. Because the sentimentality is like a sickly sweet smell on virtually every page of this novel. Perhaps because of its autobiographical nature he enjoyed writing this a bit too much. When an author gets carried away with the delights of his own story perhaps the inner editor goes into abeyance.
It doesn’t begin well. David as a character reminded me of the AI in Stephen Spielberg’s film of the same name, except, unlike the AI, his programming as irreproachable child never falters. We’re presented with a moral universe of absolutes. There’s no nuance. Mr and Miss Murdstone are pantomime baddies, as lacking in subtlety as their name suggests; Peggoty, his nurse, is a paragon of virtue. David, as child, isn’t any kind of child I recognise. He’s never mischievous or unruly. Cruelty has no meaningful effect on his character. He’s never capable of irrational response – good people after all can still be highly irritating and bad people fascinating and especially authoritative. But only good people have authority for David which basically means he will never develop much as a character, which he doesn’t. David is a neutered foolproof moral touchstone. The novel throughout has a pantomime binary moral system. A character, with one or two exceptions, is either wholly good or wholly bad. So, the first 100 pages were a bit of a struggle for me. I found Peggoty and the evil Murdstones tiresomely predictable. It was therefore a massive relief when the morally ambiguous Steerforth arrives on the scene. Finally we sense David might evolve from a potted plastic flower into one rooted in soil and subject to weather. Finally we see his moral judgements are subject to error. Finally we see the possibility of him being influenced by something other than unadulterated virtue. Unfortunately though Dickens soon repeats the early template of moral absolutes with a new set of characters. And Steerforth, the only character capable of messing with David’s programmed predictability, vanishes from the novel.
There’s no character development in this novel. Even as an adult David still seems like a ten year old. No surprise then that he falls in love with a female counterpart – an adult ten year old female. Before reading this I would have nominated Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch if someone had asked me which couple in the history of literature I found it most difficult to imagine having sex together. However David and Dora now get that award. In fact, sex, like everything else that happens to him, has no notable effect on his character. The moral light in this novel is glaring; it hurts the eyes. No surprise then that the unpredictable dark charge of sex is hostile to its regulated lighting system and so ignored.
Of course it’s not all bad. The sentence writing is consistently brilliant. And as ever Dickens creates his characters with the startled wide-eyed wonder of a child – always they have an almost hallucinated detailed vividness, that larger than life quality, a single oddball defining trait, with which we tend to see grownups as children. We magnify one detail which comes to represent the person in question. It was probably his most inspired feature, his ability to see the world through the eyes of a child but narrate his findings with the eloquence of an adult. Dickens has never been a great psychologist; he doesn’t have much to say about the inner life; his terrain is generally surfaces. The surface of this novel reminded me of a gaudy birthday card with embossed pink hearts and ribbons splashed all over it. For me Dickens is the master purveyor of the novel as light entertainment. But this was more soap opera than novel....more
At a certain point I couldn’t help wondering if Henry James hadn’t used the two main characters in this novel to have a detailed and protracted argumeAt a certain point I couldn’t help wondering if Henry James hadn’t used the two main characters in this novel to have a detailed and protracted argument with himself. Rowland might be seen as HJ in his social guise and Roderick a mischievous projection of his precocious genius. You could describe both characters as half baked. Roderick, somewhat of a romantic cliché, has the talent but no money; Rowland has the money but no talent. An alliance is formed. Rowland offers to become the young provincial sculptor’s patron and take him to Rome. Before leaving Rowland meets Roderick’s fiancé and falls in love with her. Roderick has the girl but doesn’t really want her; Rowland doesn’t have the girl but wants her. This isn’t going to end up well!
At another point the character of Roderick appeared like an eerily prophetic portrait of Scott Fitzgerald, the man who has been gifted with genius but isn’t responsible or strong enough to marshal it and who falls in love with a somewhat self-centred beauty queen who will inevitably provide further obstacles to his artistic ambition.
At times I felt there were things in this novel James probably wasn’t conscious of putting in there. Emotionally Rowland lays down relentless laws for himself and strictly abides by them; James, as author, appears to sanction many of these laws. Rowland doesn’t allow himself to feel anything that isn’t self-effacingly chivalrous, that doesn’t conform with social propriety. I couldn’t help wondering to what extent James was aware of the darker illicit currents in Rowland’s nature. He could have been a fantastic villain. Perhaps he was a fantastic villain. HJ never alludes to any such currents; he clearly admires Rowland more than he does Roderick. Rowland is a type that barely any longer exists in our century. The sixties probably put an end to his ilk. Someone who limits himself to nothing but rationally judicious thoughts and feelings; who never raises his voice. Probably the notion that HJ was a kind of celibate gay finds a lot of ammunition in his portrait of Rowland. His admiration for Roderick is a lot more convincing than his admiration for Roderick’s girlfriend. His self-denial in relation to the girl perhaps more of a smokescreen than a noble rectitude of character.
