recent reading
Feb. 19th, 2021 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseLife's been a bit intense and snowy and cold here, and we're still quite "locked down" in terms of day to day life ... so I've been reading a bit of fiction, to pass the afternoons :)
This was a bittersweet read; the copy was a gift that my father gave my grandmother, on my recommendation, after I'd heard Byatt speak at IU on her press tour for the novel. It was shortly after my grandfather had passed away, and we were trying to keep Uma connected and engaged and emotionally supported, and the book sounded like just the right thing for her. She was always such a passionate believer in those Victorian fairy tales, Peter Pan and Oscar Wilde.
I remember her reading it. It took her awhile; the book's over 800 pages long, and she struggled sometimes to focus due to depression. But every time I drove up to visit, her bookmark had moved a little farther forward.
My aunt gave the book to me last fall, when I visited on the last warm day, along with my copy of The Book of Merlyn that I'd left in Uma's room, and hadn't picked up at the memorial. Reading it made me feel connected to my grandmother, and -- better.
Although I'm perhaps glad we didn't read it together, and discuss it. The themes were apt, and personal, and I'm sure she felt some of it very deeply and complexly. The stuff about motherhood and childhood and the ambivalent position of the creator-mother, and the stuff about motherhood before birth control, when it was a thing that happened to you without your direction. And the stuff about traumatized children and the aftermath when things are all just awkward, and child loss once you've raised them for so long.
Reading this book made me think a lot about the psychology and selves of women having and loving children without being able to chose it, and how much safety I've found through reproductive self-determination. How terrible it would be to have a child, and love and lose it, and have had your life ruined by its conception in the first place!
Byatt gives careful and extensive dating, situating her characters precisely in the era between 1895-1911. You always know what's going on around them in the worlds of wealth, politics, and the arts.
I got a big personal kick out of revisiting so many of the topoi I'd worked on in grad school, the British Fabian Socialists, the Men and Women's Club, the initial performance history of Peter Pan. It might have felt drudgy, like review, if I'd read Byatt's novel the year it was published, when I was still neck-deep in the stuff, but at this remove it was quite congenial.
I never did find the illumination I was looking for with the c19th Brits when I was doing all that academic business; it's been interesting, realizing how much it was my own family ideology I was trying to work into, or out of.
The Great War looms like a wave-wall at the end of the novel. And of course it must, with that chronological interval for a setting! And it hits just the way you know it will, because that's the pattern, the soft period gives way to the slaughter of all the young characters. Byatt works hard to reconstruct consolatory meaning after the war, but tbh I struggled with the last hundred pages or so, bc it was all just so very, very, very sad, the waste and the woundings.
It's been hard, this last year, to not be terribly, terribly aware of waste and needless death all around.
Kate Chopin's prose takes me places. A good voice to read when you can't go anywhere, and haven't done for a whole year now, and are maybe going a bit starkers.
Was her perspective one that we don't still see represented today? She supported the Confederacy, but she's so interested in personal and cultural difference, and so accepting, and desirous of acceptance, for different ways of being. It's not that I don't see the Confederism of her take on things, how rigid she can be about caste and class, but there's so much inchoate yearning, too, that is still appealing there.
This was a bittersweet read; the copy was a gift that my father gave my grandmother, on my recommendation, after I'd heard Byatt speak at IU on her press tour for the novel. It was shortly after my grandfather had passed away, and we were trying to keep Uma connected and engaged and emotionally supported, and the book sounded like just the right thing for her. She was always such a passionate believer in those Victorian fairy tales, Peter Pan and Oscar Wilde.
I remember her reading it. It took her awhile; the book's over 800 pages long, and she struggled sometimes to focus due to depression. But every time I drove up to visit, her bookmark had moved a little farther forward.
My aunt gave the book to me last fall, when I visited on the last warm day, along with my copy of The Book of Merlyn that I'd left in Uma's room, and hadn't picked up at the memorial. Reading it made me feel connected to my grandmother, and -- better.
Although I'm perhaps glad we didn't read it together, and discuss it. The themes were apt, and personal, and I'm sure she felt some of it very deeply and complexly. The stuff about motherhood and childhood and the ambivalent position of the creator-mother, and the stuff about motherhood before birth control, when it was a thing that happened to you without your direction. And the stuff about traumatized children and the aftermath when things are all just awkward, and child loss once you've raised them for so long.
