One more tale of two brothers, and de Maupassant on the novel

Tags

Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Guy de Maupassant, Julie Mead, Oxford World's Classics, The Classics Project 2011, Translation

Pierre et Jean, by Guy de Maupassant,
translated from the French by Julie Mead.

Why do stories of two brothers—or two sisters—[especially] insist on contrast and comparison? Because they’re knee-jerk, they’re instinctive, they’re human nature? In literature, authors tend to go on the route of fairy tales or parables—if not legitimately or in structure, then in tone, or feel.

De Maupssant’s short novel feels like that. It’s almost too easy to compare and contrast—the author gives us two brothers, standing side by side, from the get go. It’s almost like an invitation. One brother, the younger, Jean: “a model of gentleness, willingness, and equanimity.” His older brother, Pierre: “impetuous, intelligent, volatile, and stubborn, full of utopian views and philosophical ideas.”

And here comes the pot-stirring, the possible conflict—which, you can be assured gives way to an actual [if largely psychological] one later on:

But a kind of jealousy, the sort that lies dormant and grows almost unseen between brothers or sisters and which only surfaces in later years when one of them marries or receives a stroke of good fortune, made them aware of a fraternal and harmless antagonism between them. Of course they loved each other, but each watched the other closely.

So it’s there. A relationship that’s naturally volatile. You’re brothers, you’re different from one another. Actual conflict comes in the form of an inheritance from a friend of the family—for Jean alone. Hasn’t Monsieur Maréchal expressed love for them both? Why just Jean? Someone has to enlighten Pierre—he’ll welcome any explanation, something to justify his jealousy, his anger.

The reader is, of course, quick to come to a conclusion: Jean is Monsieur Maréchal’s son. Pierre’s mother loved a man other than his father. Jean and Pierre, brothers most of their lives, suddenly are not.

What’s particularly impressive—and affecting, yes—about the novel is that it’s all mostly from Pierre’s point of view. Yes, most of the painful parts are: Pierre, alone, in his mind, has to deal with the possibility of his family unraveling. The people around them reveal themselves, mostly because what’s going on in Pierre’s head is so painful that it cannot be contained. People are made purer, or uglier.

So, yes, at the beginning, we’re invited to cast arbitrary judgments. But the conflict Pierre goes through, alone—it’s not so much that it inspires sympathy. I was simply, well, forced to think with Pierre, and go beyond those arbitrary comparisons and contrasts.

His family! For the past two days some unknown, evil hand, the hand of a dead man, had torn away at and destroyed, one by one, every link that bound these four creatures together. He had no mother, for he couldn’t love her anymore, not being able to worship her with that absolute, touching, and devoted respect which a son’s heart must have. He no longer had a brother as he was the son of a stranger. He only had a father, this great lump of a man that he just couldn’t bring himself to love.

[There was quite an internal struggle for me to not make Team Pierre and Team Jean banners and shirts. Although I suspect I can probably go on and on discussing the merits of both, um, teams.]

---

[PS.01] I first read de Maupassant in high school, with his short story, “The Necklace.” It was difficult to describe to my Lit teacher—Mr. Johnson O. Saet, I wonder where you are now?—the sheer, impotent frustration and distress that overcame me upon that story’s ending, how badly I wanted to shake these people (Mathilde especially!), how badly I wanted to tell them to Goddamned tell the truth already and stop being panicky ninnies. And, I suspect, that within two minutes of that conclusion, I was already devising possible solutions to unearth that unfortunate couple from the muck of Big Misunderstanding. Okay then.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

[PS.02] This Oxford World’s Classics edition includes de Maupassant’s [planned-as-tangential] preface to the novel—the essay called, well, “The Novel.” My crush on this essay is lengthy—so are my occasional arguments with it—but here are two excerpts that made my heart flutter:

• The realist, if he is an artist, will not try to show us a banal photograph of life, but to provide us with a vision that is at once more complete, more startling, and more convincing than reality itself.
• Illusion of beauty—a human convention! Illusion of ugliness—a matter of opinion! Illusion of truth—never constant! Illusion of the vile—attractive to many! The great artists are those that impose their personal illusion on mankind.

