TOMORROW: My Book World | Casey Cep's Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee
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FRIDAY: My Book World | Casey Cep's Furious Hours
FRIDAY: My Book World | Casey Cep's Furious Hours
My Book WorldMaugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage. New York: Doubleday, 1936. “It sings, it has color. It has rapture. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticize or regret.” —Theodore Dreiser The blurb above appears on the dust jacket edition of the novel I read. In its foreword, the author explains, in part, why he writes the novel: “I began once more to be obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life. They came back to me so pressingly, in my sleep, on my walks, at rehearsals, at parties, they became such a burden to me, that I made up my mind there was only one way to be free of them and that was to write them all down in a book” (iv)  My central response to the novel is that, knowing Maugham divorces his wife and lives in a domestic setting with two different men, I believe the book is the perfect portrayal of a closeted homosexual or bisexual male. Like many Englishmen of his period, Philip Carey attends all-boy schools, and Maugham describes some of these young men in lustrous detail, whereas his descriptions of females are not as pointed or glowing. Carey’s relationships with women are fraught with one of two modes. The woman, such as his mother or his aunt, is motherly and nurturing or she, like two women he becomes involved with romantically, are not nurturing. In fact, one, Mildred (portrayed by Bette Davis in the 1934 film), tests the limits of credulity. Yet, when aligned with the profile of a closet homosexual (trying hard to fit into heterosexual life), may be quite accurate. Philip is convinced he loves Mildred and rejoins with her several times after she rejects him, and, except for the final fling, always takes her back no matter how cruel she has been, in one instance, wrecking his apartment and destroying all of his valuables, including paintings he has made or bought. This character knows, even if he has carnal relationships with women, he should not get married. “In Paris he had come by the opinion that marriage was a ridiculous institution of the philistines” (276). When he finishes medical school, he wants to travel, see the world. He only chooses to marry on the last page of the book, when, at last, he has matured and realizes he must settle down.
One other observation about the novel I would make is that, in contrast to how fiction writers have worked for the last fifty years, Maugham tells a great deal more than he shows. He spends many, many pages, sometimes, foreshortening a long period of time or era in Philip’s life. Of course, as a playwright, his dialog is on the mark and believable, and the characters do act out some of their emotions, but many times Maugham takes the short-cut of telling the reader how the characters feel. Yet, I do have to say that Maugham does manage to hold my attention for over five hundred pages, and that is saying a lot. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
TOMORROW: My Book World | Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
FRIDAY: My Book World | Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
FRIDAY: My Book World | Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
My Book World Nakazawa, Donna Jackson. Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal. New York: Simon, 2015. This important book states its expressed purpose early in the introduction: “Cutting-edge research tells us that what doesn’t kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger. Far more often, the opposite is true: the early chronic unpredictable stressors, losses, and adversities we face as children shape our biology in ways that predetermine our adult health” (xiii) Author Nakazawa spends the entire book demonstrating how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can and often do, depending on the individual, have detrimental effects on a child’s physiology—not just his or her emotional or psychological well-being. In fact, the research she sites shows that such havoc can also damage one’s DNA. And in so doing, that broken DNA can be passed along to one’s children—setting up a chain of continuing abuse by which one damaged adult injures his or her own children and so on. The author makes clear that while ACEs are similar to PTSD, they are not exactly the same. Adverse events happening to the adult brain have a different effect than the ones that happen to the child’s brain, particularly if very young.