Reading this book made me think a lot about the psychology and selves of women having and loving children without being able to chose it, and how much safety I've found through reproductive self-determination. How terrible it would be to have a child, and love and lose it, and have had your life ruined by its conception in the first place!
Byatt gives careful and extensive dating, situating her characters precisely in the era between 1895-1911. You always know what's going on around them in the worlds of wealth, politics, and the arts.
I got a big personal kick out of revisiting so many of the topoi I'd worked on in grad school, the British Fabian Socialists, the Men and Women's Club, the initial performance history of Peter Pan. It might have felt drudgy, like review, if I'd read Byatt's novel the year it was published, when I was still neck-deep in the stuff, but at this remove it was quite congenial.
I never did find the illumination I was looking for with the c19th Brits when I was doing all that academic business; it's been interesting, realizing how much it was my own family ideology I was trying to work into, or out of.
The Great War looms like a wave-wall at the end of the novel. And of course it must, with that chronological interval for a setting! And it hits just the way you know it will, because that's the pattern, the soft period gives way to the slaughter of all the young characters. Byatt works hard to reconstruct consolatory meaning after the war, but tbh I struggled with the last hundred pages or so, bc it was all just so very, very, very sad, the waste and the woundings.
It's been hard, this last year, to not be terribly, terribly aware of waste and needless death all around.
Kate Chopin's prose takes me places. A good voice to read when you can't go anywhere, and haven't done for a whole year now, and are maybe going a bit starkers.
Was her perspective one that we don't still see represented today? She supported the Confederacy, but she's so interested in personal and cultural difference, and so accepting, and desirous of acceptance, for different ways of being. It's not that I don't see the Confederism of her take on things, how rigid she can be about caste and class, but there's so much inchoate yearning, too, that is still appealing there.
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Date: 2021-02-19 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-20 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-20 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-22 01:13 am (UTC)I definitely know what you mean about the repetitive Bad Daddies ... both the incest and the seemingly inevitable cheating make me feel as if I must be very naive :( I was irritated by the hedged ones, that were portrayed as not-really-monstrous-but ... but also I'm never sure if I'm just incurably optimistic and simple about that sort of thing, as a bit of a personal flaw.
The obsessive return to mothers and art interested me more, I think for personal reasons. It's so much of my own life, from my own mother the beautiful powerful (terrifying) entrepreneur and serious landscape painter, to my grandmother the children's theater director and haphazard bohemian mother of four, who was a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party back when. I see a lot of connections in my own choices to write pseudonymously, and not for money, in fringe digital spaces, and the concerns Tom Wellwood has about being subsumed in his mother's creativity.
I don't know, I like things that are halfway between novel and essay. Essays that have novelistic elements, novels that are basically theses dressed up with characters and a plot. Again, a reason why the intertexuality of fanwriting appeals!
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Date: 2021-02-27 08:39 pm (UTC)Your post is making me consider giving The Children's Book another chance. I tried reading it when it was published since I loved Possession so much, but I wasn't connecting with it and gave up partway through. Maybe I would like it better now.
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Date: 2021-03-03 01:51 am (UTC)I first fell in love with Byatt for her lovely Matisse Stories. But, do you know, I had the same issue you mention having w/ TCB when I tried to read Possession, years and years ago -- I got through a few chapters, didn't connect with it, and wandered off! I don't think I was old enough for it yet, I was I think still in high school in rural MI and couldn't connect with the academic setting.
I've got a number of her books on my shelf, including that one. I'm making my next run at The Virgin In The Garden, for no particular reason. Maybe I'm working my way up to Possession?
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Date: 2021-03-03 03:09 am (UTC)It's funny that you and I had the opposite experiences with Possession at the same time--I learned of it while I was in high school and devoured it. This past December I reread it for the first time in a few years or so. This time I ended up skimming some of the parts that are heavy on the academic jargon and working on academic papers, etc. but still love the descriptions of places and how the different characters interact with each other. There's a portion of the book near the end that's told through a minor character's journal. That had always been one of my favorite sections but this time it felt very special. This doesn't spoil anything, but at one point that character says "I want to live and love and write." That stuck in my head for days.