In the essay, de Maupassant, too, recalls words of advice from mentor and friend Gustave Flaubert:

I don’t know whether you will have talent. What you have brought me demonstrates a certain amount of intelligence, but don’t forget this, young man, that talent, as Chateaubriand said, is only lengthy patience. Work. . . .

Talent is lengthy patience. It is a question of looking at anything you want to express long enough and closely enough to discover in it something that nobody else has seen before. In everything there’s something waiting to be discovered, simply because we tend to look at the world only through the eyes of those who have preceded us. The most insignificant thing contains something of the unknown. Let’s find it. To describe a fire burning or a tree on a plain, let’s stand facing that fire and that tree until for us they no longer look like any other tree or any other fire.

On The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault: Enchanted, yes

Tags

Charles Perrault, Classics, Excerpts, Fairy Tales, Gustave Doré, Oxford World's Classics, The Classics Project 2011

 For “Donkey-Skin”: The Princess laments her sad situation.

But Heaven grows tired, now and then,
Of giving happiness to men

* * *

I find it peculiar that I first picked up The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault because I wanted to read the fairy tales in the original [or the original, in-translation]—see, I’d been reading My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales all those months ago, and some of the reworkings / reimaginings / adaptations / spin-offs worked, some didn’t. And, well, I was curious: How did the original author of these tales tell them? Perrault was at hand.

And while I was reading him, I discovered that he himself reworked / reimagined / adapted / spun-off from pre-existing work—from folklore—and its Perrault’s versions that has been passed down to us. See the introduction to the collection, written by the book’s editor and the contes’ translator, Christopher Betts:

To judge by an article about the Contes in the Mercure galant which almost certainly reflected Perrault’s views, he shared the stance on authorship commonly taken by students of folk-tale. The argument was that, although the authors of such works liked to be considered their inventors, it was really a matter of oral tradition: ‘an infinite number of fathers and mothers, grandmothers, governesses and much-loved nannies, who for perhaps as long as a thousand years have contributed, each one improving on the one before, many entertaining circumstantial details which have been preserved, while anything ill-conceived has been forgotten’. As one in the long line of tellers, then, his aim would have been to ‘improve on the one before’, the versions he had heard or found in print, by adding details for entertainment and suppressing those deemed unsuitable or uninteresting.

Well, that was awesome; consider my mind blown. Especially in light of the fact that Perrault’s tales are such an experience, as high an art as any—yes, the history and the romance attached to them are factors to this.

There’s a satisfaction, too, knowing that I’ve brushed this close to what has been immortalized by hundreds of stories told, that I had this opportunity to see for myself the wonders of these tales, as well as their limitations—that I had the opportunity to judge for myself the skewed logic of Sleeping Beauty’s wicked witch, reiterate my love for Bluebeard [he must have a reason for that room; it’s all a great misunderstanding, I tell ya!], and to encounter for the first time the ridiculously martyr-ish Griselda and her a-hole husband.

Actually, I can go on and on with these stories. I want to share how wondrous I found how frogs and worms could pour out of one sister’s mouth, while the other’s spilled diamonds and pearls. I want to share how unfair I found the fates of the sisters in Ricky the Tuft—one sister ugly yet intelligent, the other beautiful yet stupid—that when the beautiful one’s granted intelligence, the ugly sister fades away altogether from the narrative. I want to share every possible sexual reading of every image in these tales; I want to giggle over the haplessness of one-dimensional characters and their satisfying-or-otherwise destinies.

* * *

I can’t help but love this Oxford World’s Classics edition—the introduction by Betts is fascinating, and so are the supplementary material he included, detailing what could be found on each of the tales’ origins, and their more influential adaptation [other than Perrault’s, of course]. The language was as lyrical and rhythmic as I would imagine fairy tales to be—and I very much appreciated that Betts, when relevant, included in his notes contentions to previous translations of certain phrases, and even how he came to a definite version of specific lines.

But, what’s so great about this edition is Gustave Doré’s illustrations. They’re just awe-inspiring, and so very pretty. Even with all the sexy-sinister [or just plain sinister-sinister] elements. I want to blow ‘em up and have them painted on walls. It’s funny how they felt so familiar to me. I know they must have accompanied Perrault texts numerous times, but seeing them so close, so there, I can’t help but feel that Perrault and Doré are an inevitable pair. It slays me.

