A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement by Anthony Powell

So, a couple of months ago I signed up for the most recent Classics Club Spin, in which a random number is assigned to choose your next Classics Club read. I only had seven books on the list, so I thought it was a win-win. My selection was A Dance to the Music of Time (First Movement) by Anthony Powell. I was really looking forward to it, but sadly, it did not end up being the book I hoped.

First, I should point out that this is an omnibus, the first three volumes of a 12-volume cycle of short novels originally published in the early 1950s. Each volume is about 250 pages long. As it's such a long work, I started it in October, and I still haven't gotten much more than halfway through this book. However, I did write down some thoughts as I was reading, so I'll try to at least comment on my progress. 

The first volume, A Question of Upbringing, is the story of four young men at prep school. The narrator, Jenkins, tells us all about his two friends, Stringham and Templer (apparently in prep school no one is ever referred to by his first name; I only figured out Jenkins' first name was Nicholas because it's on the back of the book) and another slightly less privileged boy named Widmerpool, who appears to be somewhat tormented because he is of a slightly lower class -- his father works for the railways, ye gads! 

Basically, it's the mildly interesting antics of some incredibly privileged and entitled rich white boys. Jenkins doesn't seem too bad, but his friends are pretty much jerks. There's one episode in particular when they're cutting class and decide to divert attention by playing a nasty trick on a headmaster called La Bas. All the women in this novel are merely there to serve the men as mothers, sisters, or potential girlfriends. 

It was mildly interesting, though I didn't care much for any of the characters. Is this meant to be a satire about the future leaders of England? The (slightly) less-privileged Widmerpool seemed the best of the bunch so far, but I was somewhat underwhelmed. It was a pretty easy read and I finished it in less than a week, so I thought I would zoom through it. Alas, I hit a snag at the second volume. 

Volume II, A Buyer's Market takes place after the boys have left prep school, and quite frankly, it was a struggle. Much the action takes place over one night at a series of large parties, where Jenkins runs into a lot of his old school friends. I just found the whole thing tiresome, all these privileged young men who all seemed so entitled. None of the women in this part are well-developed characters, as they're just love interests or for the amusement of the men. There's also a reference to an African-American that is really offensive. I realize this book was written in the 1950s and is set in the 1930s, but based on the current political climate, I found it really distasteful.

I thought the second book sort of stalled near the middle. I generally avoid reading large omnibus editions as I find them very unwieldy (plus this one was numbered with the original page numbers, so it was difficult to see how far I'd got. It also didn't help that I didn't read it for long stretches and I lost track of the narrative thread and began to get some of the names mixed up, and there are a lot of minor characters introduced at large parties. I just really wasn't that interested in the characters any more, they seemed so spoiled. Maybe this is just the wrong book at the wrong time and I should give it another chance. Many people have commented how they loved this book but it's just leaving me cold and I may abandon it altogether.

Bloggers, have any of you actually finished this book, much less the entire series? Is it worth trying again later or should I just add it to the donation pile? Do you think there's such a thing as the wrong book for the wrong time?

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

I'm finally down to the single digits in my Classics Club list, but I realized that I have less than six months to go before my deadline! The other day I was at the library and just for fun, I looked to see if they had any of the books on the list on the shelves. Lo and behold there was Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. I'd tried to read it about a year ago but just couldn't get into it, mostly because I was listening on audiobook and couldn't stand the narrator, who sounded like she was reading to small children. Anyway, I gave it another shot and it was so worth it, because this book is brilliant.

Main Street is a satire of small-town life in the Midwest about 100 years ago. Carol, a bright young librarian living in St. Paul, meets a doctor at a party. He's about 12 years older and from a small town called Gopher Prairie. After a bit of a whirlwind courtship, they marry and return to Gopher Prairie, population 6,000. Carol has many good intentions and is convinced she can make the town into a place of beauty and culture, but she is foiled at every turn, by nosy neighbors, gossips, and people who think life is just fine as it is. Over a period of years, she tries to improve by volunteering on the library board, joining literary societies, and even directing an amateur theatrical. 

