B--Elizabeth Barrett Browning--Aurora Leigh...................................299/312
C--Theodor Fontane--Effi Briest...........................................................84/239
All three current books are from the 19th century, though different parts of it, the Carlyle being from the 1820s, Browning the 1850s, and the Fontane from the 1890s. I also have managed to have one female author and one from a foreign literature, albeit a major European one.
I have been following a very strict reading schedule for about the past three years with regard to this project, either forcing myself to read my allotted amount of pages late at night before going to bed, or reading extra over the next day or set of days in order to catch up and stay on schedule. I think this was important as far as getting the program rolling enough that I didn't want to abandon it, but it's gotten to the point where some of my days are so busy that it just isn't possible to squeeze in 40-50 pages of book reading at any remotely quality level, however much I would like to. And then with another long Victorian poem coming up on the B-List, I decided I could relax my pace, for a while at least, to accommodate the reality of my day to day life. I do like long form old English poetry, and in my glory days of reading in the mid-90s when my brain was sharp and I had not been exposed to the internet yet I used to read a good deal of it calmly and undistractedly. The way my life is now this is difficult to do however. I have made a point of only reading the Browning especially when I am pretty well rested. Several times in the evening I have taken an hour or two nap before getting up and tackling a few hundred lines or so with a clearer head, and it has helped to some extent.
I have always found Carlyle to be the most generally incomprehensible of the famous Victorian writers. I can't imagine most modern people are able to get much out of him, except in snippets of comparative clarity in which his mindset (not to mention his language) are still so far from where almost anybody is now, or has been for the last sixty or seventy years. By which I mean his conception of man's place in the universe, relation to God, what kinds of human actions and attitudes and striving have significance and which either do not or escape his consideration are very different from the way we tend to think about these things now. His book is good to read as an accompaniment to Barrett Browning, who was friends with him and whose poem shows the influence of many of his ideas.
Giving that I usually have a period of 1-2 weeks in which to read the "C" list books while I am trying to write the essay for the "B" book, I have also scaled back on trying to read at least a little of the "C" book every day as well unless I have some extra time, which I do have a couple of days a week now that school has started again. Thus far I am enjoying Effi Briest, a book as well as an author of which I was completely ignorant heretofore, a great deal. I have often lamented that my systems did not give me more German literature to read, and in addition to being the kind of languid realist novel that I like anyway, the Imperial German setting has enough of a freshness for me that my interest is further heightened. To see Berlin depicted as a normal European capital on which the upper classes of people descend to shop and eat and stay in hotels and go to the theater just like we have read in a thousand books about London and Paris and Moscow and St Petersburg and New York is illuminating because I am not accustomed to thinking of it in that way. Maybe it is that way now, but the European world is seemingly so different from what it was for such a comparatively long time, and Berlin's character had diverged from these other capitals for most the last century anyway. Another new place for me in my reading life appears when Effi moves to the resort town on the Baltic Sea, in what is now Poland, although the area where the story is set is very near the current German border. The Baltic Sea coast is a big part of Europe, but stories and artwork set in it have not made their way to me very much. This area seems to have a character somewhat similar to where I live, in New England, quiet, lonely even, with a short summer season. So all of this has a great appeal for me.
The room where Sartor Resartus was written
Supposed to be Aurora Leigh, I think.
Effi Briest was made into a film by the legendary German director Fassbinder in 1974.
Evocative of Bergman
No comments:
Post a Comment