Novel Eye

Interestingly, in light of what I wrote below about the realities inside famous novels (and plays) I came across an essay by Doris Lessing about Jane Austen. In it she questioned whether there really could have been the happy ending: "And now here comes my personal caveat, but I am not the only one to think Darcy would not marry Elizabeth. Aristocrats do not marry poor middle-class girls much encumbered with disagreeable relatives. Yes, you believe it for the space and time of the tale, and that is all that is needed...Very beautiful girls, from nowhere, marrying lords in their castles? It all appeals to our nursery memories." It's a fascinating little essay in a book of her random essays on a huge variety of topics. I picked it up as a bargain book from B&N. Rather like reading a blog. One thing that she pinpoints is the absurd way Austen is sometimes taught--by people who don't know the time period to people who cannot imagine it. I remember at one poin...

Ah, I said I'd write about the magical books I've been reading, didn't I? And here I am out of time--though I have had a pretty productive day for me. Somerwhere in May I jotted a note to myself to read some Lessing; went to the library and found a new Doris Lessing that was a sequel to Mara and Dann , so had to read Mara and Dann first. After I tried to read the sequel immediately, but a major character DIES about 15 pages in and that was so heartbreaking to me I couldn't continue for a while and read some other things in between. Among them I read A Call for the Dead by John LeCarre because we had gotten the old BBC series of Smiley's People from Netflix. I was going to write about that too at some point--this was in that strange, sad draught of mid to late June where I stopped posting. I was going through a video game addiction at the time. They wax and wane with me depending on how much of life I can face. Anyway when we watched Smiley and then it's PREQU...

Once there was a fantastic literary newsletter loosely affiliated with a book store here in Boston and one of it's features was the First Line Quiz. You didn't win anything but acclaim and a listing, but it was still fun. The internet of course made it easy to win if you wanted to win like that but I didn't. When I guessed as I did twice I was thrilled with myself. The lines I won on were from "1984" and "Canticle for Leibowitz." It made me realize I have a great fondness for (and collection of) Dystopian literature, specifically as in the case of Canticle post-apocalyptic. Where are we going, what will it be like, what will be similar to now, what will they think of us? Mara and Dann is by the great Doris Lessing. Lessing has enough cache for the literary snobs to try and ignore the sci-fi elements of her stories by pointing out that they are social commentary disguised as sci-fi. Well, duh. All good literature is social commentary of some kind. They d...