I leave you, now. I’d love to dork out about each fairy tale here, but we’ll never end—although please, do not be afraid to indulge me if you want to do the same, haha. Instead, let me share some of my favorite illustrations, followed by their captions, Perrault and Doré’s inevitable partnership at work:

For “Bluebeard”: Bluebeard forbids his wife to unlock the private room.

For “Hop O’ My Thumb”: The Ogre cuts his daughters’ throats.

For “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”: The Prince sees the beautiful Princess.

For “Cinderella”: Cinderella is admired at the ball.

Truly, Romantic Constancy?

Tags

Classics, Classics Circuit, Excerpts, Jane Austen, Oxford World's Classics, The Classics Project 2011

We don’t quite get along, Jane Austen and I. I’ve all but renounced her much-loved Pride and Prejudice, and not because I enjoy being contrary [though I occasionally do] but because it simply isn’t the story—love, social-niceties, of-the-era—I am looking for, or even want. Austen and I, we do not suit. I have accepted that—although I still remain open to the fact that, perhaps, one slow day years and years from now, I’ll reacquaint myself with Lizzy and Mr. Darcy, and feel something other than Meh.

I wanted to read Persuasion because I figured it was my Austen, finally. No battle of wits, no hiding behind fans, no overheated country balls. Here were two people with history: disappear-into-the-wallpaper Anne Elliott has fallen in love with the ambitious and charismatic naval officer Frederick Wentworth—but breaks off their engagement on the advise of family and friends. It is, after all, young, socially and financially unadvisable love.

Eight years later, they meet again—“Once so much to each other! Now nothing!”—and they have to reconcile the past, and their feelings now: How much has Anne changed? that is, has she grown a spine? how has Wentworth [now a captain] truly been all these years?

It’s an intriguing hook, one with great potential for emotional depth. Premise, I like you, I wrote in my notes.

But that’s about it. All too soon, I realized that Persuasion wasn’t for me—and perhaps Austen would not really be an author I’d love. Oh, I understand its quietness, I can step back and appreciate its subtlety, its undercurrents, the passion sizzling beneath the calm, occasionally tongue-in-cheek narrative. I could see that it was a poignant love story. But, see, it just wasn’t mine.

I could understand that, in much the same way the first chapters saw Anne run roughshod by her family, friends, and the countryside, Anne’s place in the narrative took a backseat. That it’s style reflecting content. But, good lord, it was so frustrating for me—I cheered when Austen would relent and let Anne hint at what she felt. Anne, whose “word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way; —she was only Anne.” Yes, yes, but not for me. I waited for Anne to assert herself.

The intro to this edition mentions how Anne can’t be the timid spinster she’s resigned herself to be—that her mind’s a passionate tumult. Well, yes, yes, I see your point, but I can’t see enough of it in the text. And, yes, perhaps my boredom had me greatly missing Anne’s growth as a character—but after a while, it wasn’t my concern anymore. I just needed story, I needed the assurance that I was reading a novel that remotely liked me.

Anne and Captain Wentworth’s reunion had me cheering. And then I waited, again.

The highlight of the story for me was when Captain Wentworth finally took the stage, and the point of view—just a handful of paragraphs in the entire novel, actually. Here, his feelings toward his and Anne’s steely reunion:

He had thought her wretchedly altered, and in the first moment of appeal, had spoken as he felt. He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity.

He had been most warmly attached to her, and had never seen a woman since whom he thought her equal; but, except from some natural sensation of curiosity, he had no desire of meeting her again. Her power with him was gone for ever.

This passage raised my hopes—I grinned at the book, I all but swooned. But, well, that was it. That was it for him. I was stuck with Anne and the majority of Bath once again.

The occasional smolder would appear—a little poof here and there in the coals of an already banked fire, I suppose? But no. Subplots abound, pesky characters slip in and out and hog the spotlight to prove some social point.

This, I’ve realized, is part of my main beef with Austen: there’s just so much peripheral action. Fine, this is a social novel—but I’m a fan of the focused and the internal doohickey, ya know. That’s me. And cutting back on the social niceties and those pesky peripherals—that would not make this an Austen novel, then.