At the same time it’s a huge shame authors of modern romance fiction don’t have an inner Rowland to curb the saccharine nonsense they write about romantic love.
For a first novel this is a hugely impressive achievement. It can be a bit long-winded with the sense of the same scene being played out several times but James’ facility with stunning sentence writing gets him off the hook time and time again. He can make even a rather banal observation or idea sound the height of wisdom and eloquence with the beautiful highly mannered craftsmanship of his prose. It’s been a treat to reacquaint myself with HJ and I’m looking forward to the next date.
The wonderful portrait of HJ by John Singer Sargent [image]...more
It was interesting to learn in the introduction that Henry James suffered with acute constipation his entire life. If ever a physical ailment was psycIt was interesting to learn in the introduction that Henry James suffered with acute constipation his entire life. If ever a physical ailment was psychologically eloquent of its sufferer here it is. This entire novel with its cryptic dovetailing prose is wilfully constipated. At one point a character accuses another of being cryptic. It's one of Henry James' little jokes because the comment in question is no more cryptic than just about every other labyrinthine obfuscating sentence in this novel. The surface is there to mask the interior. Every character participates in this act of collusion. No one in this novel has a bad word to say about each other despite how often they are at inimical loggerheads. Only furniture provides (implied) criticism of the owner.
In essence it shares an identical plot with the more enjoyable but less subtle Portrait of a Lady. The plot is very simple. Densher is in love with Kate; Kate is in love with Densher but Densher is poor and Kate's aunt has much grander ambitions for her niece. They are compelled to keep their relationship secret. Then arrives an American heiress stricken with a fatal illness. Kate persuades Densher to woo her for her money. Everything in this novel, including emotion, has a price tag, a market value. James though avoids moral judgement. He's a master of avoidance. Conversations are often like some elaborate costumed dance of avoiding the point. Characters make a point of not saying what we want to know. James loves conjuring up that ghost world of the things that remain unsaid. He loves hiding ugliness beneath a veneer of glittering refractions. (Nabokov was to do this more knowingly and artfully in Lolita.) We all deploy deliberately misleading language to hide the things we do we aren't proud of. We all posit virtue as the ultimate motive for an act of perfidy. Usually we think none the less of ourselves for doing so. James seems to thinks no less of Kate and especially Densher for doing so. He was generous in how little he made them pay for their mercantile behaviour. In a novel where everything has a price tag I couldn't help feeling Kate and Densher should have been made to pay more. Which is another way of saying the conclusion was on the lame side.
The Venice setting with all its possibilities of glittering refractions was disappointing. It was like he had run out of interesting things to say about the city and he never brought it to life the way he did London. ...more
I'm not sure what moved Henry James to pronounce this George Eliot's best work. It isn't. It's like saying The Beautiful and the Damned was Scott FitzI'm not sure what moved Henry James to pronounce this George Eliot's best work. It isn't. It's like saying The Beautiful and the Damned was Scott Fitzgerald's best work or Between the Acts was Virginia Woolf's. Sometimes literary criticism can acquire the forensic objectivity of science.
There's no question Eliot had a lot of fun writing this. I was reminded at times of Woolf's Orlando. Except Virginia makes such a warm breezy current of her feeling for and knowledge of Elizabethan England whereas Eliot's loving evocation of 16th century Florence is much stodgier. It's as if she couldn't resist using every single detail of her research which might at times have been impressive but it also dragged at the narrative with lead weights. The first hundred pages where there's little indication of a plot often bored me. Once the story gets going it does improve hugely.
Throughout the novel my feeling was her knowledge of Florence was largely acquired through books and paintings. I rarely had a sense of her having touched the doors and walls she was describing. Forster's Florence, for example, is much more vibrantly alive.
Another thing, Eliot is always so good at evoking her characters through their speech idiosyncrasies and rhythms. Here, because, she's dealing with a foreign language this is far from the case. The dialogue is often laboured and over-elaborate and homogenous. No one has a distinctive voice.
It's no doubt an indication of Eliot's own puritanical leanings that she created such an affectionate portrait of Savonarola. Personally I have little sympathy for anyone who high-handedly destroys works of art or gets up on pulpits telling the populace how they should live, which, essentially, is his legacy. 3.5 stars (now and again there's some fabulous writing)....more
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