She is also the subject of much gossip, about her clothing, her interior decorating, and her choice of friends, whether they be working-class servants, socialists, or well-dressed arty types. World War I erupts, and there are some painful reminders of racism and political backlash that are incredibly timely. There's also a character who is mocked for being effeminate which made me really uncomfortable and a terrible incident about a woman who is basically run out of town after a boorish young man ruins her reputation with gossip. It made me furious but incidents like this still happen today. 

I thought Sinclair Lewis drew a brilliant portrait of small towns -- his characters are really well developed and the descriptions of scenery are wonderful. It reminded me a little of the winters in Little House in the Prairie. There's also lots of snappy dialogue and great quotes. I don't usually include this many quotes in a review but these three were so great I had to include them. This one is my favorite and I forced it upon my family with great delight: 

Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should you spend your good money? After worrying about it for two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which she would never entirely recover.

I imagine many book bloggers can relate to this as well!

Here is another of my favorite quotes that made me laugh out loud. Carol is at Sunday dinner with some annoying relatives: 

Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would slide in easily. The headlines would be terrible.

Lewis had his snarky moments, but he's also incredibly insightful:

There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

I raced through this book in less than a week and highly recommend it if you're looking for a well-written, insightful American classic. I'm sure it will be one of my top reads of the year, and now I have only seven books left on my Classics Club list!

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

 

I took this one off the shelf at the library the other day because it was my lunch break and -- gasp! -- I'd left my book at home. The horror! But The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford was a) on my Classics Club list and b) short, under 200 pages, so it seemed like a win-win. It's a very short book, and yet I could talk about it for hours. 

Essentially, this is the story of two Edwardian-era couples with extremely dysfunctional marriages.  Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, a British couple, meet an American couple, John and Florence Dodwell, at a German resort, and begin a friendship that lasts for years. The narrator, the hapless John, has no idea that his wife Florence has been carrying on an affair with Edward for years, until both Edward and Florence are both dead. In a rambling narrative, the reader gets the story of the couples' friendship and the subsequent affair, just as though one was sitting down having a series of drinks with John and he was recounting the tragic story in person (possibly on a veranda in the tropics, with an ocean view and some nice cocktails, or seated in deep leather chairs in a gentleman's club.)

What seems a straightforward, though tragic story is eventually revealed to include a lot of twists and turns, with lies and hypocrisy and characters you just want to shake or smack upside the head. The ending left me flabbergasted and full of questions, and I so wish that I had chosen this book to discuss back when I belonged to a face-to-face classic book discussion group a few years ago. 

This book was published 100 years ago, in 1915, and I imagine it was groundbreaking for its time, mostly because of the style of writing -- I wouldn't call it stream-of-consciousness, but it doesn't really follow a linear progression. It digresses and rambles, but it's still really insightful and beautifully written. The Ashburnhams are trapped in a loveless marriage, yet they are loathe to admit it or even consider divorce. The Dodwells are from old moneyed families from the northeastern U.S., but I imagine that's fairly similar in regards to the upright, "stiff upper lip" sort of attitude of most of these characters. 

As I was reading it, I immediately recalled another book that really stuck with me, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, which I finished just a few weeks ago. I can definitely see how Ford must have influenced Greene -- the two books are almost companion pieces, with Greene's being the flip side, the adulterer instead of the cuckolded husband. The marriages of these characters are both tragic and heartbreaking, but at the same time, I felt like the characters mostly deserved what they got, in the end -- yet another case of fascinating train wrecks. 

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

I put Rudyard Kipling's Kim on my TBR Pile Challenge list this year because it was on the Modern Library's Top 100 list, and because I bought a copy for a mere $1 at a library sale several years ago -- I've moved it with me to two different houses since then!  I chose Kim off my TBR pile because it was fairly short and because it's May, which is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month (I'm on the Diversity committee at the library, and we've been planning events for it all year.  Since Kim is set in India, I thought it would fit in nicely).