Another thing: I’m not affected by Austen’s insights on love. Not in here, not in Pride and Prejudice, not in Sense and Sensibility. I scowled when I read, with Anne, Captain Wentworth’s letter:

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.”

And though I recognize the poignancy of their relationship’s turn, it was too sudden and unseen for me. A mouthpiece reigniting of their love:

There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and estrangement. There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting.

Why am I not moved? Why don’t I believe any of this? Why am I inclined to think that what many have called the constancy of love is only an arbitrary  narrative technique? Why do I suspect that these two allowed themselves to be persuaded, yet again—this time into loving each other, convincing themselves that yes, this love was finally theirs, and for forever?

_______

I read Persuasion by Jane Austen as part of the Dueling Authors: Austen vs. Dickens Tour hosted by The Classics Circuit. [I was pretty confident I wouldn’t touch Dickens.] The link up there leads you to the updated schedule: for more blogs, more books, more opinions. As always, thank you to Rebecca and our current tour’s guest-host Nicole Bonia. See, although it didn’t work out, at least I’m more certain now with where I stand with Jane Austen.

Since I Last Saw You

Tags

Books About Books, Classics, Fiction - Novel, Maureen Corrigan, Nicole Krauss, Oxford World's Classics, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, The Classics Project 2011, Translation

I have been reading. And the guilt of having temporarily abandoned this blog has waned enough to allow me to return to it. The above books were some of my attempts to get back on “track”—I’ve finished them all, am pleased with them, but then [to keep up with the tiresome navel-gazing I’ve been prone to lately], I have to wonder what exactly that “track” is. Still, I take comfort knowing that the question of What is this blog about? runs a far far far second to What have I been reading? and What do I want to read next? [I know that this past month has been the haziest and unfocused, re bibliophilic segues.]

* * *

For some reason, there’s an unfamiliar feel to the scene when I settle down to read a contemporary novel—contemporary enough to be relevant in many blogs and broadsheets and the shortlists of awards. I was moderately excited about Great House by Nicole Krauss, though—ever since I first heard about it, I wanted to read it: It’s about a desk that connects the lives of four [and more, arguably] people over the decades, spanning continents. Four seemingly disparate characters, one looming, loathsome desk.

Now. I don’t love Krauss as much as majority of the literate world seems to. That is, I liked The History of Love well enough—I found it affective, the structure and the prose just awe-inspiring. But I remember now that its resolution made me impatient. I know it doesn’t resonate. I know that even as I was reading the last pinch of the novel I was fairly certain that the book would simply be a good book.

Now. Great House is a good book [an unevenly good book], but a very flawed one. I liked it well enough. It wasn’t affective so much as arrogant of its technical achievements, however shaky they may be—however confusing for the reader, however much it seemed like what logic it had was limited to the writer’s mind.

As with novels structured this way, I will always pick favorite parts, and the risk of unevenness runs high. In this particular case, the last chapter was, well, luminous. After wading through murky waters [thank you, Miss Krauss and your penchant for paragraphs covering ages and pages, your language almost painfully purple], the arrival of that last chapter had me sitting up and paying attention and flipping the book over to reread the parts that had seemed so hopelessly confusing/uninteresting for me. I reacquainted myself with most of the book after reading that closing.

[Books that came to mind while reading this one: Echoes of Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, which absolutely tops Krauss’ novel, that pale imitation; the failure in coherence and affect and oohlookatmylanguage can be found in Sarah Hall’s How to Paint a Dead Man. Am I getting more bloodthirsty in my reading? Or should I find some inner peace, some old Sasha who used welcomed all this overwrought prose and meek obsessions—and read this again, time willing?]

[If a stranger had approached me on the train or the coffee shop, asking me how the reading was going, I would have probably shrugged and said, “It’s okay, I suppose.” I wish I can say more now, here. But, well, there you go.]

* * *

Years and years ago, I was endlessly fascinated by that kitschy-twee, proto-hipster movie, Dangerous Liaisons Cruel Intentions—which was, predictably, the barest-bones version of the classic it was based on. I’ve been wanting to discover the purer roots of that movie, this book with all its fans and crinolines and steeds and duels and diddling-on-ottomans. And so I read.