There are a number of compelling aspects to Nakazawa’s book. One, she brings to light a large number of case studies to make her point and follows them throughout. You begin to hear about “Kat” in the beginning and you learn in the end how her life improves. Two, the author cites a great deal of cutting-edge research on the topic. For example, studies show that women, by a significant percentage, who consult a doctor concerning their history of ailments are dismissed by male doctors as being flaky or hysterical (common treatment throughout history). And finally, the author devotes an entire section of the book to treatments, because with appropriate care and therapy, the brain, which is plastic, can be retrained. Individuals can and do recover from Adverse Childhood Experiences. I highly recommend this book to be your first if you are exploring the topic. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
FRIDAY: My Book World | Donna Jackson Nakazawa's Childhood Disrupted
FRIDAY: My Book World | Donna Jackson Nakazawa's Childhood Disrupted
FRIDAY: My Book World | Donna Jackson Nakazawa's Childhood Disrupted
My Book World Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. New York: Houghton, 1984. Forster accomplishes so much in this novel first published in 1924. It is one of those books that, because of the author’s elegant but subtle insights, is timeless. Readers feel as if they are there in Chandrapore experiencing the British condescension towards Indians, experiencing the many geographical and topographical wonders, observing or participating in the various religious sects, which bubble up against one another yet are a bit tolerant of one another. It is against this rich backdrop that the novel’s tension unfolds. When a young Doctor Aziz first meets Mrs. Moore, a British visitor, it is in a mosque. Before thinking, he chastises her for not having removed her shoes, but quickly apologizes when she states that she already has done so. They strike up a friendship for she is anxious to befriend the Indians, to understand their beautiful land, and Doctor Aziz is only too pleased to oblige her. Forster also limns an Indian which is a stranger to us today, by way of Doctor Aziz. He is at by turns arrogant, defiant, then apologetic, childlike in his seeking of British approval, then ashamed, as a grown man that he has sunk so low. Since the British left India a long time ago, Indians have had time to regain or reframe their national profile while perhaps holding onto certain institutions the Brits left behind. In any case, cultures clash when Doctor Aziz, unconfident and really unwilling, is put in a position to take Mrs. Moore and her young female companion, Miss Quested, on a tour of Marabar Cave. It is a bitter irony that the expedition which he organizes explodes in his face, when something dark happens to Miss Quested in the cave, something for which Aziz is held directly responsible. The novel’s end provides an intriguing closure, when Aziz and his hard-won British friend (who’s moved back to England) returns to Chandrapore in the future for a visit. They have become quite fond of one another yet can never seem to consummate their friendship. The last paragraphs of the novel seems to sum up their 1924 dilemma: “‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ NEXT WEEK: My Book World | TBD
TOMORROW: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Passage to India
FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Passage to India
FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Passage to India
My Book World Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion. New York: Random, 2019. Jia Tolentino may be one of the most eloquent spokespersons for members of the Millennial generation. These nine essays cover topics, among others, concerning her informed opinions about the Internet and social media. Another essay about her short stint in a Reality TV show is more confessional in nature, and brutally honest: “Reality TV enacts the various self-delusions of the emotionally immature: the dream that you are being closely watched, assessed, and categorized; the dream that your life itself is movie material, and that you deserve your own carefully soundtracked montage when you’re walking down the street” (44). My favorite essay may be “Pure Heroines,” one in which Tolentino takes a hard look at how girls and women are treated in literature. She goes deep on this topic, examining books that are from fifty to one hundred years old: writers like Maud Hart Lovelace (whom I read in elementary school), E. L. Konigsburg, Lucy Maud Montgomery. But this discussion is to lay the foundation for her look at more contemporary literature. Tolentino’s observation is that the girl-heroines, who are brave and outspoken in childhood, become hemmed in by the sexism and patriarchy in adulthood. “Traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition rather than the male one . . . [f]emale literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity” (118). Yet I also enjoyed “The Cult of the Difficult Woman,” and the final essay, “I Thee Dread,” in which Tolentino declares that in her young adulthood (born 1988), she and her partner (she plans never to marry) have attended forty-six weddings, expending over a period of nine years as much as $35,000 to gift their friends, arrange for transportation to the weddings, not to mention the “uniform” and finally hotel accommodations. But if one is spending an average of $30,000 for a wedding why not expect your guests to put out their share, as well, eh? Jia’s primary objection to marriage is the inequity that awaits a woman once she crosses the threshold into wedded unbliss. Here, Tolentino deftly references her title, providing a sort of recap of her entire book: “I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of the independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms” (289). After that, the bride’s life is over as she splits into two personalities: one who is “large and resplendent,” and one who “vanishes underneath the name change and the veil” (290). Tolentino nails not only this vision of marriage (the thesis is not original) but she does so for her generation of women who still seem to be falling into the trick mirror of self-delusion.