Basically, this is the story of Kimball O'Hara, also known as Kim, a young orphan boy growing up mostly on the streets of Lahore, India during the Victorian era.  He's not an Indian though, being the child of an Irish soldier and a nameless mother.  When book opens, Kim is about 13 and he meets a Tibetan lama (a holy man) and becomes his apprentice -- his chela. The lama has a quest to find a particular river, and Kim also has a quest.  He's always been told that it was his destiny to meet a red bull on a green field.  Kim joins the lama, but on their quest, he encounters a group of British soldiers.  They find evidence that Kim's father was once in their regiment -- and they have an emblem on their regimental flag that's a red bull on a green field.  

Naturally, they have to make sure he's raised as a white child.  Plans are made to give him a proper education, but a clever colonel realizes that if trained, Kim's knowledge of Indian languages and culture could be a great asset to the British forces.  He's shipped off to school but spends his holidays being trained by secret agents.  Kim becomes drawn into the "Great Game" of British imperialism.  Eventually, he rejoins the lama while still working as a secret agent for the British. 

I always thought this was some kind of adventure book, but it's the slowest adventure I've ever read -- my edition was 286 pages but it took me nearly three weeks to finish it! I did enjoy the details about Indian culture, and the sense of place, but the pace of the story was just glacial.  If you're looking for a great swashbuckling adventure tale, this isn't one I'd pick.  It's really more about Kim's quest, but I'd say it's really about his quest for identity as an Anglo child growing up in India.  Over and over, he's reminded that he's a Sahib, and therefore superior.  

I was surprised at how much religion was in the book.  There's a lot of Buddhism, and an awful lot of references to Indian gods and legends, most of which I didn't get (I was actually reading two different editions, one at home and library copy on my breaks at work -- that copy didn't have any footnotes).  Apparently this was quite groundbreaking for its time.

Kim sometimes considered a children's book, which I don't get at all.  I can't imagine any child today picking this up and reading it for fun -- it's a fairly interesting story, even though Kim is yet another child that speaks and thinks like an adult.  I'm pretty sure the language of the story would turn off most modern children. (I did check my library catalog, and half the copies in the system are cataloged as Children's Fiction.  I should go back and see how often they've circulated!)

So, my final verdict: if you're looking for a fast-paced, rollicking adventure -- I would read Kidnapped or Treasure Island.   If you're interested in Indian culture and an insightful look at British Colonialism in the late 19th century, this is a fine read, as long as you're not in a hurry.

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

Well, this book has been sitting on my TBR shelves for at least five years, and I finally started to read it about a month ago.  It took me a long time to get through it, and I was completely perplexed.  I just did not get this book at all.  

Here is the setup: set in 1930s London, sixteen-year-old Portia Quayne, who was recently orphaned, moves in with her much older half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, who have no children.   Thomas' father left him and his mother when he was a teenager, after he'd had an affair with Portia's mother, who became pregnant.  The first Mrs. Quayne magnanimously decided it was better for everyone if Mr. Quayne divorced her and married his mistress, so that the unborn child would not be illegitimate.  Mr. Quayne, the second Mrs. Quayne, and Portia lived cheaply on the Continent, until Portia's parents died one after another and she was left with no one but Thomas.

Anyhow, now she's moved in with him and his wife, who are childless.  Thomas has an advertising agency, and a youngish friend of Anna's, Eddie, has gotten a job with Thomas' firm.  He's 23 but he starts hanging around Portia.  Basically, the story is about how Portia's innocence is lost.

It all sounds like it's going to be very sordid and scandalous, but basically, this is a book in which nothing happens.  My last book, Barnaby Rudge, was a book that was all plot and very little character development, and this one seemed like just the opposite -- it's all character's and dialogue, and very little action.  I kept waiting for something really shocking to happen, like the underage Portia having an affair with someone much older, but nothing like that happened.  The most shocking things are that Eddie is (gasp!) holding hands with another girl;  and . . . wait for it. . . Anna reads Portia's diary!!!!  Ye gods!!