I can confidently say that my recent gorging on historical romance novels has prepared me well for reading Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses. Now this, ladies and gentlemen, this is rakehelling at its most scandalous. If I had a quaint fan, I’d flutter it about.

This is debauchery, this is exquisite, titled manipulation. And its epistolary form only lends to the sneakiness—isn’t it in the nature of correspondence to give way to misunderstandings and deliberate treacheries?

I never knew I’d have so much fun with all this corruption of a parade of innocents. Vicomte de Valmont and Marquise de Merteuil are two of the slyest people I’ve ever come across—and how artful and cunning their villainy. How detailed, how textured, how lyrical. So salacious, so scintillating.

One of the favorite books I’ve ever read—isn’t it a wonder that I’m at a loss as to how to talk about it? How to dissect its structure, its clever tricks that hit just the right note? How to exhaust each of the characters? Oh, I love this, I love this a lot.

* * *

A book about books, a book about a life run over by books: Maureen Corrigan, a critic for NPR, in Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, whose first line reads: “It’s not that I don’t like people.” It’s your usual accessibly eloquent bookworm talking about the books she loves, the books that have made an impact in her life—the books at hand in key moments in her life. It’s a book lover’s treatise on this solitary vice, it’s a series of lectures about specific books and genres, it’s also a memoir, yes, yes, all that.

My interest [and giddiness] began waning when Corrigan launched into impassioned discussions about female adventure stories, about detective novels, about the second coming of feminism, about adoption books, about [dammit] Catholic schoolgirl books. Not necessarily because boredom crept in, not necessarily because I could not relate.

More of the knowledge that I was not supposed to relate. Reading Corrigan—the latest in a littlemountainofBooks About Bookson my shelves—I realized, more and more, that this reading thing we’re all so crazy about—it’s intrinsically alienating.

Though we’re bound by this shared passion for the smell of new or old bindings, the soft rasp of pages as we turn them, the worlds we find constructed within words—this shared passion for solitude and silence—the books we hold close to our hearts and how we hold them can be quite distinct.

It’s pretty obvious, I know, almost a given. But it’s a comfort. We, each of us, will always be strange ducks, even to each other. It’s particular, specific to our moods and experiences and idle daydreams and little biases—even historical.

[Ever since I read Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, I have been trying to convince myself that I would like to write a personal history of reading. A history of Sasha’s reading. I’d love the idea, I’d love writing it. But again, laziness inspires a hard-sell.]

* * *

[I’ve been really tired lately, even tired of—, but but but I have to push on. I may grimace at this blogging thing occasionally, I may groan at the guilt—but, dammit, I am neurotic enough to adequately give the books I read a little plot of digital land here in my corner of the Internet. So. Until tomorrow, I promise. I hope you’re well.]

On The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — “the last court of appeal” — by Arthur Conan Doyle

Tags

Arthur Conan Doyle, Classics, Fiction - Short Stories, Oxford World's Classics, The Classics Project 2011

Aherm. Previously, in Sasha’s Escapades with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, MD — Baker Street, the canon, and all that sleuthing jazz:

♦ A Study in Scarlet. My first Sherlock Holmes, the first book, which “beat my preconceptions to a pulp.” Just so giddy to be part of ~Holmesiana.

♦ Sherlock Holmes Selected Stories. Which was probably a bad decision, re the correct order of the Sherlock books to read. But I liked the range — a Sherlock Holmes crash course. I loved, especially, how Holmes and Watson grew more vivid to me, their roles — as independent characters, and as the author’s creations — more solid.

The latest in this not-quite-as-complicated relationship: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Every time I pick up ACD’s Sherlock stories, I keep wondering myself if the previous joys were all flukes, if I was going to grow tired of him, if he would become too obscure-ish for me, if this would be the time I’d say Meh, not for me. It’s doubly damning, see. My reading until recently had a giant blind spot regarding the Classics, and mysteries and detective-novels [contemporary or pioneers they may be] were almost never in my reading list [we don't count sub-plots, right?].

But Sherlock Holmes and Watson get me every time. Their peculiar selves, their relationship, the cases they damnably solve all-too-teeth-gnashingly. Even what one’d assume as a rigid structure — a briefing by a client, Holmes solving it all, Holmes and Watson confirming that Holmes was right, durh — surprisingly bends to accommodate the characters who flit and fleet into their lives.

