Review: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser

I had a tough time getting through this one. It is long (more than 850 pages), plodding, repetitive and dated as to language and subject matter. About one-third of the way through, I loaded an audio version onto my iPod and made it to the finish line listening as I drove and ran. Afterward, I read some criticism of the book. It is admired as a "masterful portrayal of the society whose values both shape the [protagonist's] ambitions and seal his fate"...and as "an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American lifer and of the dark side of the American dream." Be that as it may, I would not recommend it

Review: HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

This one has been on my To Be Read list since I saw the movie Apocalypse Now back in the 1970s. I had not realized that the book is actually a collection of three short stories, the second of which was the subject of the movie. The first, "Youth,"  is the story of a ship on fire at sea, narrated in the first person by the seaman Marlow. He reappears as narrator of  "Heart of Darkness," a wild story set in the Belgian Congo concerning a journalist (Marlon Brando in the movie version) who becomes manager of a station in the interior and makes himself worshiped by a tribe of savages. The third story, "The End of the Tether," is the rather sentimental tale of an old captain. All are adventure stories inflected by very careful judgments: social, political and, above all, psychological. They are notable for their descriptive power and artful structuring: intimate with character and loyal to detail while still comfortable with great ideas. Well worth reading!

Reading Resolutions - 2012

I have enjoyed participating this past year in the 2011 To Be Read (TBR) Pile Challenge, which required reading 12 books taken from my To Be Read stack, each selection to have been there for at least a year. I posted my list last January and then shared my reviews of those books with the other participants as I completed them.

I'm reenlisting in the same challenge for 2012. Here's my (fixed)  list together with the two (2) alternates that are allowed, just in case one or two of the books end up in the "can't get through" pile.

 
My Twelve Chosen are as follows:

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Complete 1/16/12)
   
2. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Complete 5/21/12)
   
3. Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (Complete 4/6/12)
   
4. William Golding, Lord of the Flies (Complete 6/12/12)
   
5. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (Complete 6/23/12)
   
6. Henry James, The Ambassadors (Complete 9/20/12)
   
7. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
8. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
9. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
10. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (complete 9/27/12)
    
11. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause
12. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations  (Complete 9/4/12)

My Two Alternates:

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
2. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Review: THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers

McCullers was just 22 when this first novel was published in 1940. It centers on the relationships between a lonely deaf-mute, John Singer, and four other characters living in a small Georgia town in the 1930s. These are Mick Kelly, a sensitive, adolescent white girl; aged Dr. Copeland, the hurt and frustrated Negro; Jake Blount, a nervous and unbalanced whiskey-head; and Biff Brannon, whose consciousness is one mass of timid bewilderment.  All these characters and many more feel that the deaf mute alone understands them; they assail his deaf ears with their troubles and hopes, thereby revealing their intense loneliness and denied capacity for living. When the deaf mute's friend dies in an insane asylum, he commits suicide, and act which deprives the confessional of its priest.  The lives of Miss McCullers' characters are resolved thus:  Mick Kelly is doomed to a life of wage slavery in a five-and-ten-cent store; Dr. Copeland is beaten by a mob of whites when he protests against the injustices meted out to his race; Jake Blount stumbles off alone, wistfully, to seek a place in the south where he can take hold of reality through Marxism; and Biff Brannon steels himself to live a life of emptiness. Hovering mockingly over her story of loneliness in a small town are primitive religion, adolescent hope, the silence of deaf mutes - and all of these give the violent colors of the life she depicts a sheen of weird tenderness.

Review: KIM by Rudyard Kipling

One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father's death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:

Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest.

From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to believe that a great destiny awaits him. The details, however, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman's addled prophecies of "'a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into English--'nine hundred devils.'" In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing "commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake," makes him uniquely suited for a bigger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim's friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling's private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping good yarn to the level of a timeless classic.

Review: MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary (1856) is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. She has a highly romanticized view of the world and craves beauty, wealth, passion, and high society. It is the disparity between these romantic ideals and the realities of her country life that drive most of the novel, most notably leading her into two extramarital love affairs as well as causing her to accrue an insurmountable amount of debt that eventually leads to her suicide. In contrast, Emma's husband, Charles Bovary, is a very simple and common man. He is a country doctor by profession, but is, as in everything else, not very good at it. Charles adores his wife and finds her faultless, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. He never suspects her affairs and gives her complete control over his finances, thereby securing his own ruin. When Charles discovers Emma's deceptions after her death he is devastated and dies soon after, but not before frittering away the very last of the assets remaining after his bankruptcy by living the way he believed Emma would have wanted him to live.

While the story is simple, the novel is moving because of its profound humanity. Flaubert records dispassionately every trait or incident that can illuminate the psychology of his characters and their role in the logical development. Flaubert's realism is said to have been a reaction against the romanticism of the prior generation. Emma may be said to be the embodiment of a romantic; in her mental and emotional process, she has no relation to the realities of her world. She inevitably becomes dissatisfied since her larger-than-life fantasies are impossible to realize. As a whole, the novel is a commentary on the entire self-satisfied, deluded, bourgeois culture of Flaubert's time period. His contempt for the bourgeoisie is expressed through his characters, all of whom are seeking escape in empty church rituals, unrealistic romantic novels, or delusions of one sort or another.

Review: WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys

In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Bertha is the madwoman locked in the attic by her husband Rochester, the simmering Englishman whose children Jane has been hired to tutor. In Bronte's novel we learn little about Bertha other than that she's a monster who must be bound with rope, a white woman from the Caribbean whom Rochester was long ago pressured into marrying for her money. But Rhys, who grew up in the French Caribbean colony of Dominica, presses on the silences in Bronte to give Bertha her own story. Caliban does not become Ariel here, but Rhys turns a menacing cipher into a grieving, plausible young woman, and one whose story says whole worlds about global mixtures, about the misunderstandings between the colonized, the colonizers and the people who can't easily say which they are.