Now, I know that this is a book that many people love.  Goodreads and the blogs are full of people who rave about it.  It has also been listed on Modern Library's Top 100 Books of the 20th Century, which is where I first heard of it.  It was not a difficult read, and I agree, some of the writing was very beautiful and insightful (I'll try to find a clever quotation to insert).  But most of the time I wanted to smack Portia and say Get over yourself!!!  There's a very brief mention of Mussolini at one point, and I wanted to scream at the characters, "Any day now, the Luftwaffe are going to start dropping bombs all over London.  Then you'll see what real problems are."  (Okay, that's unfair, since the book was published in 1938;  it's easy for me to make this judgement knowing what's about to happen since obviously Elizabeth Bowen couldn't.)

Of course, I had a relatively uneventful, boring childhood.  Nobody died, nobody had any affairs or divorces;  I don't have any illegitimate siblings anywhere, so maybe I have no right to complain.  Really, I didn't see why Anna and Thomas didn't just ship Portia off to boarding school.

And the ending just seemed very abrupt and unresolved.  Maybe I just need someone much less pragmatic to explain it all to me.  I don't feel like it was a complete waste of time, because parts of it were quite enjoyable.  I just don't see what the fuss is about.  If someone out there in the blogging universe is a huge fan, I apologize if I've offended you -- and please tell me if there's something obvious that I missed.

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment." 

Of Human Bondage is one of the very first classics I ever read for pleasure, and I still love it.  I first read it when I was eighteen, a freshman in college.  It was forced upon me by a boy in my dorm, who lived down the hall and on whom I had an enormous crush.  He insisted I take it home over Christmas break and read it.  How could I refuse?  Well, I did end up loving the book, though things never worked out between the two of us.

Years later, I've read lots more classics for pleasure, including several by Maugham, but I never picked it up again -- I had so many other books I wanted to read!  It's actually been so long since I read it that I could barely remember the story any more.  I didn't even remember how it ended!   Finally, I decided it was time for a reread.  Last fall we nominated books for 2012 our classics group at the library, and I put this on my list -- I wanted so much to discuss it with other people!  Well, wouldn't you know it, things came up and I had to miss the discussion, but I couldn't resist reading the book again anyway (I also added it to my Classics Club and Chunkster Challenge lists).  And I am pleased to report that I still loved this book the second time around, maybe even more so than the first time.

For those who aren't familiar with the book, it's a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, loosely based on the life of the author W. Somerset Maugham.  (It's a long book, so I'll try to give the setup without too many spoilers). The main character is Philip Carey, a young man growing up with a clubfoot in the late Victorian period.  He's orphaned as a small boy and sent to live with his uncle, a strict vicar in a small town in Kent.  His aunt is kind but doesn't know much about raising children.  Philip is a bright boy but mostly bullied by his schoolmates because of his disability, and his teachers seem pretty heartless.

However, Philip is a bright boy, and when he's older, he goes off to boarding school, and his teachers expect great things of him.  His uncle expects him to go off to Oxford and then take orders, but Philip has doubts about religion.  Instead, he goes to Germany for a year to study before returning to England.  Philip has a small inheritance, and tries various professions. He spends two years as an art student in Paris before he realizes he'll never be anything but a mediocre artist, so he finally decides to follow in his late father's footsteps and become a doctor.

One fateful night in a cafe, Philip meets a waitress named Mildred, and it's the beginning of an obsessive relationship.  Mildred is really toxic, one of the most obnoxious characters I've ever met in literature.  The book deals with their relationship and Philip's personal growth along the way.   Will Philip marry this horrible woman?  Will she put him in the poorhouse with her greed?   "He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her.  He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other."