Yes, every time, it feels like coming home. No one is as surprised as I am. This familiarity might breed a drought of Sensible Things to Say, but each encounter with Holmes/Watson allows me a new perspective, else a new facet to scrutinize. I’ve covered the preconceptions, I’ve touched on the ideal-ness of the Holmes-Watson bromance and contrast.

In these stories, I read a Sherlock Holmes that was — egads — more human. More normal, yes, but nicer. Eccentric, sure, more than a little cold — which is probably why every decent gesture resonates.

[Which is, I realize now, rather strange -- Adventures is, after all, the first collection out of Doyle's Strand-published stories. If I hadn't made that detour to the Selected Stories, would this fresh humanity have struck me the same way? Struck me at all?]

Oh, he’s a strange little duck, arrogant, nasty, so goddamned limitedly perfect. But these new adventures — getting foiled by Irene Adler, Holmes damning the cruelty of a stepfather’s prank, omg Holmes with a pistol trying to save a damsel in distress – dude. I am in love with Doyle’s stories, his creations.

I read, and I have so much fun. So, so much. I feel baffled, but ecstatic anyway. [Holy cheesecake, why do I feel like weeping?]

“Free! Body and soul free!”

Tags

Excerpts, Fiction - Short Stories, Kate Chopin, Oxford World's Classics, The Classics Project 2011

#20 of 2011 ▪ The Awakening and Other Stories by Kate Chopin.

It felt that me and Kate Chopin were particularly fated. Chopin felt like my kind of writer—hadn’t I loved her “The Dream of an Hour” when I read it at 14, along with a freshman class largely too indifferent at 7:30 in the morning to care for anything other than coffee or cigarettes or the girl they met the night before? Had I not been as shaken and ecstatic as Mrs. Louise Mallard when she whispered, over and over again, under her breath, “Free! Body and soul free!”? Here was “a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely”—free, children, free!

There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

I loved this story—alternately titled “The Story of an Hour”—when I read it years ago, and I love it still. Those few minutes of Louise’s pure, monstrous joy—and that conclusion! It’s one of the simplest and saddest stories I’ve ever read.

And so it was with great excitement that I set out to read more of her work. I started with her short stories first, found them as lyrical, as simple, as charged with monstrous joys. Here are long-suffering women, cruel women, bored women, virtuous women—but all of them were complex, whole. The adulterous wife eating a corner of a letter sent to her by her lover? The debutante’s love shriveling at the face of her suitor’s misfortune? Illicit kisses, sly looks across the room!

Needless to say, I loved her Other Stories. The novel The Awakening itself? Not so much.

Again, for all intents and purposes, I should love this novel, “its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood”—the discovery of the self, what one is when one calls oneself a woman. Mrs. Edna Pontellier and I were supposed to be chummy.

But it didn’t happen. I spent weeks laboring over the first half of The Awakening, arguably Chopin’s most famous work—and I got nowhere. I let it alone, picked it up again. I don’t hate it, no—I just didn’t like it enough for me to have any, erm, emotional investment in it. I was bored in a few places, and tolerant in most. It’s baffling, really. And I do not want to dwell any more than I already have. Sigh.

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Other Stories was sent to me by Oxford World’s Classics—thank you kindly. I regret that it did not work out completely.

PS 01 – If I were stranded in a bookstore during a zombie apocalypse, and I had to take only one of the last two books with me as I fled to safety—I would definitely take this book and leave Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s, who definitely isn’t my cup of tea.

PS 02 – I just read this wonderful story of madness and self-discovery. That sounds odd, but it’s wonderful. It’s The Outward Room by Millen Brand, and I devoured it and it’s so very good. I’m desperately trying to write a coherent entry about it, haha.

PS 03 – This is a fly-by theory: perhaps there couldn’t be a deep relationship between Mrs. Edna Pontellier and I, because, well, she wasn’t Mrs. Emma Bovary? Yes, I know they are two very different creatures—but, well, doesn’t it testify to my fondness for weirdos like Emma? Judge me, Universe, judge me!