Mestember Update

I am a little late with the update this month, because I was celebrating the holiday the past two days.

A List--Thomas Hardy--The Woodlanders 247/379
B--Robert Burton--The Anatomy of Melancholy 320/1,131
C--Gillian Flynn--Gone Girl 139/419
*D*--Paolo Ruiz--The Fault Line: Traveling the Other Europe From Finland to Ukraine 170/253

This current group is a bit too much, mainly because of "B". Even keeping up a very modest pace of 15-20 pages per day in it is wearing me out, given everything else I have to squeeze in in the course of a day.

The A list is in the midst of a run of three Hardy books right now, the first two of which I assume to be considered minor as I had not heard of them before. The Woodlanders, after an intriguing start, is looking like it is going to live up to this designation. It is still not bad, but it is very similar in character with all of the Hardy books as well as many other 19th century English novels. It calls to mind Adam Bede in particular. There is more of a sense in Adam Bede of there being an ultimate purpose in life of what might be considered a spiritual nature that is worth being mindful of that makes it the more successful book, I think. The Eliot characters run into difficulties because they deny or lose sight of this purpose, while the Hardy characters' problems stem from the circumstance that they have no comparable sense of purpose or who they even are in the first place. The professorial editor of the relatively recent Penguin edition I am reading, with the usual pedantic overkill* characteristic of modern authorities on literature, notes that Hardy was influenced by Darwinism and related developments in scientific understanding at the time he was writing this book, and the psychological break of the most sophisticated characters with any spiritual relation to existence stands out.

Burton, whom I have read before but who has come up on this other list I have started late in life and am determined to read all the way through as far as possible, I will deal with in a big posting when I finish him, which probably won't be until November.

Gone Girl was the winner of one of my goofy contests and while I felt obligated to start it I am not sure I am going to read it all the way through. I will give it credit that it is mildly more intelligent than the run of genre books or best sellers, and I suspect that the characters, while shallow and completely uninteresting in themselves as literary creations, are in some way representative of people in my generation, whom I am fascinated by, as stupid and sensually stunted and existentially confused as they are, because I have been judged by most of them to be even less adequate in these areas relative to what an acceptable human being would be than they are, and more or less rejected by them. There are also a number of mildly evil and probably repressed thirty-something MILF characters I am interested in, to see if they will do anything sexual. All of the characters in this are supposed to be well above average in looks, and to have been active and capable participants in the sexual arena during their single youth; the female protagonist is recorded as having had twelve sex partners, and it is implied that if her husband has not had this many, he easily could have. However, as in most instances where my generation is involved, all of this is completely unsexy, all of these experiences add up to little more than so many statistics and detached, almost robotic connections made with people displaying adequate desirability. None even of the married couples evince the slightest hint of feeling actual love for anyone, or even the kind of real respect that in the absence of torrid passion still indicates the presence of some affection.

I picked up the Ruiz book at the library because I was feeling a little uninspired by the combination of things I was reading otherwise, and weighed down by the Burton (though that has begun to pick up in the last few days. For a while there I was finding myself unable to read more than a couple of pages without nodding off in my chair), and I had not read a travel book in a while. Ruiz is a journalist born in 1947, Italian by nationality, though he likes to emphasize that as a native of Trieste, which is famously located at the point where the Slavic, Latin and Germanic cultures of Europe meet, and belonged to the Hapsburg Empire prior to 1918, he is most comfortable in places where multiple peoples and traditions co-exist more or less side by side. He hates nationalism, though his real antagonism is directed towards the EU, which he sees as standardizing and sucking the soul out of the Europe he loves. (and obscenely fixated on money-making, even more[?]) He undertook this trip in 2007, Starting above the Arctic Circle on the border between Norway and Russia, and progressing south, loosely along the border between the EU and that part of Europe that remains outside, which thus far means Russia (he is in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the point of the book that I have reached). While I am interested in the reasons for his sourness towards the new Europe, I think it overly colors his reactions to everything he sees. It is refreshing to experience the kinds of old-fashioned hospitality and cooking and handicrafts and habits and so on that he finds in Russia--I felt something of this when I was in the Czech Republic back before they joined the EU--but whenever this is counteracted by anything he associates with a western influence, such as cell phones, tourism, "androgynous Western women", fast food, and the like, his reaction is uniformly negative, and there is nothing that might be associated with the modern west, other than possibly some aspects of its tendency towards cleanliness, for which he can express any approval. At one point while in an Eastern train station he sees some Polish children reading books and laments that 'one never sees this in the west anymore.' I mostly agree with these sentiments, though I find him a little sententious in his negativity--he has more than a little of the "I am the only Westerner who still possesses a working mind and an identifiably human soul" about him, and I suspect his views of the comparative soulfulness and vitality of people outside of the west are probably a little too rosy, so while I will certainly finish the book, it has already been established for me what kinds of impressions the rest of the trip will likely bring.    

There was a golden quote I forgot to insert in my post about Dreiser, regarding Clyde's early love interest, Hortense Briggs, who played him for the chump that he was:

"As Hortense well knew Clyde was pressing more and more hungrily toward that ultimate condescension on her part, which, though she would never have admitted it to him, was the privilege of two others."

I guess this reads as one of those clunky, unliterary Dreiserian sentences, but the universal truth embodied in the content carries the day, as it often does with him.

*Have I ever told you how much I hate the scholarly footnotes in modern editions of classics? First of all, of course, they have to make a note on every historical or literary factoid that presents itself, the assumption apparently being that the average reader nowadays is a complete moron. Hence we have footnotes for the likes of the writing on the wall, the apple of discord, Baden, and other formerly commonly known references. We also get the obligatory explanation that phrenology is a pseudo-science, with the implication that if our literature professor-guide had been alive in 1886, she would have seen right through its idiocy. She also implies that Hardy thought of it in 1886 in exactly the same way that she is thinking of it in 2010 or whatever, which I doubt. There is also a reading of why Hardy has his rustic characters mangle biblical passages that owes too much, I fear, to contemporary academic loathing both of the rural poor and the Christian religion. But I have to end this post.