Bette Davis as Mildred and Leslie Howard as Philip in the 1934 film adaptation

This book is more than 600 pages, but I breezed through it in about five days.  I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen, though I did have to grit my teeth and power through a few times -- Mildred is so awful, I really wanted to reach into the book and throttle her!  And Philip deserved a few good smacks upside the head a couple of times too.  But I really did love this book.  Philip's personal journey is really interesting and I got really caught up with it emotionally, I was really on the edge of my seat.  And I found the writing to be just wonderful and insightful.  Apparently Maugham considered himself among the best of the second-rate writers, but I disagree.  I kept finding passages throughout the book that I loved, and kept marking them with sticky notes (since I hate writing in my books).

I also loved reading about Philip's year in Germany, and his attempts to be an artist.  A couple of times Philip mentions a stockbroker fellow who chucked it all to be an artist in the South Seas, which is obviously Paul Gauguin -- who shows up in his 1919 novel, The Moon and Sixpence -- another Maugham novel which I read years ago and have essentially forgotten.  I'll have to reread that one again as well.

Has anyone else read this book?  Did you love it as much as me?  Any more Maugham you can recommend?  And have any of you reread a favorite classic after a long period?  Did you still love it or was it just not the same?

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

After reading The Professor's House, I was really looking forward to Death Comes For the Archbishop which was the selection of my real-life classics book group.  In fact, I've been looking forward to this one since we selected it and put it on the schedule last fall.

If you are not familiar, here's the setup:  Beginning about 1850, Father LaTour is a young French missionary prince, working in Ohio.  Some church elders decide he is the perfect person to administer the enormous vicarate of New Mexico, as the new archbishop.  The story is basically a series of vignettes in the life of Father LaTour and his boyhood friend, Father Valliente, another missionary who accompanies him on his journey to save the souls in the Southwest.

I feel almost guilty writing this, but I just did not get why this book is so beloved.  It's considered one Cather's best works, if not THE best, but I found it disappointing, and really slow.  Of course, the writing was wonderful, but I just hard a hard time connecting with the story, which isn't really a narrative -- it's just little slices of the lives of Father LaTour and Father Valliente.  It's almost like a series of short stories.  It's possible I didn't appreciate it as much because I took a break in the middle of reading it, a couple of weeks, and I had a hard time getting motivated to pick it up again.  However, I honestly didn't care much about the characters.  Father LaTour didn't really seem to be very developed to me.

I'm not a religious person, and I was actually raised Catholic though I don't agree with it.  I'm not going to use this post to get into a big religious discussion (and if I get any hateful comments I WILL delete them); in general, it just didn't really interest me.  I actually got rather offended at times when Cather wrote about some of the abuses of power shown by the priests.  There's a scene in which a Mexican woman, who's been enslaved by a horrible white family, comes to Father LaTour -- does he help her and give her refuge?  No, he hears her confession and sends her back to her captors!  Now, as far as I know, this book is set before the Civil War, but to my recollection slavery was never legal in New Mexico, and definitely not the slavery of Mexicans by whites!!  I was appalled.

I also disliked how condescending the white characters were to both Mexicans and Indians.  I wasn't shocked when it was characters who were obviously unsympathetic jerks, but even Father LaTour was kind of racist.  Cather repeatedly refers to his parishoners as "yellow" and "red." I should have expected it, because it is a historical novel, but I did find it kind of offensive.  I never got the impression that Cather was racist, since she portrays the Mexicans as loving and generous, and the Indians with great dignity and respect.  It was just the white characters that really bugged me.

Of course, Cather's writing was great, and I do think the best thing I liked about it was the sense of place.  At our book group discussion, Amanda pointed out that New Mexico itself is almost a character in the book, because it plays such a big part.  Cather writes repeatedly about the canyons, the rocks, the pinon and mesquite trees, the enormous sky and the clouds, in such a way that made me feel as if I was right there with Father LaTour:

The weather alternated between blinding sand-storms and brilliant sunlight.  The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still -- and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world.  The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud.  Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it.  Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.  The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

Now, if that doesn't make you want to buy a ticket to New Mexico, I don't know what will.  And I'm still going to keep reading Cather -- I still have The Song of the Lark and Shadows on the Rock on the TBR shelf, and both look wonderful.