NEXT WEEK: My Book World | TBD
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18: My Book World | Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18: My Book World | Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18: My Book World | Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion
My Book World Porter, Regina. The Travelers. New York: Hogarth, 2019.
This barely three-hundred-page novel contains a cast of thirty-five characters and spans nearly fifty years of American life from the 1970s until President Obama’s first term in office. At times, one must check back at the beginning to see who is whom. But for the most part, Porter does a remarkable job of refreshing the reader’s memory when the time comes. Even more remarkable, she paints a picture of our country as it really is: a world inhabited by white and black people who intermarry, have children, some of whom belong to the LGBTQ community. Is it all love and roses as our hippy friends of the seventies (including me) had hoped our future would be? Not by a long shot. The life she unearths is as messy as an all-white or an all-black one, but it is a life that is also marked with joys and trials of raising children, finding one’s own place in the world. This is a novel of high and low culture, one in which Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, becomes a major motif throughout the book, but a work in which current argot makes a place for itself without being annoying. It is a novel that requires the reader to put the nonlinear pieces together, a novel for now and always. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50 Oregon
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Regina Porter's novel, The Travelers
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fiftieth post of fifty. Oregon (2015)Not only do I get to conclude my fifty-part series with the thoughts of one of my favorite childhood authors, Beverly Cleary, who lives at age 103, but with one of my favorite states. Ken and I arrived at our destination, Oceanside, in the middle of June, 2015. Our friends whom we met at Oceanside, had cautioned us about a sort of mix master coming through Portland, and we had studied digital maps galore, but we still managed to lose a lane and wind up for a few panicked seconds wondering where our car would go. It all worked out. The four of us shared a lovely three-bedroom house on a steep hill. Luckily, it was sunny the entire time, yet the temps never rose above the mid-fifties. We were privileged to witness a double low-tide, in which more beach than usual was exposed, leaving a great deal of sea life visible until the tide returned. I captured a bit of that beauty in the photos above, also a few other sights we managed to take in along the coast. Oregon was the 33rd state to join the union in 1859 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2009. Historical Postcards and Trunk DecalsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World | Regina Porter's Novel The Travelers
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50 Oregon
My Book World Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. With illustrations by Charles W. Schwartz. London: Oxford, 1949. I came across this tome while letting a house in the hill country of Texas, a place where the landowners raise native grass and wildflower seeds for wide distribution and sales, also a place where owners protect the environment and earnestly promote its care. The author, born in the late 1880s, is around sixty when he writes this book about ecology. At that time he already sees the Earth’s demise headed our way, now seventy years ago. And people wonder why we should be on fire about the current state of world environment? Since the age of early industrialization, humankind has been killing off the world, one species of botany and zoology at a time. And we’re still at it: cars and jets, fracking, coal. Land, sea, and air ruined daily one molecule at a time, even if the sun is shining, even if, in the middle of an ocean, you see nothing but blue (you haven’t yet spotted the great vortex of plastic bottles). The decay, the earth’s demise is there, rolling in slow motion. And Leopold sees this. Seventy years ago! Leopold expresses his deep love for Nature with a lengthy history of a good oak taking seed in 1865. Metaphorically, he cuts it down, and, by surveying its eighty rings, can tell the reader what traumas the local ecology has experienced: “Now we cut 1910, when a great university president published a book on conservation, a great sawfly epidemic killed millions of tamaracks, a great drouth burned the pineries, and a great dredge drained Horicon Marsh. I cannot go on, but the author continues, year by year, until the fallen oak has revealed all that the land has enjoyed or endured, usually at the hand of human beings, politicians who have little understanding nor care for the environment: “The congressmen who voted money to clear the ranges of bears were the sons of pioneers. They acclaimed the superior virtues of the frontiersman, but they strove with might and main to make an end of the frontier” (137). Leopold reveals bitter irony after irony, desecration after desecration of our native earth, and, again I say, seventy years ago! And still, we (as a species) do not listen.
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50 Oregon
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
January 2020
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