B List: Percival Christopher Wren--Beau Geste..........................................248/418
C List: Toni Morrison--The Bluest Eye..........................................................56/216
This is my second Cardinal Newman book. I think that, other than Carlyle, he is the celebrated Victorian writer whose work translates least well to the mentality of our present age. The problem is no doubt as much with me as it is with him. I was expecting a "spiritual biography" in either the ancient or more modern sense of the writer struggling with his sinful or unbelieving nature and encountering God and his Works at a very intense and intimate level. I was not expecting rather in-depth accounts of theological disputes among once prominent but now largely obscure clergymen and scholars stretched out over the course of decades, which is what constitutes the bulk the Apologia to this point. Foolish me. Newman was a serious man, or at least he took his avocation deadly seriously. However the questions that were all-consuming to him are not ones that I care very much about.
One wonders what Newman would think if he could see his old Oxford today.
I will do a longer report on Beau Geste of course when it is finished. I will say that, whatever its defects as literary art, it has a quality of fun and high-spiritedness about it that I like a great deal, and one that is pretty rare. One of the reasons I like the IWE list is that it does seem to have a higher percentage of books of this character than other good-for-you kinds of lists do.
Toni Morrison, whom I have not read before, is one of those writers who seems to have both more extreme supporters and detractors, and to come with more restrictive critical boundaries as far as what is considered acceptable to say about her, and even the tone in which to say it, depending on who you are, or who you think you are, than is usual, which is somewhat unfortunate. This is her first book, and my impression is that it is the most conventional and least disturbing of her works. The style is (to me) not far off from the careful, tight minimalism that was in vogue around that time, and is a good example of it. It is perhaps inevitably to someone from my perspective a sad book, because the lives in it are largely unrelieved by anything that I would find appealing, but I will say that every sentence in it thus far has a certain weight and holds my interest and attention, which is a noteworthy occurrence.
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